Choose Your Language

Saturday 1 May 2010

Cook Bakes New Areas!

I am delighted to say that during my search for prefabs I came into contact with Marcin, who you may know better as Hosa, the creator of the Forgotten Village prefab. He has been away from the NWN2 scene for some time and has recently been putting a lot of work into his Fuel4Health blog, a site dedicated to offering recipes for healthy food. If you are into healthy eating, take a look at his blog as it is professionally presented and an excellent guide to those who like to cook.

In the past, Marcin has also contributed to the Polish persistent world, "Aeris", which has some stunning area designs and has received some great feedback to date. And so it was to my great delight that Marcin agreed to come back to the NWN2 scene and help design some areas for Better The Demon. If all goes to plan, I hope he will put together a good handful of areas that will help complement those prefabs and my own already included. It's early days yet, but we are discussing requirements now.

Having decided to use prefabs and now also having Marcin on board means the project has had a large boost towards its completion rate. Although I have not yet worked with the areas, the very fact they are now included adds a good 14% to the overall project. If all goes to plan, there is now a reasonable chance that the project might be completed by the end of the year ... or next year the latest. :)

With Marcin working on the areas that remain, I hope it will free my time to start working on the plot once more. Subject to what I do will determine what future blog posts will reveal. Hopefully, there may even be one or two screenshots from the new areas of Marcin as he builds them. Time will tell. For now, I would like to both thank and welcome Marcin aboard the project and hope our joint efforts will be a success for everyone.

POLL RESULTS



The poll, What Turns You Off A Module, is now finished and the final result (from the 19 results) suggest that at least 31% of the voters felt levels of interaction is a key element to what keeps them interested in a module. This would have been my own choice out of the ones listed as well, because I can live with most of the other issues as long as I am kept involved with the game with interesting interaction. From this perspective, I hope Better The Demon does offer the player plenty of interaction over and above the normal expected with a NWN module with its many additional systems (new GUI interactions) and style (offering a more realistic environment).

Unfortunately, I am unable to glean much more from the other results as the feedback was probably too low to represent a fair argument. Furthermore, some of these options were asking for feedback to help explain the choice made, which was not clear from the feedback I received. That said, I do appreciate all the feedback I did receive and am grateful to those who did vote as it does help guide me during my module development.

5 comments:

dgraf said...

Lance - congrats on scoring Hosa to help with area design. I have always been impressed with his work. Looking forward to seeing what he comes up with for you.

Anonymous said...

You have a great partner there: I remembered the area by its name alone. That's a high compliment.

Lance Botelle (Bard of Althéa) said...

Hi dgraf and Chaos Wielder,

I have indeed been blessed with such help. I just hope my own work does his work justice. His joining has certainly encouraged me. :)

Lance.

EC said...

End of the year! Wowsa! That's right around the corner. Great news. Congrats on getting help, and on getting Hosa back into NWN2!

Lance Botelle (Bard of Althéa) said...

Hi E.C. Patterson,

*IF* all goes to plan. ;)

There are a couple of major sections I want to complete that I have started (including editing every spell and putting together a major tome of item creation).

Also, it all depends on how well I manage the creature AI and quests over the coming months. Then there is beta-besting. Perhaps that is a better thing to say, that beta-testing may be ready by the end of year/early next year.

Allow the feedback from that to be fixed and then hopefully a release. :) As long as everything stays on target then I reckon that's just about possible. ;)

Having HOSA on board is a real blessing. If he can put together the areas I need, then there is a far better chance for the release schedule than not.

Here's hoping all goes well.

Lance.