In the last post, I covered why I thought the loot system in the vanilla game was not really a good option (in my eyes!) for BaL. This has been at the back of my mind for a long time, ever since I started working on this mod.

The first idea I had was to generate random loot items with prefixes and suffixes based on enchantments picked from a pool defined in a 2DA. Not very original, I admit. I mean, it's not like this hasn't been done in every action-RPG out there. While I was very enthusiastic about the idea initially, that feeling quickly (and rightly!) ebbed away once I realized this will not suit the gameplay at all. Then, I came up with the idea of extremely limited world drops but the player will have the possibility to run some dungeons which will scale loot according to level. Way too much work!

So, what can be done to make loot interesting? The loot definitely has to be of some use to the player and at the same time, there should be a feeling of anticipation when clicking the loot bag. The system I settled on revolves around Crafting. I know Awakening has Rune-crafting as a skill but again, in my opinion, I felt it was not enough.

Old-time readers of this blog might remember me mentioning Phaenan's Crafting GUI Framework a long time back; the possibilities this opens up are endless. The vanilla crafting GUI, unfortunately, had hard-coded ability IDs for the craft-skills which severely limits what you can do to extend that interface. However, with this new interface, the restrictions are removed and more important, customization options are present that makes it much more modder-friendly. Phaenan has already implemented this in the latest version of her Winter Forge add-on and if you are a modder, you can read about the implementation details on the Flexible craft UI project.

Phaenan's Crafting GUI in The Winter Forge (c) Phaenan

So, how can crafting make the loot system better?

• The player is always on the lookout for reagents and this can be used to generate loot tables that will be of interest to the player.
• The above only works when there is sufficient diversity in the reagents required. As an example, requiring one to just harvest Elfroot while all other reagents can be bought makes the player go ho-hum when he encounters another Elfroot plant/drop.
• The crafting itself can be designed to keep the player engaged in creating/modifying key aspects of the game. 

Now, I keep saying crafting but only because it is tied to the crafting GUI. As I said before, with Phaenan's modifications, the possibilities are endless. I am working on one such possibility right now and once it all comes together as intended, the player will be presented with a new avenue to strategically modify how the game is played. More later...

Read More...

Work on the new interior level is progressing well. The basic structural pieces are in place now. The tricky part is in finding the right VFX for the level. At this point, I'm not there yet and quite likely, won't get to that part till later. Why? This level was conceptualized around a big boss battle and until I have the mechanics of the battle in place and tested, the level will remain in it's rudimentary form. This way, if at all a rework is required, I can re-do the level quickly and re-test. This will also be one of the final areas the player encounters so as such, there won't be any screenies coming out on this area till release.

In addition to the level building, I have been working on some of the systems within the game, most notably the loot system. I mean, it's high time some of these are done and integrated into the module for balance testing.
First off, the loot system designed for Dragon Age is a very versatile one; requiring one to just modify 2DAs or add additional ones if required. I consider this much more flexible than manually assigning loot for every container/mob and is also much easier to tweak and adjust. So, I won't be making many changes to this system in its basic form.

However, there are a couple of issues with the actual loot in Dragon Age.
One, loot distribution was bad. I am not talking about vendor trash here. Vendor trash is an essential component of any loot system - it is not possible to have every drop contain an item that will be an upgrade to the player. Besides, vendor trash helps generate gold which can be used to purchase other useful things.

This fish is not meant to be cooked!

The problem I see with DA loot is that the distribution of the items for the different treasure levels was bad. Towards the very end, you come upon a locked chest that requires level 4 lockpicking and possibly, extra cunning to break through. You eagerly open it...and find a Health Poultice inside. Oh, the disappointment! Or you find the rare Manuscript Copy. Most of the highest level chests/creatures either gave you potions or money or trash, with some giving runes - which can be more easily purchased.

Second, usefulness of the items. Either the items were inferior to what you already had (even in late-game loot since some of the best items can only be purchased) or you ended up with lots of salves and poisons. Now, if the game mechanics required you to use them, it wouldn't be so bad but I hardly recall using any salve or poison when playing in Hard difficulty. Maybe in Nightmare? Further, unless you are min-maxing and/or playing with a reduced party size, you don't need the best equipment to get through DA. Which results in a lot of gold lying around in the player's inventory. Admittedly, it is not possible to implement a good economy in a single-player game but nevertheless, I think some of these points can be addressed.

How? I cannot just cut down the loot drastically because players expect some reward for the fight they just won. In the same vein, I can't just give out rare and powerful items because that will trivialize the gameplay. There has to be a balance between the two and while there are multiple ways to go about it, I hope to deliver an enjoyable and useful system with BaL. I will cover the details in my next post.

Read More...

Eight days, no updates on this blog. For those of you wondering what's going on, between RL, work, WoW and modding, I haven't had much time to sit down and write a post.

My mother-in-law flew back to India this week. She had come down here to help take care of my daughter and the fly-back comes with the usual addendums of shopping for the folks back home. Then, comes packing the suitcases, weighing, rearranging stuff, weighing and so on till everything fits and is within the weight limit. Packing for long-term international travel is an art, I tell you. We also had to send our daughter back to day-care and that means evaluating options,  visiting the centre, talking to the people there, etc. All in all, a very hectic week.

This was one of the main reasons why I wanted to finish BaL before February because I knew time would become a little after the last week of January. Oh well. How can there be improvisation if everything fell in place as planned? On to BaL, I did a few more rounds of combat testing and found a few issues (most of which are fixed, I might add).

First, I needed to write my own spellpower and resistance check calculations since the vanilla spellpower calculations won't fly for my player custom class. Specifically, the Dreamweaver class will not be using Magic as a primary attribute at all. That was a fairly easy thing to do and test.
The next couple of issues were mostly with VFX. One of my passive on-hit abilities has a custom VFX that is not being triggered for some reason. Should be a fairly easy thing to fix since the relevant portion of the code is not being fired at all (tested with a PrintToLog statement). Quite likely, there is a mess up in the 2DA somewhere. Then, there are some problems with custom VFX not working at all when casting - that is a long road, I figure and will probably leave that for later.

The Nexus from WoW

I've also started prototyping a new interior level. It's a fairly small level but I hope the design will have a big impact. The concept behind that is inspired by The Nexus from WoW and this will be a good test to see how much I've matured as a level designer. Expect to see some new screenshots on this blog soon.

Speaking of blogs, I discovered this great one - The Rotted Rose - through Paul's blogger profile. The author, with a background in game development, is working on a module for Dragon Age and also writes about DA2 and general game-related topics. I enjoy reading it and hope you do too!
Till later...

Read More...

This post is a couple of days late in coming but hey, better late than never. Craggy Island was officially released late Sunday night and can be downloaded from DANexus. Paul has an extensive post about the journey from conception to release on his blog, make sure to check it out; it's a good read.

For me, Craggy Island was the first fruitful collaboration in the Dragon Age space. When Paul first posted the island's screenshots and posted for scripting help, I was a little wary about offering help since the other projects I had done that for had died away after a while. However, this one looked to be different since he continued to work on the other aspects and post progress updates. In the end, I caved in and decided to do the scripting portion - couldn't let a fine island like that go to waste!

It's been a bumpy ride at times when I've been tied up with RL or Blood and Lyrium or the Community Contest entries and couldn't devote the time required to complete the tasks assigned to me, which led to delays on the overall project release. It's been a learning experience too - the most important lesson being sometimes the game and Toolset behave like sentient entities. Serious! The only recourse in those times has been to take a deep breath, let the Toolset throw it's tantrum, do the same sequence of steps again and voila! it's working!

Anyway, enough on the journey. The destination has been reached and Craggy Island has been released. Now, the most nervous phase of a project starts - what will the reception be like? So, go play Craggy Island and make sure you post your feedback - good or bad - in the comments section; it will definitely help in us maturing as better game designers. Cheers!

Read More...

Well, almost there. I'm talking about Craggy Island, of course.
The past week was a bit unsettling because of all the various ways the game decided to test our conviction that the module was ready for release. B2B area loads didn't work, quests working in one build didn't work on another, plot actions that had been working for a long time were suddenly breaking - it was like a pre-go-live crunch period, which in a way, it was, I guess.

After numerous exchanges of full and incremental B2Bs, we finally decided to take the big step of wiping out the database on Paul's side and loading everything from scratch from a B2B on my machine - which had a bigger percentage of the anomalies working correctly. Things finally started going in the right direction yesterday though Paul had to spend some hours renaming the VO files - I always import B2Bs with 'Create New Strings' checked.

Don't worry, son; you are almost there

Still, what's done is done. We are currently testing the B2P package on both our machines and while some snags are hit, they are being speedily resolved as we encounter them. So, Paul's stated release date of 16th looks like being the D-Day for sure!

Read More...

Over the weekend, I had one minor issue to fix for Craggy Island - there is a quest which isn't getting updated after meeting the required conditions. Pretty trivial, eh? That's what I thought and I had put an estimate to get it completed (along with a few other minor things to implement) by Saturday evening.
You would have already guessed that this was not a trivial fix (or why else would I write a post about this?). I was testing it with some debug scripts so I didn't have to play through from the beginning and it worked fine. Then, I loaded the full B2B I got from Daeltaja a few days back and again, worked fine. The problem? It didn't work on his setup. 

The chest that won't co-operate...on a selective basis

 We went over the relevant pieces of code line by line to make sure we both had matching scripts - shouldn't be necessary since I had just loaded his B2B but sometimes the Toolset works in it's own strange ways. Recreated the offending resources, refreshed the objects in the area and in general, made sure everything matched up. I even did a full run-through to make sure it wasn't something happening earlier that was affecting it - worked fine.
We must have spent like 4 hours trying to nail the problem down without any success.

I am doing one of my periodic database refreshes on my office laptop and after that, will import the B2B again and if it works, send that to Daeltaja and hopefully, get this issue out of the way by today. Goes to show, even the littlest of things can screw up things in a big way.

Till later...

Read More...

It's close to 10 months since I started working on Blood and Lyrium. When I started out, the story was pretty simple and I had hoped to finish it by October. Then, as I got more familiar with the Toolset and started 'living' the story during development, it gradually blossomed into what is now a far better story. There are still a lot of things I want to add to it but pragmatism dictates that the line be drawn somewhere. I've also spent a fair amount of time working on Craggy Island and that has been a good experience on the collaboration front.

I also started this blog, my first ever. The sole inspiration behind doing this was Challseus' Rose of Eternity Daily Journal. There were times in the beginning when I would easily get frustrated with the Toolset and I would be reading his daily updates and would think - Man, how can this guy do so much in the toolset on a consistent basis?!! And that too with a 4-hour commute! Many a time when I've faltered, I used to read his journal and get motivated to have another go at the Toolset and that's when I thought - it would be good to have a blog to record what I am doing too. And it has helped immensely. When I check the stats on this blog and see the number of people coming to read it on a regular basis, that provides additional motivation - there are people who are definitely interested in BaL and want to play it when it's done.

I've also come to realize some of the limitations that cannot be gotten around within a short duration - cinematics being the prime example of this. Still, I've persevered where I can and while there have been delays, I am still extremely enthusiastic about sharing this story with others.

I've mentioned in many posts that I want to release this before DA2 comes out; more accurately, around the beginning of February. Well, that is not going to happen. So, when is the new targeted release date? At this point, I really don't want to set another release date only to revise it again. So, it's going to be done when it's done.

To that end, the plan going forward is going to be simple - get the alpha out first. Then, streamline the work to proceed with an area at a time. There are times when I have jumped around when I've had inspiration strike only to go back to a previous area later and struggle to get back into the right 'mood' for that area. A simple thing, maybe but when all you have is a few hours daily, it is an avoidable time-sink.

So, what have I been doing on the BaL front these past two weeks? Dialogue and combat-testing. I've been writing dialogue like a man possessed - vast sections of quest dialogue have been overhauled and the companion profiles are starting to come through in conversations better. I have only a few more to go before the alpha is cut and I have already enlisted MysteriXoX to proof-read what I've written. A good story and great combat mechanics will fall flat if the player is not engaged enough to play through the module and dialogue is one of the primary means of engaging them.

Combat testing! That warrants a whole separate post and will be made shortly, along with some additions to this blog. Till later...

Read More...

Apparently, my TARDIS didn't realize that it shouldn't malfunction when I have holidays. Not that this is the first time that's happening. I really need to go back to Gallifrey and get the guidance system looked at. Instead of the quiet mountain retreat (with internet connection!) for which I set my coordinates, it ended up materializing in a dingy server room at work! What's worse, the room was crammed with engineers attempting to fix a slew of new-year bugs in various live projects and they weren't about to pass up the opportunity of a Timelord helping them. Even though I tried to tell them that I cannot work without my access credentials (I was silently thanking the person who forgot to extend it), they insisted that it would be simple enough for me to work through the ancient means of email and IM. Add to that the absence of a robot like K-9 and no wonder the Timelords consider Earth to be so primitive!

Still, all's well that end's well and that ending is well in sight now. If I can somehow manage to sneak into my TARDIS, I can try to go back to the time before the holidays and this time, make sure the guidance system works correctly or in the worst case, make sure that at least the chameleon circuit works so that TARDIS looks just like another piece of furniture and I don't have to come out!

A more detailed update will follow soon.

Read More...

This past weekend, I came to terms with WoW. Yes, I know - another post on WoW. Well, not really. I like the game. Like it so much I've already got the first two expansions and a game card to keep me playing till March. I also realized one important thing - there is no need to finish the game. In fact, it can't be finished! So, why devote all my time to playing it? Weekend nights are going to be WoW time but other than that, I'm going to focus on getting this module (and the second part) completed. I mean, this is just an assurance that I am not abandoning this module - the lack of regular posts recently might have given that impression and I just wanted to get the expectations straight.

So, what's been going on with BaL, you ask? Encounter design. More specifically, creature design. Even more specific, boss creature design.
Now, I am not a fan of this auto-scale system at all. Frankly, I think it's wasted effort. Now, some might argue that the non-linear design of the campaign made this a requirement but in my opinion, it wasn't needed even there. My recollections of the OC might not be 100% accurate but by the time you finish Lothering, you are already at level 7 or so. Looking at the area-data file, except for the final quest chains and battles, almost all areas are scaled between levels 7 and 10. Where's the need then?

I wouldn't be going on so much about this if I hadn't been disassembling the autoscale scripts over the weekend. There's just so much code in there for so little gain!
Just to determine the scaled level (let's not even go into the subsequent work done to actually initialize the creature),

• check against the min/max level for the area
• check against the player level
• check against the LevelScale in autoscale sheet
• check against the max level for that appearance
• check against the min_level in the creature table
• check whether appearance level limits are disabled in the module and area

Going through all those 2DAs and setting up the variables isn't something I wanted to do. It's just too much work!
If I want to remove auto-scaling, it pretty much meant gutting out the entire logic in there and writing my own creature core script. This is what I have started doing this weekend. My vision for BaL involves some complex boss battles, based on the difficulty level in-game and I don't want auto-scaling to botch it up. So, I need to add my own version of auto-scaling - the difference being only the difficulty level selected in-game counts. This way, regular players who don't want very involved boss battles can play on Normal while Hard will pose a definite challenge. Nightmare isn't in the plan yet since doing this IS a lot of work.

The result of all this will hopefully be a definitive combat experience that the hard-core players like because, let's face it, combat design in the OC was never a strong point for Dragon Age.

Read More...

The lull at work, that is. We have one more deployment this weekend which should take a couple of hours at the most but other than that, there's not much going on at work. I've started compiling a list of things to complete over the next 2 weeks since this will be the time when I can focus on developing.

Towards that, I've been concentrating on wrapping up Craggy Island as best as I can and barring one issue where ambient animation is not resumed once combat ends, everything is good to go from my end. Sometimes, even the smallest thing that you know you could probably get to work while you are asleep gives so much trouble and that was the case here with codex entries not appearing. After a lot of debugging, it was due to the infamous duplicate GUID bug. Anyway, all's good now.

The focus for the next 2 weeks is going to be tying things together in the new areas and creating NPCs and ambient behaviour for them. And then, finish up the remaining abilities for the custom classes since those will be needed to play-test these areas.
I do have to spend some time to finish my PBEM tourney for Shadow Magic. Now that I am at the semi-final stage, I want to make sure I go all the way through and regain my Championship crown! So, I'll have to spend some time to map out the strategy for the finals - assuming I win the semis, of course!

Till later...

Read More...

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

Read More...

When Dragon Age was first released and players were talking about having a tank in the group and discussing whether Alistair or Shale was a better tank, I admit I really didn't understand why you'd need a tank in the group. In almost all encounters, a couple of mages in the party will wipe the opposition before the tank even has time to pull aggro. In rare cases when it is required and the tank goes in first to draw threat, the battle is anyway over soon enough. Couple that with the fact that party members cannot die and I didn't see any role for a tank in Dragon Age.

Now, most of my gaming has been with single-player games and the ones I have played multiplayer (Unreal and Shadow Magic), the concept of a tank is non-existent. Well, maybe a little in Shadow Magic but since that was PvP always, that didn't work as expected.

Enter World of Warcraft. Yesterday, I did my first dungeon run - two actually. Being the first time, I didn't even know every member had to talk to the quest-giver to get the quest to show up in the log; just assumed it was handled on a party basis. Even worse, I had a full inventory (I was out doing the regular campaign while queued) and couldn't pick up the items I needed. Second run, I died and couldn't remember the path to get to the other members (this was in Blackfathom Deeps). Anyway, the thing that really struck me about these runs was the importance of a tank. The tanks really played a part here - unless they maintain aggro, it usually leads to a wipe. The mages and other DPS had to make sure they are not drawing too much threat or it's back to spirit form - I learned this the hard way the first time.

Transposing this to Dragon Age, one gets similar skills in the Warrior Shield tree. However, the effectiveness is vastly reduced due to two important factors -

• threat calculation missing/removed from a lot of rogue/mage talents. These classes, primarily DPS, can do damage without being at risk most of the time.
• the mobs (and even bosses) are too weak or too few for the tank role to really shine.

I must say, those dungeon runs were a revelation. As I've said before, Blood and Lyrium will feature custom classes for the player and most companions. In fact, except for the Warrior class...at least, till yesterday. The warrior class in BaL already has no access to the 2H tree so this gives a perfect excuse to maximise the utilization of the Shield tree and design the combat around the concept of a party as in WoW. Since the classes for most companions are fixed, I don't have to deal with the possibilities of a significantly gimped party due to player choice and can pretty much anticipate how strong the party is going to be at key points in the story. I tell you, this is going to become very interesting.

Read More...

As mentioned in the last update, I've been working on two things primarily - finishing up the scripting for Craggy Island and reworking the Evermist level.

The work on Craggy Island is almost done. We've added some VFX to the final area to make things seem a little more coherent. The actual VFX that was to be implemented is not present in the default VFX_base worksheet. For now, a similar VFX has been added and while it does look fine, I think the original one (fxe_mist_p) had a 'blowing-out' animation that's missing from this one. In the end, we might just have to extend VFX_base and use the VFX that was originally intended to be in the area.
There is also an annoying issue with the auto-level up template for the companions - just doesn't seem to work. I'll have to spend some time tomorrow going over that and trying to fix it.

This weekend, I spent a considerable amount of time on the Evermist level. Even if I do say so myself, it is starting to look much more like a proper village than a random collection of houses on elevated ground. I've taken pains to bring in some distinction to the various areas within the level - for example, rich farmers will have shingled roofs on their houses and the immediate area around them will look better with cobbled pathways and bigger houses, the poorer sections will have thatch roofs, closer-spaced houses, patch-worked walls.

I had planned to take some before/after close-up shots to show the difference but didn't have time yesterday night. Maybe in the next post :)
Here is a screenie of one of the streets that is near the entrance; still need to add a few more props but I also have to make sure not to overdo it. As it is, the level is prop-heavy due to all the constructed structures!

Oh, and I managed to spend only a few hours on WoW - enough to advance my gnome by about 7 levels. Reading about the latest patch on the WoW forums, it appears that the initial leveling process has been made faster ;)

Read More...

That's right! THE drug, going by what I've read and I must say, it's true to an extent!

I saw a BF deal for a free monthly pass for WoW and decided I'll give it a shot. I got one of those 10-day trial invites so I can decide whether to sell that pass or not and it looks like I *might* subscribe instead. I should have taken a screenshot of the first time I entered Eitrigg. I guess it was a busy time in the realm - there were scores of characters around! That first glimpse sucked me right in though I couldn't log on to that realm after that (almost always full!)
Instead I created a gnome mage in Norgannon and it's been a blast playing that little 'un. I don't know about others but I find the graphics extremely appealing. It's so colourful and lively, compared to DA.

The starting area for a gnome character

The other thing I noticed was that even for unimportant quests - simply to go to another place, for example - you get a detailed reason. Far more detailed than any of those Chanter's Board/Blackstone Irregulars/many other side-quests in DA. I really liked that there is a story behind all these fights against the Troggs, Rockjaws and Frostmanes.
The other important distinction from DA that I immediately noticed were the ambient animations. Here is a screenshot (badly taken) of a guy carrying another. He actually goes and lays the guy down on a makeshift bed and goes back and waits for another survivor!

Anyway, as much as I am enjoying this game, I am making a conscious effort not to play for extended lengths of time. I still have a module to finish; make it two actually. I am in final stages of scripting for Craggy Island and after that, it's just going to be bug-fixing (which we've already done a lot) and polishing. Hopefully, it gets out around Christmas; last I heard, VO is in progress.

Meanwhile, while re-working my Evermist level, I've also been taking breaks on and off (it feels like I've been working in the level editor most of the time!) and re-working dialogues to change references to the locations that have moved. I'm also working on fleshing out the setting with a lot of ambient dialogues during these breaks so it doesn't get boring - which is quite easy when re-working a level as huge as this one. I'm also making sure some of the buildings fit more into a village setting; an example is the marketplace which was very big and spacious under a huge tent-like awning previously. Now, the shops are more closely-packed and cluttered with make-shift roofs.

Re-worked market

Once I finish this, I have around 4 cutscenes I need to create in this area. That will definitely take some time! Till later...

Read More...

It's been some time since the last update - I've been completely swamped with RL work and had to put Dragon Age stuff on hold. Hey, need that money to finance these hobbies! Still, I managed to finish the required work on Thursday itself so the past two days have been spent on DA - minus the time spent researching and buying stuff on Black Friday. I ended up buying some games that I will probably won't play for another 3-4 months (Alpha Protocol, Resonance of Fate) and even got myself WoW to try out for a month and some other stuff I didn't think I needed till I saw the price :)

With the aim of getting an alpha out, I started playing through Evermist which was the level I submitted for the Community Contest a while ago and which is a crucial area in BaL. When I was playing through it, I realized something was off. First, it was too big for what it's purpose was and when I say this, I mean way too big. The idea behind this area was a small farming village between Denerim and West Hill but that feeling of being in a village wasn't there. The roads were too wide, the houses spaced too far apart and while I really liked the different mounds from a level-building perspective, they were a little too high and too numerous.

After trying to patch the level for a few hours, I decided to bite the bullet and start reworking it. I redesigned the level on paper - first, removing superfluous stuff like the roads circling the village. This was a very bad design decision in hindsight - these roads provided numerous paths and almost all of them have no scope for interaction with the villagers or the environment. It's just a cliff face/forest/fence on one side and a smaller cliff face on the other side. As I said, a bad design decision.

Still a WIP but this should give a sense of scale (the height is 288 vs 256, btw)

Then, came the real re-work of re-arranging the houses and getting the houses closer together without feeling congested. One of the goals of this rework was also to reduce the level size. The previous one had a playable (green boundary) area of 5 x 7 which is way too huge. The reworked one will have a 4 x 4 playable area which is more than a 50% reduction in size. The main reason for this downsizing is the removal of those 'ring' roads. Without those roads, I can leave the structures outside the playable area.

One advantage of having a level as a basis for this new one is the ability to export and import selection groups. Since I had been fairly meticulous in organizing my structures (save for the last minute addition of numerous props), it was easy to copy a lot of the stuff over. I hope to finish this tomorrow and have a play through and finalize things.
Till later...

Read More...

This is just a short post to let everyone know that work is keeping me extremely busy. We had a go-live on Saturday that was aborted at the last minute due to data issues and that cost me precious time in rolling back changes and re-testing stuff. The kicker is - I will have to do all those changes again this week (yeah! during the Thanksgiving Holidays which I was counting on to make some serious headway with BaL). I also have one more go-live in progress currently that's expected to be done by tomorrow.
All in all, a totally shitty week and BaL will have to stay in the freezer till my time is freed up.

Till later...

Read More...

Things just got a little more exciting and a little more hectic! I've taken over a new role at work, managing the projects we are working on and with it comes a ton of admin activities. Being an individual contributor till now, I've never really appreciated the amount of work that actually goes into managing a large scale project such as ours and this was sort of a rude awakening. Still, I've jumped in with both feet and I've got to make this work!

On the BaL front, things are progressing slowly but steadily. The important cutscene Dahlia is working on is expected to be completed this week and I am recruiting a VO artist for the lines required for this cutscene. This will help in the visualization, I am told ( I tell you, I am a noob at cinematics!) and it will also give me a chance to get the whole voice-over related activities into my build workflow.

Are you the one I am looking for?

Currently, I am working on populating the different areas with ambient NPCs. Leeward, in particular, has this big campsite party that will have quite a few ambient NPCs and I am trying to find varied animations for them so they don't all appear as clones. This does involve creating new ambient patterns and I am trawling through the ANIM_base worksheet to see what I can cook up. After that, I have a couple more cutscenes to create (nothing complex but since I will be doing them, anything can happen!).

Then, comes the big activity - packaging and play-testing the alpha. I plan to do this on another computer to simulate a user playing it so that it's easier to identify missing resources, etc. This will also free up my desktop to tweak and run the lightmapping on the levels that need it - parallelism all the way! Now, if only I had 48 hours a day...

Read More...

Of course, I wasn't away from the Toolset for that long that I need a break-in time to get back into the groove. In fact, I didn't even manage to keep my word that I'll not touch the Toolset till Thursday! We identified the pesky bug at work and while fixing it will take some time, we at least have the damn thing in our sights.

I spent a day brain-storming the talents and talent trees for one of the new classes for the companions. While the basic idea behind this class was established a long time back, it was time to go into the details -> finalize the ability names, what each ability will do, the various other information associated with abilities and most important, the specializations. I am extremely happy with the way the specializations have turned out - rooted in lore and distinct from what is currently offered in DA.
I am planning on having a separate page soon with all the new classes, abilities and trees so folks reading this blog can have a sneak peek at what's in store for them come February :)

WIP Shot

I've also started collaborating with DahilaLynn on cutscenes and we've been having a lot of discussions over IM on this one important cutscene (for now!) that she's directing for me. I must say, those chats have been extremely useful - showed me I still needed to go a-ways in the cutscene department (for example, she was talking about adjusting dof and I had to google it!). For those who haven't, check out her Alistair's Royal Wedding over on DragonAge Nexus - that should give an indication of her directing expertise.
...which reminds me, I need to do some lighting and stage work in the area where the cutscene is taking place and send it to her.

Till later...

Read More...

Write a better story? Check.
Create better levels with realistic lighting? Check.
Create more complex characters each with their own lives/opinions/agendas? Check.
Tie all these together into a module better than the official campaigns? Check.
.
.
.
.
Well, maybe :)
What Bioware cannot do and I can is take a break!

The past two days have been extremely hectic at work, so much so that work has spilled over into the evenings at home. I've ran into a bug that's driving me nuts and is likely to be a show-stopper for the project go-live if I don't get it resolved soon.

Added to that, I've been experiencing writer's block - totally! I guess it's because by the time I fire up the toolset, I'm mentally drained from work (don't you dare tell me otherwise! :P). The inspiration just doesn't want to come. So, I've decided to take it easy for a couple of days. No Dragon Age stuff - I am going to spend whatever free time I have in the evenings to catch up on all the books I've downloaded to my Kindle!

The way I figure - better a couple of days off and come back with a fresh mind rather than trying to plug away at the Toolset and develop stuff I will have to rewrite/redesign later. I wonder what David Gaider does when he gets writer's block? Or Laidlaw runs into a wall with a design idea? Definitely not take a couple of days' break, I bet!

Read More...

The weekend started off pretty quietly - for the whole of Saturday, I was not able to work on BaL though I wanted to.  Sunday looked to be turning that way - we had the daylight savings kick in and I realized I actually hadn't gotten up early :)

Still, I managed to finish the level I was working on - it is a fairly small level and will be used in one of the area transition encounters. It resembles a small clearing in a forest with a path winding through it - the sort of area where you'd stop to camp. It's so hard to create the illusion of a forest though, especially one around the rim of the clearing. For one, there is no terrain darkening tool and I wasn't able to find a suitable texture to substitute for that. Second, there is, as far as I was able to determine, no way to remove light from a particular area. This is very significant for forests as trees in Dragon Age do not cast shadows.

The view from near the entrance to the area

For now, the level has been marked complete which means it is 90% done. I will probably do the shadows later when I have time. I also tried using negative lights for this purpose but apparently, they have some other purpose.

I also managed to finish (read: 90%) an important cutscene that sets the stage for the plot beyond the first couple of areas. It is still a little rough around the edges at certain points but it's functionally complete and that's all that matters for now.

Till later...

Read More...