Behind the Scenes Work

Past few days have have seen a lot of behind-the-scenes work, both on Blood and Lyrium and Craggy Island and mostly on Skype.

I think I've mentioned this before, DahliaLynn is working on an important cutscene for BaL and so far, it's looking absolutely terrific! We've been going back and forth over it but it is mostly complete now except for some fine-tuning. Today, we got the revised voice samples for that scene and will be integrated into the conversation shortly. After this is done, I hope to retain her services for a few more cut-scenes; frankly, the ones I've done so far are not good. Of course, I've received a lot of suggestions and advice on cinematics from her but going back and re-doing them will not be a quick task and with the amount of things still left to be done, they will have to wait.

How do you know this is from the Toolset?

The good news on the progress side of things is that the Evermist re-work is complete (well, except for the final polish but that's true for all my levels) and I've started integrating the area work done previously. There is also an extremely cool side-quest in that area, if I do say so myself. One that's innovative in it's use of the game resources; I got caught up in implementing it and while it's not working as intended currently, it's just a question of hacking away at it because that's primarily what it is ;)

I also fixed most of the big issues with Craggy Island, including that auto-level up templates for companions. I was kicking myself for not double-checking everything after finding the causes - the character template had a min-level and preset abilities that was screwing up the final output. I was calculating the XP needed to level from Level 1 to 7 and the min-level was already set to 5. So, what happens? The game bumps her up to level 9. I tell you, I was pulling my hair out trying to figure this out.

In addition to the fixes, some more cool VFX effects have been implemented that gives the scene that authentic touch. I know I said this previously too but these ones are way better, trust me! One more day will be dedicated to CI to code in the character pre-set and fix some niggling issues but after that, it will be time to beta!

For those out there wondering, I have not completely succumbed to the temptations of WoW...yet! But the pull is strong! :p