Playtesting + Craggy Island

I finished the area (Leeward) I was working on for Blood and Lyrium a couple of days back - finished as in, the required NPCs for the various quests are in place and their dialogue is written and plots and associated scripts are done. Technically, that means I can play through till this area and the story will progress accordingly. Of course, there is some additional play-testing to do to make sure everything is alright. I can't speak for other module-makers but for me, it is very difficult to do more than one or two runthroughs of an area if I haven't added something new to test. I know there are alternate options to choose and different approaches to the same goals (well, most of the time at least) but I just can't seem to muster the willpower to do it. I don't know - is it that the content is not interesting enough or is it just my psyche?

Anyway, the good news is, as I was play-testing, I got a very good idea for a quest at the beginning of the game. Now, some players might not like having to answer lore questions to progress through a main quest line. I even thought of adding in an alternative way to do it but then, ditched the idea. After all, Blood and Lyrium is about a Dalish protagonist and I didn't want to dilute the experience right at the start. I just made sure that the player can find the required answers either through conversations or codex entries before starting the quest.

New Quest - The camera needs a bit of adjustment still

A few posts back, I was talking about Craggy Island and how the island itself was looking beautiful. As it turns out, Daeltaja was looking for some help with scripting and I've decided to set aside some time to do just that. This last week, we went through a few hurdles getting B2B to work right but after the initial hiccups, managed to complete the initial plot and associated scripting. The module is not planned to be very lengthy so I expect, if we keep up the kind of communication we had going last week, to be done with the scripting front by end of this month. I hate to put an end date on things still in development (I've already revised BaL's release date twice!) but I reckon I will take a chance with this; especially as the main developer (Daeltaja) will have a couple of weeks vacation this month.

Till later...