Shadow Over Moonglow - An Ultima Themed Campaign for DOS2

[JasonNH]

I was going to wait longer to talk about this, but since I got caught on Twitter already ...

It's just as well, since I could use ideas on integrating Ultima style content within the DOS2 framework. By all means if you have any suggestions, please chime in.

Shadow Over Moonglow is a standalone campaign for 1-2 players using the Divinity Original Sin:2 game client. It is set in the Ultima world of Britannia just prior to the events of Ultima 5. The players are founding members of the Resistance who are called upon to help discover the whereabouts of former Great Council member Goeth who has gone missing after being sent on a recruitment mission to Moonglow. The campaign will primarily take place on Verity Isle.

Goals and Highlights:

• 8-12 hour campaign for 1-2 players with a maximum party size of four when companions are included.

• Dual-Mapping System
  An explorable overland map that connects the smaller, traditional areas together. Similar concept as NWN2: Storm of Zehir without the painful loading times. Planning on spawning random encounters in the overland map, and if engaged, you get sent to an arena map for the actual combat. Overland map should be dotted with lots of little things to find and areas to explore.

• Day/Night Cycle
  Intention is for it to affect both aesthetics and gameplay. We'll be looking into bonuses and penalties to certain skills.
  
  
• NPC Schedules
  Major locations like Moonglow and the Lycaeum will make use of NPC schedules so long as we can reach our goal of those schedules having meaningful impact on gameplay.
  
  
• Quest and Crafting Driven Skill Acquisition
  Rather than simply buying skillbooks, the emphasis will be on discovering new skills from trainers found in the world, and in the case of magic, crafting them from reagents after learning the recipes.

• Spell/Combat System
  Still very much a WIP design but there will be changes from vanilla DOS2. Trying to find ways to incorporate reagents without micro-management and/or supply issues. Contemplating 'tiered' levels of magic with cantrip like spells that don't consume reagents but are lower powered versus higher level spells that require reagents but may completely bypass armor types, etc. The challenge is going to be trying to maintain some degree of an Ultima feel to the system while working with DOS2's heavily dependent elemental interactions. Since I am not a huge fan of the current implementation of physical/magical armor in DOS2, I may incorporate some of the work from the community that changed abilities to have a probability of bypassing armor that is inversely proportional to what percentage is remaining.

• Non-linear Questing
  We are very much trying to design this like the original Ultima games where completing quests was more a matter of having all the pieces of the puzzle in your possession versus following a prescribed path. While there will be some milestones and stakes in the ground, the design philosophy is geared towards exploration and open discovery.

• Limited Rest
  Current plan is to rest either in a bed or "hole up and camp" outside in the overland map with potential ambushes (like Ultima 5). Whether or not this makes much sense depends on how the spell system turns out. If you can spam healing spells, there is not much sense to having a resting system at all.

• Backgrounds
  Since Brtiannia doesn't really have different races like lizards, dwarves, and elves, we are contemplating the idea of City of Virtue for its equivalent, e.g., Britain, Jhelom, Skara Brae, Yew, Minoc, etc., with each granting its own tags (compassionate, valorious, just, etc.) and/or perk(s).

Target Development time: 18 months
Don't want this to drag on much more than that, maybe two years max.

Risks and Concerns:
Setting aside the usual ones of self-doubt and being overly ambitious, I see these as the biggest challenges:

• NPC Schedules - Could be a big time sink for little payback if it doesn't really impact gameplay.
  
  
• Toolset Support - While it's in way better shape than DOS1 and has most of what is needed already, there is still the glaring hole of no custom music or sound support. While it is on their TODO list, it still makes me nervous because I really don't think I could release this if I have to use only what is available from DOS2.
  
  
• Limited / Mismatched Assets: Ultima is primarily a humanoid world. DOS2 has multiple races that will simply be 'wasted' in our setting. We hope there is enough variety to sustain the entire campaign without them.
  
  
• Objections from the current Intellectual Property holders. I'm optimistic given the long-standing history of Lazarus.

 

[Tavernking]

The biggest risk and concern is that you'll give up in about two weeks.

 

[JasonNH]

The biggest risk and concern is that you'll give up in about two weeks.

 

[Excommunicator]

its been 2 weeks how is this going

 

[JasonNH]

Planning an update on Sunday.

 

[JasonNH]

Developer Diary #1

Team Update:

I'm pretty excited to have picked up a couple of additional team members for Shadow Over Moonglow. I got an offer from an industry veteran level designer to help out with levels and he has started working straightway on the Moonglow town map, which will likely be the largest one in the campaign. I've also reunited with a talented programmer and experienced scripter from the NWN and Dragon Age communities. We worked together during and after the toolset beta for DA and he helped to get the community going for DOS1 by creating and maintaining a wiki for it.


Collaboration Tools:

With four people all contributing to the project I wanted to have a decent set of collaboration tools and settled on Cloud Forge. We have a source control repository, a wiki, a documents archive, discussion boards, and bugzilla integration. It was really handy for getting the additional team members up and running quickly. The value of source control can't be overstated and I think the time spent on getting this framework in place will pay off several times over in the long haul.


Systems:

Most of my time has been spent working on the overland map and the aesthetics of a day/night cycle. Both of them are a bit fussy since they step outside the normal use patterns in DOS2. The overland map uses a grid of triggers and overhead spectator cameras with a fixed height and perspective since there is no other known way for preventing the camera from zooming in. This also means players cannot pan the camera, so the movement is more like Baldur's gate than NWN2: Storm of Zehir. We think we can make it work though.

The day/night cycle is also a little wonky due to these spectator cameras. The overland map has a single atmosphere trigger with multiple atmospheres for the day/night cycle. When you switch from one atmosphere to the next, the engine does not begin to render the changes when they occur while one of these spectator cameras is active. This means I have to re-activate the currently assigned overland map camera anytime the atmosphere changes in order to see it happen and I lose out on some of the blending from one atmosphere to the next. It's still in its rudimentary stages, but we've made some decent progress. We've tested the overland map in two person multi-player and verified it works there too.

I tinkered with character creation a bit but didn't have much success in trying to cut out the unwanted races from the game. We obviously can't have lizards, undead, elves, and dwarves running around Britannia. The lack of success pushed me to think outside the box a bit and I'm now planning to implement something that hits the nostalgia feels anyway. Character creation will begin from a dialogue and then proceed into a customization UI after answering some questions. I originally didn't want to take this approach since the players are not the 'avatar', but I have some ideas that should work well within the Ultima lore in this context.


Writing/Plot:

Our approach is to write the story from the viewpoint of the antagonist(s) and then outline a map of the ways in which the player can unlock the clues necessary to thwart it. We hope this helps to minimize the amount of linear feeling to the campaign. While there will be some chained logical paths to progressing we want players to have the capacity of finding the pieces in any order. We have most of the plot/backstory fleshed out and some of the player experienced questlines for discovering it. We have about ten character sketches in place, where two are companions and the remainder are NPCs. We have created visual sets and portraits for all of them.

Upcoming Focus:

For the next couple of months we'll be focusing on creating a "horizontal slice", however simplistic it needs to be. We want to implement the main quest-line from beginning to end, even if it means just dropping items onto an empty level to be gathered up, giving an NPC a single line of dialog, etc. We found this helpful in our demo mod to create the basic skeleton and then expand on its frame. It provides a lot of options when you come home from a long day at work and might feel like working on one type of content but not another. In addition to the horizontal slice we will be putting more attention on character creation, companion customization, and starting equipment. As we test things out, we'll want to have as much time with the character creation framework as possible to see how it plays out.


TL;DR - Have a team of four making steady progress with source control commits on a daily basis. We are going to implement an entire skeleton of the main quest line and some basic working systems and expand from there. Still a very long way to go but enjoying ourselves.


Here is a very rough cut of some of the placeholder systems in place, along with debug text and sped up day/night cycle.

 

[CryptRat]

Our approach is to write the story from the viewpoint of the antagonist(s) and then outline a map of the ways in which the player can unlock the clues necessary to thwart it. We hope this helps to minimize the amount of linear feeling to the campaign. While there will be some chained logical paths to progressing we want players to have the capacity of finding the pieces in any order.

 

[Neanderthal]

• Limited Rest
  If you can spam healing spells, there is not much sense to having a resting system at all.

Well limited mana, expensive, rare and limited reagents and the fact that healing doesn't mitigate fatigue should make resting still extremely valuable in my opinion. Plus it opens up the possibility of using dreams and such, which is a common device in Ultima games.

 

[JasonNH]

Just finished a major overhaul to character creation for the campaign. Since this is the codex, I probably don't need to explain the gypsy thing, but you never know. For some context and nostalgia feels:

Ultima 5 Character Creation

Ultima 6 Character Creation

So in Shadow over Moonglow, players will begin similarly with a narrative driven dialogue that effectively determine a preset, after which they can customize the look and specific stats of their character.



This will also be supported in two-player multi-player. Here is an example of how it looks:



There were quite a number of challenges with implementing this, to say the least. It's not perfect, and if Larian can open up the flexibility in a couple of areas I may be able to polish it up a bit more, but it's functional and I am happy with the progress.