Back to level building

After a weekend spent in rewriting and polishing up the first act-and-a-half, I decided to take a break and do some level building. There is still a fair amount of work to be done on the story though. To give you some background, when I initially started writing this story, I had a clear idea on what the end-game should be - the setting, the areas, the story-arcs in those areas and even a few quest lines were already semi-finalized.

The problem was - getting the player to the end-game. For reasons that will be clear when BaL is released, I couldn't just ask the player to go to the end-game areas via direct questing because that is not possible given the setting. Instead, I came up with various story arcs that would eventually lead the player there and these are driven by different factions each having their own agendas - with one manipulating the other, sometimes unwittingly; some with common ends but different means to get there, etc.

So, at this point, I have a very well-defined start and a semi-finalized end-game. The details on the transition between the two are being worked on as I find time - this will be the point in the game where some factions' lives are ended and other factions gain notoriety. Or something like that.

This week has seen the re-emergence of the level editor in my 'Frequently Used Tools' list. I've been working on the exterior village level that I started before going on vacation. I hope to finish it by this weekend and get it into a state that can be submitted for Community Contest #1. I've also been tweaking some of my earlier levels as I play through them and identify mistakes...like the one in the screenshot below with the tree prop stopping short of the ceiling.

The tree prop has been neatly sawed off to prevent structural damage :)

The second one to enter the 'Frequently Used Tools' list after a long time is the conversation editor. I went back and modified all the earlier conversations to use my own plots for skill/stats checks, generic functions, etc. As part of the story update, I also fleshed out all the interactions in the first half of Act 2 which has resulted in a lot of conversations penning themselves. I still have to put them into the toolset though *sigh*

In between, I have also been playing Divinity 2: Ego Draconis, the sequel to Divine Divinity (I really didn't like Beyond Divinity that much). It's been a fantastic ride so far and I am close to unlocking my dragon form which should make it even more enjoyable. Really, there is nothing like a hack 'n' slash to kill an hour or so of free time and Divinity 2 is doing great in that regard!