In my previous post, I had mentioned how certain skills were unusable given the current design of Blood and Lyrium where the player will take on the role of a Dalish Elf ruin-raider. For those that aren't familiar with Dragon Age lore (are there any readers of this blog who aren't? but anyway...), the Dalish live in isolation as much as possible. They do not live among humans or dwarves, they do not undergo military training alongside them and they most certainly do not learn magic in the Circle of Magi.

                           The same classes for races that pretty much live in isolation

Given this, I did not want my Dalish Elves to follow the same Warrior/Rogue/Mage classes that have been established. I understand Bioware did this since they had to cater to each origin and having race-specific classes would have added a big overhead (though that would have made the UI more flexible at least). But hey, us module makers have the freedom to do that! Players in BaL will have the option of choosing one of the two new classes for playing - and only one of those two.

The custom classes to be added in BaL do not have a rogue flavor. This meant that the core rogue skills - disarming traps and lockpicking - had to be factored in as skills so that the player will have access to them. That was another reason for the redesign of the skills system.


On to level design...
I finally decided to buy a replacement RAM kit since the RMA was taking too much time (and this will put me in a position to get up to 8 gigs when it does come). I finished up one more interior level and will be working on filling it out with NPCs, dialog and quests this week.

                                               The Lucky Horse Tavern

This area will feature a lot of ambient behaviour on the NPCs and will probably require a few scans through Beerfish's excel utilities to pin down the animations required. This will the first time I am going to do extensive ambient behaviour set up so it should be interesting.

Till later...

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One of the primary concerns with any custom module is to judge how far a character will progress in that module - what is the optimum level range that a player will end up at? What sort of skills will be used in the module? Will there be redundant skills or talents that a player will never find a use for?

For Blood and Lyrium (and the game, in general), I felt some of the skill trees were redundant or tacked on or just plain unusable given the module design (more about this in the next post).

For example, we have an entire skill tree dedicated to making traps. However, only the rogue gets the necessary talents to disarm traps. This seemed illogical to me - if a person is skilled enough to put together complex traps, shouldn't he be able to take part those same traps? Or at least simple ones?

The other thing that bugged me was stealing. I am a big fan of improving skills as you use them a lot and stealing is a prime candidate for this. How can a warrior in heavy armor and wielding a great sword (especially, one of those ridiculously big swords in the game!) steal successfully from anyone other than a dead person? And unless you had a Fagin to 'mentor' you, how can you just become better at stealing?

                                             Skill Tree in Blood and Lyrium

In my module, there will be just one skill each for Stealing and Trap Mastery. That's right - Trap Mastery. The player will be able to both construct and disarm traps using this one skill. Trap and stealing difficulty will be handled via Cunning and Dexterity as primary modifiers and armor/weapons as secondary modifiers.

Combat Tactics will also completely disappear from the skill list. The player will be given a set of slots at the beginning of the game and that's it. I am toying with the idea of purchasing additional tactics slots by undergoing training from select mentors but it would have to fit in with the whole story to make something like that work.

I am not completely happy with the way the skill tree turned out, though. I will probably get in touch with FollowTheGourd on the Bioware forums to see if he has any idea to hide the empty squares and arrows.

                                 
...and lastly, a short update on the level design progress. My RAM started throwing errors and causing random BSoDs so I had to RMA it. While I am waiting for a replacement kit, I am stuck working on my laptop which means less level building. I have been using this time to finish up some of the 2DA and scripting work required and also writing up more of the story so it hasn't been a complete waste of time!

More on design decisions for Blood and Lyrium in the next post!

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First, the big news - I am going on vacation for a month in July. Back to my parents' place in India with it's sunny weather and rolling farms. I will be taking my laptop with me - it is a pretty decent laptop but I am not sure how it will handle the heavy level editing required for Dragon Age; certainly not on par with my desktop at home. So, the focus for this month is going to be level design and building - I can then work on the areas, scripting, conversations, etc. while I am on vacation.

I have been laying out the levels on paper - I am not going to make the same mistake of reworking entire levels like I did when I started modding. The plan is to get the basic level design complete for Act 2 and a bit of Act 3 too. These acts will contain a few exterior levels and these are the most resource-hungry to design so the first priority is to get them done and out of the way. They are also going to be different in terms of layout - one of them will be a small one-street town, two will be small villages and there will be at least 2 more forested areas.

The next few blog posts in this month will showcase those levels. I also plan to start writing a series of articles about the game-play changes being done for Blood and Lyrium - there are some aspects of the core functionality that I feel are superficial or can be re-designed.

Before I sign off, I would like those of you not familiar with AmstradHero's blog to grab yourself a cup of coffee and read his latest articles on level design, texture blending and general game design. A very coherent and useful series of articles for any builder (player's feedback welcome too!)

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For those familiar with HoMM 5, you'll know what this means. A week when nothing really happens. I have been sick for the past few days and have hardly been up - I didn't mind it for the first couple of days since it was a welcome break from work but boredom slipped in pretty soon. It's difficult being lazy and doing nothing!

I played around a bit with the lighting to get it right for the interiors - still a problem; the exteriors look a lot better.

I did manage to finish most of the conversations required for the first act. Now, to put them all together and make sure the stuff works properly. The coming long weekend should give enough time to finish up Act 1 and move on to the next stage.

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The past week has been really fruitful; all the level layouts required for Act 1 of Blood and Lyrium are complete. I still have a few more props to put in but I will come back to those later. I am starting to get burned out on level-building!

I have started work on the dialogues and quests for Act 1. The major dialogues are in the starting area and the final area that I built this week and one of them is already complete. Dealing with two quests and companion and NPC interjections made it quite complex and over 2000 words - I am wondering if I should trim it down a bit (I admit, I ramble a bit when I start writing!)

I also finally started on the stages and cut-scenes. Though I was hesitant at first (the tutorials are so lengthy!), it was not that difficult. Well, I was mostly doing stages and a very simple cut-scene; once I start on the intro cut-scene, that will really test my skills. The major plots have also been put down and associated plot scripts written. Next step, once the dialogues are done, is the journal entries.

The custom ability implementation for Arms and Armor is still an open issue, unfortunately. I will have to get back to that soon though since Ambaryerno has made good progress in the design department. Check out his new sword models here.

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The ability coding for Arms and Armor is nearing completion though getting the new abilities to actually work is still an issue. For those interested, I have opened a topic - Custom Ability Implementation - on the Bioware forums for getting some help on this issue. If anyone has any inputs, post a comment here or in that thread.

Here are some tips for level-builders. I suspect almost all of these are common knowledge but I figure these will come in useful for someone at least!

Copy and change x-y coordinates (Interiors): Many of the models which are part of the same logical set (eg: Tevinter Interior Tileset - small wall, small roof, floor) have the same size on the x-y axis. So, if you want to line those 2 floor tiles up perfectly, copy and paste the floor tile and change the X or Y units by +/- 8 (depending on the direction). The same applies to the walls and ceilings. Sometimes, the length/width would be different than 8 but once you figure it out, lining them would be a snap!

Replace model file names: When building interiors, it is easier to build the skeleton using the same models for walls, floor, roof, pillars, etc. Once the skeleton is done, you can go into the model properties and change the model file name to the one you actually want there. This is easier than placing the new model there and copying the coordinates.

Cutaway Override in model properties: When you place a picture/coat-of-arms/torches/etc on a wall, going into Tactical Mode in-game cuts away the tops of these walls. The props placed on the walls look like they are hanging in space. To prevent this from happening, you can set Cutaway Override to FALSE in the properties for that model/prop. I didn't know about this before and had to realign a whole bunch of wall torches onto pillars!

Shadows without models: Let's say you want to build a dark pit or a dark circular area within a big room. Place a model of the appropriate shape (doesn't matter which model) right above the area you want to darken and adjust the model properties to set Export To Game as FALSE and Lightmap as TRUE. Place a light directly above it to cast a good shadow. Once you render lightmaps, you will see a dark shadow beneath the model but the model won't be present in-game. There is a bit of work to get it just right since the model can cast shadows from other lights too.

Here is a link to a detailed tutorial about lighting done by the BG2 Redux team. Post any comments or questions you might have in this thread.

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 (yeah, couldn't think of something better for the title)

Most of the time since my last post here has been spent taking care of RL issues so time spent on developing Blood and Lyrium has been minimal - just some conversations and plot scripting.

However, a good amount of work has been done on Arms and Armor, scripting new talents for 2-handed Light weapons. M2DAs are yet to be created for them, though and the passive/sustained talents still need to be completed. I expect to be done with that by this week so that it can out in the next alpha for testing (and I can go back to developing BaL)

An interesting discussion came up in the Bioware forums about compatibility between different modules. With the scores of add-ins available now, each changing a small aspect of the core gameplay, this has become one of the constant issues the user faces - and this is even before the user-made module scene has fully taken off (like in NWN, for example). If you are reading this and have an opinion on this or just want to offer support for the discussion, head on over there!

If anyone reading this is interested in doing some level work for my module, post a comment here or head over to the project page to post in the discussion thread or comments area. Thanks!

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