One of the biggest time sinks in module-making in Dragon Age after level building is writing dialogue. Even when you start with a concrete story and well-defined NPCs and companions, writing dialogue is not so easy. The most basic issue, at least for me, is trying to keep in mind that I am not writing a story but an interactive adventure.

What does this mean? Let's take an example - I was writing a conversation today and at one point a companion says the following line: "I don't want to talk to you. Ask him what he wants". Now, this interjection is not completely necessary to the conversation but it helps the flow and builds on an already established relationship between the companion and the conversation owner. Only when I was reviewing the conversation did I notice the "him". A few copy-paste as links and plot flags later, the conversation was complete.
Now, the above is fairly simple but this is one area I wish the DA conversation system was a little more flexible and allowed us to use tags to reference race/gender/class/background/specialization/etc. It seems almost unintuitive to write multiple lines just to change one word.

The bigger problem (and unrelated to the conversation system) is trying to come up with dialogue options - the backbone of an interactive conversation. Now, in some cases, these options just flow organically. I was writing a conversation for a minor NPC and multiple choices at each node was so easy. Then, I started writing another piece for a companion and ended up being stumped. Offering choices while maintaining the flow of dialogue is extremely important - irrelevant options can easily destroy that flow and tone set previously.

I take pride in my writing skills in English even though it is not my native tongue. However, I've lost track of the number of times I've referred to an online dictionary/thesaurus to make sure I am using a particular phrase or idiom in the correct way. And I don't even want to talk about writing emotional scenes - I just plain suck at those, a fact I've come to accept. I spent over half an hour today writing eight lines, eight lines with no options at all and it's still not final. Anyway, the journey continues and hopefully, these efforts help to bring the story together in a cohesive manner in the end.

Lastly, good news for the DA community - the first installment in the Dark Times: Confederacy of Malkuth saga has been released. Check out the details in the official announcement thread. I haven't had a chance to play it yet (have set aside time during the weekend for it) but it appears to be fairly long and involved and most important, it is, as far as I know, the first significant addition to the Official Campaign...and this is just the first part! For those ruing the fact that Bioware won't be releasing DLCs for DA:O anymore or that they can't continue their Warden's story (seriously, what's with this Warden fixation? If you don't believe me, go check out how many threads in the DA2 forums refer to this), head over to the DT:CoM thread and fill that void up!

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First, the news...
What is the most important happening in the Dragon Age modding community this week? The release of Baldur's Gate 2 Redux! The BGR team has put together one awesome module - check out the details here if you haven't had a chance. It's expected to be released later today and can be downloaded from their DANexus page.
 
If I were to pick one area of Dragon Age modding that I am really comfortable with, it would be scripting. It might be due to the fact that I do a fair amount of LUA and Perl scripting at work but DAScript itself is a fairly complex system with hidden nuggets waiting to be unearthed. So, when the Mini-Game Scripting Contest was announced, I was excited - finally, a contest catering to my strengths! I didn't have a chance earlier to spend time on it but this past week, I've been doing some prototypes at work.

The 8-queens problem

The game I am designing is loosely based on chess - no, not the chess game but logic games within the chess rules framework. If you are familiar with chess, you might have heard of or even played the game where you have to place 8 queens on the board such that they do not attack each other.

Now, there are a lot of variations to the above 'standard' game. In fact, a quick search will show you hundreds of math papers written on this subject dealing with unique solutions, solutions for generic NxN boards, 3-dimensional boards, n-dimensional boards (n dimensions! brings back memories of my Differential Geometry course...where nothing can be visualized as in the real world).

What's this? A triangle immersed in a saddle-shaped plane (which is a hyperbolic paraboloid) as well as two diverging ultra-parallel lines. Math! You gotta love it.

For this contest, I've put my own spin on it and attached a simple story to it so that the game can be played in that context. The number of variations that can be played are currently at 25. The real problem was putting down solutions on paper so that I can provide hints if the player is stuck. Now that that part is complete, on to coding. One of the most useful script add-ons released is, in my opinion, is Craig Graff's Variable Storage System. Terribly useful when you have to keep track of a lot of stuff and plots either won't work or are too cumbersome to implement. I will be making extensive use of this in my contest entry.

I am also resizing some models and changing them a bit to provide a good layout where the game plays out. I plan to release this as a stand-alone game too so it has to look polished enough. Will it win? I don't know but I certainly hope so. Will it be well-received? I honestly don't know. Some players might approach it as a chess game in which case it will lose some of it's charm. If taken purely as an interactive game, it might work out better. The model-work that I am doing is in part to distance the setting from the chess board as much as possible. Let's see if it succeeds.

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If you had been visiting this blog regularly, you would have noticed the new Community Contests banner on the right. This was part of a...campaign of sorts to promote the Community Contest effort further so as to pull in new faces. We pinged a lot of our forum friends who had blogs or websites asking them to put a similar banner up on their sites; mikemike37 talked to greywardens.com and I was still thinking we could do more!

Then, Challseus came up with the idea of talking to Fernando Melo, who is sort of like a community representative over on BSN, about posting in the Bioware Blog. So, I messaged him and he forwarded the request to 'Evil' Chris and Victor Wachter. The result - a post on the Bioware Blog about the Community Contest and an announcement by Victor in the Dragon Age forums.

The significant part though is this sentence from that blog - Starting this week, I’ll be taking a look at the toolset community and the mods they create, and featuring them on the BioWare Blog. It will be a big boost to the mods that have been released if they are featured in the blog. As it is, with the Featured Projects section broken and the popularity system not so popular among modders, they need some other avenue to promote their content and this might just be the shot in the arm some of them need. Here's to Bioware! *cheers*

One other thing we've done over at the Community Contest group is to create an Info thread which summarizes the salient points about the contests and how people can help out. If you are interested in helping out or just want to know more about the group without having to go through all the threads out there, this should help you out.

Till later...

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Yep, in plural!

I had been toying with the idea of submitting the Leeward level to the Community Contest. However, it is not *technically* a finished level since the village is not complete. The incomplete areas are not accessible in Blood and Lyrium but that wouldn't be enough reason to make that entry a valid one according to the contest rules.
I had started design work on the next big area in BaL, a village called Evermist. This would be a crucial area in BaL so I had spent some considerable time to make sure that all I needed could be presented properly.

Design on Paper

Given that I had the design work complete around middle of last week, I decided to take the plunge to try and finish it before the contest deadline. It is a fairly large level (192 x 288) and I've decided to use a lot of elevations and custom-built houses which makes it even more time-consuming.
At this point, the initial prototyping is done and it is looking pretty good - by my own low standards :)
The contest deadline is just 6 days away so I will be slaving away at it whenever I get some free time. I would love to hear any suggestions or feedback on the posted images either here or at DANexus or in my project feedback thread so feel free to share your thoughts on the level.

The view from the Chantry

The other contest, rather competition, that I am participating in is the Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic PBEM 1vs1 Tourney. Historically, though I've been a Singles Champion, I've never been able to see a 1vs1 competition through to the end. These tourneys typically go on for about 5-6 months and in both competitions held in the past, I've been forced to forfeit due to RL delays. Hopefully, this time, I can play till the end.
Of course, I haven't had much practice since I haven't been playing PBEM for nearly 9 months now but as luck would have it, my first round is relatively easy and I hope to go through to the final 16 without any major hiccups. Here's hoping!
Being on the forum staff, I'll also be helping out with the organization (setting up threads, resolving any disputes, etc) a bit so that is going to cut into the time I can spend on DA.

Too many things going on!
Till later...

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AmstradHero pointed out that the Comments feature wasn't working on my blog. I had been wondering about that for some time now - the stats show that I am getting new and old visitors consistently and yet, no comments!
It seems this is a fairly common problem with custom templates on blogger. I remembered switching the Comment posting option to a 'pop-up' in my earlier template; after switching it on this one, it is finally working now! Made a mental note to test the comment functionality every time I change templates.
So, go ahead and post those comments!

I've also done some minor changes to have the Comments and Email link on separate lines and increased the line spacing to avoid the clustered look.
Since this is a custom template, I couldn't get the Reactions widget to work out-of-the-box too. I've added the required code in but for the life of me, I can't get the damn reactions left-aligned. Looks like I will have to ask Google for help on that one.

Lastly, I have added 2 more blogs to my reading list (well, Daeltaja's blog has been there for some time now).
Craggy Island is a stand-alone module being developed by Daeltaja and the levels are looking just fantastic. Check out his blog for some excellent screenshots.
The Dark Times Chronicle is a newsletter penned by MysteriXOX and is set in the Confederacy of Malkuth. It is an excellent source for all kinds of information on the DT:CoM world - interviews, culture, weather (yes!) and even classifieds!

Happy Reading and expect an update on BaL in a day or two!
Till later...

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Lately, I've been spending a lot of time on the BSN forums - not browsing the actual forums but taking a shot at the various riddles and puzzles being posted in The Dark Times Chronicle group. Created by Team Z, which is a dev team for the Dark Times: Confederacy of Malkuth, the group plans to release regular newsletters to keep the folks interested in learning more about the DT:CoM universe entertained. And so far, they've done that rather splendidly!

The Team Z logo

With lots of riddles, puzzles and threads dealing with weird happenings, truisms, etc., the group has been an enjoyable place to go to for a break and MysteriXOX is almost always around to keep the momentum going! The most important thing, though, is that the first edition of The Dark Times Chronicle is being released in 2 days so keep an eye out for it. It will contain information on the DT:CoM module and interviews with the developers as well as more riddles and puzzles.

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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...

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The hangover from a long vacation is always bad - unpacking, a ton of work waiting to be done and on top of all this, several interesting happenings on the BSN forums.

One of the exciting things is the new Community Contests initiative started by mikemike37. The idea is to hold content-creating competitions on various aspects of DA modding with the entries being available for the entire community to modify and use - freely. It is an excellent idea for generating community content, which has been extremely scarce in the DA.
The other interesting part are the prizes - in the absence of material prizes for now (there are talks underway to get them), interested community members can devote a fixed amount of their time as a prize to help the winners with their projects. This will definitely help bring together community members and provides an option to help people who are lacking skills in a particular area while also giving exposure to those who are proficient in their own areas.

Go here to read more about this effort - Community Contest Wiki Page and sign up here if you are interested in helping out. Two contests have already been announced - a level building one and a prop design.

The other 'happening' I want to touch on is one that is generating a bit of controversy - the Open House initiative started by Proleric. The idea is to make freely available all the projects hosted on BSN with a wiki list to make navigation easier. The ultimate goal of the project, while good, has led to some friction between community members due to the way it is being implemented. While I endorse the idea of open content, putting the onus on project creators to classify their works as 'not open' is a bad idea. The stance that 'open is the default mode' for projects seems to be driven by community members coming from the NWN/NWN2 modding scene - which, to my mind, is against most of the other modding communities I have seen. It's still in the early stages though so it might mature out to be a palatable option for all content creators but then again, it might not. We just have to wait and see how it evolves.

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