Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Old School Dungeon Crawl of Doom

Feel bad that I've not been active on my fellow builder's blogs recently (so much juicy stuff going on for NWN2 now! Hoping I can help play/test your work soon!) but that's due to lack of time - but the upside is that most spare time has been spent digging into the toolset. And hopefully I should be getting close - if all goes to plan, this weekend I intend to run through the main plot path - party of 4 level 7 PCs tackling in order White Plume Mountain, Return to White Plume Mountain, and the climactic Ex Keraptis Cum Amore. That's one long old school dungeon crawl right there, weighing in at a solid few hours. Focus will be to check for balance, but also to see if I can finally overcome the clingy bugs that have been plaguing me e.g. creatures that refuse to jump to a waypoint even when there's no good reason they shouldn't (will likely end up using script-hidden as a workaround). Plus there's a few old-school aspects that will need testing like magic decks of cards that completely screw up your PC (does anything cry classic D&D more than that?).

Since the last few play reports I've overhauled the balance of the entire campaign, but I think tweaking that could go on forever and I'll never please everyone, so I'll likely release soon and make any alterations on the fly. Hopefully the upcoming spate of releases will see more traffic back on the Vault and all new content can benefit from that.

So. If I'm lucky, end of the month doesn't look like too unrealistic a prospect.... eek.

Here's some screenies of the specific dungeon areas i've just finished adding scripts and dialogue to. Strange pools of bubbling alchemical mixtures - drink, swim, or avoid like the plague? Time to make those Wisdom checks....




6 comments:

Kamal said...

Sounds like how I test, run though as much as possible noting every bug along the way until I'm stuck.

Anyway, I'm curious on your thoughts on balancing campaigns that are open like this.

Amraphael said...

Is it the end of the month yet? Is it the end of the month yet?
But when? Is it the end of the month yet? I'm so excited about this module. Great work so far!

Lance Botelle (Bard of Althéa) said...

Great stuff!

When the post title has "old school" and "dungeon crawl", with a "doom" thrown in for good measure, I am already hooked. :)

Did you say if this was MP as well as SP play? I was hoping my friend and I could give it a go if it is MP.

Lance.

Wyrin said...

Thanks Lance
yeah it's built with MP in mind but it's not been tested. So hoping it's good to go for MP but antipating a few unforeseen bugs! :-/

Lance Botelle (Bard of Althéa) said...

Hi Wyrin,

I think my friend and I may be one of your first testers in MP then. :) We are making our way through Will Rock (again), but I suggested we play some MP NWN modules - and yours would be a great start!

When we do (I hope he is up for it), I will reposrt back any issues we find (if any).

Lance.

Shaughn said...

End of the month! Congrats on the up coming release. Playtesting is the most trying yet most interesting part. No matter how many times you try something and it works it only takes one different person to find out how it doesn't work. I thought I had my campaign fairly straigthened out and excepted a few little things but quite a few were returned. Nothing game breaking (except when I tried to fix things) but lots of little quirky things you never notice as a creature.
Script Hidden is a wonderful thing and I use it all the time as a backup. Lots of the time I create a custom line within the script so I cam delay a script hidden. I hide a creature since it rarely failes then remove effects then destroy and have a new copy if needed at sepific locations to unscript. Jump and destroy by themselves seem too fail too often for some unknown reasons.