Storyboarding and Phaenan's Crafting GUI
I come back from vacation and open the word document containing the various details of the story I had put down earlier. The one month I never opened it turns out to be crucial as a lot of things I had thought plot-critical were contrived means of forcing the player down a particular path and a lot of things I had thought to be quite creative were in fact, not.
The past week has been a sobering one as I went back to the basics and started re-writing large parts of the storyline. Additional options, both in dialogue and actions, were added and the motives of the different primary factions were given more depth and meaning. While doing this, I was conscious not to add something for the sake of choices - a trap all too easy to fall into. I also made sure I wasn't playing the story mentally while writing so that particular choices appeal more than others - a factor in the earlier version when some actions were upgraded to be 'plot-critical'.
You would have noticed that I haven't added any screenshots for quite a while. That's because I haven't run through the areas in quite a while as I had been coding and testing in a small bare test area. However, this weekend, it's back to the level editor and testing areas in-game so you can expect more BaL shots soon.
The one thing I am excited about is Phaenan's new customizable crafting GUI. For those that don't know, Dragon Age uses Scaleform for its UI which means it cannot be modded easily without the source files or the SDK (or so we thought!). I had been talking to Phaenan and FollowtheGourd about changing the crafting GUI for BaL to accommodate the additional crafting recipes - since that is far more elegant than doing it via conversation or via placeable interactions. I had even resigned myself to learn some flash coding to modify the default crafting GUI to read my crafting ability IDs instead. Then, Phaenan announces the Flexible Crafting GUI - now I don't have to worry about writing a bunch of scripts to do the work that the GUI will handle using M2DAs. Thanks, Phaenan!
Till later...