[WIP] Thirst, a Dragon Age mod focused on C&C

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Thirst is an upcoming Dragon Age module focused on choice and consequence. It is a stand-alone campaign designed around non-canon story elements, but integrated into the existing Dragon Age lore. Set in the trade city of Arceris, ruled by the mysterious Council of Six and tyrannized by the criminal mastermind Bloodblade, you play a recent arrival to the city who soon finds him or herself trapped there as an embargo comes into effect. Using your unique skills and abilities, you will uncover a conspiracy at the heart of the city and decide its fate!

Though I enjoyed Dragon Age, I felt that the game had a lot of missed opportunities regarding its character system, with the statistics of the game largely contributing to combat and little else. Thirst is my attempt to take the Dragon Age rule set to a new level, by making the build of your character important not just to fighting, but in solving quests and navigating through a storyline. If you're a fan of Fallout, Planescape: Torment or any other choice and consequence-heavy RPG, Thirst will appeal to you.

UPDATE: An official beta covering the full campaign has been released. This is likely to have bugs and other problems. See here for more details:

http://dragonage.nexusmods.com/mods/3496/

Very nice looking, I hope you can release at some point.

In that third screenshot of yours, the right side of the archway needs to be lowered to match the left side.

I played about with the Dragon Age toolset a bit when it came out, and remember being put off by the awkwardness of level building, as well as a general lack of support/easy scripting/art resources that weren't, well, Dragon Age-y, but I did think the 'plot flag' design would be perfect for modders wanting to get in plenty of C & C. Good luck to you, sir.

Why would you want to work in the game industry? If you don't go into it as an indie, or direct to a top down position from other bullshit positions (eg. Pete Hines and Emil P-something from being editors and reviewers at Adrenaline Vault, owned by ZeniMax, to Bethesda as head of PR and a senior designer, also owned by ZeniMax), working in the game industry is waged slavery, a perk of being the most underdeveloped industry at the moment.

Anyway, good luck, I guess. It's only unfortunate that you're doing this for DA.

Looks great. I'm glad to see that the quality of writing, from what I saw in the videos, is probably better than that of DA.

Keep up it up.

Haha, me too. I've experimented with game design, modding and level design in the past, but never really managed to release anything or get beyond that 50% mark. I'm hoping to change that this time.

I'll check into the arch. I don't think I was using grid-snapping there, so it's possible that's why things are a little misaligned.

And yeah, while editing things related to combat and character building is really awkward and annoying (I've decided to just go with all the default skills), plot flags are an excellent way of mananging progression through the game. Combined with the C++ I've had to learn to do scripting, it offers a lot of control over things without being overly cumbersome. The Toolset definitely is purpose-built for Dragon Age rather than for mods, but it still gets the job done and lets me build some pretty nice-looking environments on top of it.

Because I think it's one thing that I'd be really good at, that I've been set on for the last couple of years, and because frankly, I'd enjoy it more than any other job - at least in theory, because of course you never know until you really get into something. I am well aware of the bullshit that every person working in the games industry has to deal with - bad management, crazy hours and relatively low pay, lacking in job security, being forced to compromise artistic vision for the sake of market demands and idiot investors who think they know more than you do, etc. - but honestly, I just don't have the same passion for much else, and it really lets me put my wide variety of skills to use (writing, art, level design, basic programming/scripting, audio production, teamwork and project management, etc.). Unfortunately, it's possible I'll never get there, considering how competitive the field is, but I'm hoping being able to release a stand-alone add-on with close to ten hours-work of content for a fairly contemporary game will give me a leg up over others.

As for Dragon Age... yes, I know it's not the most ideal, and the mod community isn't actually as active as I thought when I started. But at the same time, I need to remain contemporary and, frankly, as far as marketing myself goes, it's better than building a mod for the Infinity Engine or some such. I've also really managed to improve my level design chops and artistry over the course of this project, which is something applicable to just about any game genre or engine.

Ghostdog approved! Thanks for the thumbs up. While I don't want it to get to my head... yes, I think my writing is better than BioWare & co.'s as well, although I have to admit that when it comes to humour and more "colourful" characters, I definitely struggle. I've never been the best author when it comes to fiction, and I think my more purpose-driven dialogue reflects that (but at least it's on the more realistic side of things). Getting out of the comfort zone is one thing I've been forcing myself to do in all respects over the last few weeks especially.

Thanks for all the feedback, guys, I really appreciate it. And as I release more details, I encourage everyone to be critical. I want this thing to turn out well, and while I can't say it'll end up being the greatest thing ever (I don't have a dedicated team of play-testers to constantly help refine it, and it's my first major project of this nature), believe me when I say that I take nearly every bit of critique into account, even if it's stuff that's hard to hear.

Well, if I'm not mistaken, I think a mod for New Vegas would be FAR more receptive and responsive as far as Codexers are concerned unless you specifically want to deal with a medieval fantasy setting.

Experimenting with the Fallout 3 mod tools a while back (and Oblivion before) made me vow to pretty much never touch them again. They are absolutely, utterly terrible. I actually have some respect for Obsidian and Bethesda, because they somehow were able to make decent-looking games in an editor which makes something as simple as editing terrain a complete and utter bitch.

From the screenshots and videos, this will easily easily be better than DAO. Keep up the good work.

For feedback, the only thing I found slightly annoying was the 'cutscene initiation distance'. It seems like cutscenes get triggered as soon as you enter a 50 metre radius of the NPC. It would seem much smoother if that distance was significantly reduced. Or maybe have the player initiate the dialogue?

The talk trigger size is something that's hard to get right... you have to make sure the player is actually going in that direction, and not just running past, but at the same time don't want them to miss it. In this case I want the guard to hail down the player, because it's more or less a way of letting him/her know that they're enterting a more dangerous part of the world, while making sure the player has a chance for the player to catch up on the story/world state if he/she hasn't been investigating elsewhere. I spend more time than one might think tweaking them, so hopefully it'll work out well. There are definitely situations where I take control away and let other NPCs take over (such as the argument there between Errol and Theron), but I try to minimise them and have the situations make sense. It's hard balance to find between letting the player do whatever he/she wants, and making sure that necessary information is given to everyone.

And thanks very much for your comment, it's appreciated. Glad to know I'm on the right track here.

Couple more "cutting room floor" screenshots -

Fourth Sceptre Hall, a prestigious and exclusive restaurant the player will have to visit to get in contact with a certain character - diplomacy, intimidation, deception, and raw violence are all options.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10680698/Pictur ... ceptre.jpg

The mansion/home of the player's uncle, the first interior environment in the game, and a base for the player, featuring equipment storage and beds to rest in for healing injuries (insta-healing kits are mostly out, you'll need to return home or at least find an inn).

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10680698/Pictur ... sion_1.jpg

On your level work.

Too late. Not sure what Ghostdog is smoking but he's wrong. I've watched your videos and let me tell you something: Your writing is bad. I mean bad bad. Really bad. So bad you make Bioware's writers look like subtle geniuses. The problem with your writing is simple: You're trying too damn hard to produce fancy/"skilled" writing instead of something that resembles sane English. Some people can write artistically and make it work. At the present, you are not one of them. Everything felt awkward and forced. Now, I've seen your posts in this thread and I can tell you can write perfectly well normally. So here's my advice: Just write normally. Imagine you were in whatever situation your character was in and just write whatever you would say/however you would respond if you were them. And when you're writing descriptions, etc. write it like you would say it when talking to someone. Imagine yourself saying it. Read it out loud if you need to.

The end result won't be brilliant, but it should be perfectly acceptable. It might even look good.

Beyond that, avoid avoid description text like "(The thug leader grins.)" or "(She looks aside, distant.)" Common rule of writing: "Show. Don't tell." This is twice as true when you can actually show it. So whenever you have a description like that, do the animation work instead. And you need cutscene/dialogue animations. This is not an option. The scenes look entirely too dumb and half-assed without it. Add a lipsynch to it, even if it means you have to record voice overs you'd never put in. These things will easily improve the quality of your cutscenes.

If you want you can also run some of your writing by here and we'll dissect it like a freshly killed carcass.

Does it feature tastefully done rape, though?

While I do agree the dialogue is a bit awkward in places, looks ok to me, environment design seems nice

I'll be watching this thread. Great work

Whats your inspiration for doing it?
I mean this project specifically? Grinding for "portofolio" for job applications?

I'm currently writing for another web site, so my progress on the mod has slowed down a bit lately, but I'm still working on it and have some progress screens to prove it, at least!

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10680698/Pictur ... ion1_1.jpg
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10680698/Pictur ... ion1_2.jpg

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10680698/Pictur ... lights.jpg

I should also note that recently I hit a fairly decent milestone in development, in that now I actually have an intro. It seems like a basic thing, and it is, but one major problem I've been facing without realising it is not having a concrete idea of how the game begins, how certain quests start, what knowledge the player will have going into the game, etc. While I still don't have a cutscene to set things up (not sure how I'll handle this yet), that security is something that will make improving the flow through the initial stages of the game much better and easier to manage.

Thanks for the tip there, appreciate it. I should note that the vast majority of the dialogue seen in those videos has been redone, and I've definitely been aiming for more "natural" dialogue. One of the hard things for me is to communicate personality through text, without it coming off as too forced. I fully admit I'm not much of a writer when it comes to fiction and storytelling, but I'm trying and learning as I go. One problem is that I don't have a proofreader or anyone like that, so stuff that looks good in my head doesn't end up looking so good to other people when read in-game. I plan to release a beta or some such to iron out bugs and other issues like dialogue and quest flow.

The problem is that I simply don't have voice acting (no access to actors, 10,000 line script by the end makes it beyond my means) or, often, adequate animation to communicate this sort of thing. It's a compromise I'm making in treating the game effectively like an old 2D CRPG by relying on descriptions rather than visuals, and it's a balance that's hard to strike, but the intent isn't to emulate modern games, since I simply can't rival those production values. There are some Dragon Age mods which use voice acting, but the price you pay in those is (aside from bad voice-acting), a lack of choice and consequence, simplified dialogue trees, and so on. I'm going for depth and detail, not presentation.

Sure. Here's some of Errol's new dialogue I've come up with after losing most of my content in that one system explosion a couple months back.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/10680698/Pictur ... s_pain.jpg

Dissect away!

Basically this, but also my own enjoyment. What can I say, bitches got to get paid, and game development is something I'd love to do. Have to start somewhere, and unfortunately it's pretty hard to get a job in game development without prior experience.

Is it possible to make the convo camera go overhead like in Baldur's Gate? That should help the old school feel you want as well as avoiding the uncanny valley with those faces staring blanky.

Also do you have any advice for writing dialogue trees?

Yes, it's possible to do this, and something I've considered... problem is the game isn't really played from an overhead perspective so it might even be more jarring to have the camera back up every time a conversation starts.

For starters, you always have to ask, what do I want to accomplish with a conversation? What sorts of dialogue options are the most obvious to give the player, so that it doesn't feel like any information is missing? You need to make sure that everything you give the player makes sense, has a purpose of some sort (even if it's just fleshing out the world, story and characters), etc. At the same time, recognise all players have the same play style, so you will need to provide "pathways" through conversations that lead to the same information but may take drastically different ways to get there, to the point where certain completely different sides of characters might come out as a result. Also, I always try my best to make sure players have reasonable options to skip things while still getting the necessary information across.

Always force yourself to interrogate your own plots and characters, chances are if you can find problems in them then players will be far more relentless and will suspect something is wrong if you seem to be denying them information by avoiding certain dialogue topics etc. Obviously you're going to be limited by what you can reasonably create, but if you nail the most obvious stuff and anticipate the "problem points" in dialogue you shouldn't have too much trouble.

There are some technical issues that can get in the way of writing dialogue. These are very dependent on the game - in Dragon Age you are limited to six dialogue options per node, and you want to keep the line length under control, so I have to be efficient and break things up as appropriate, and anticipate situations where I may have more than six lines available. Occasionally this can result in filler lines like "So, I was thinking..." which then conditionally jump to another dialogue section, but you tend to notice this in most other games as well if you look for it - chances are they're going to stand out a lot more to you than to the player. Another issue is I'm limited to 200 characters per line, which means that efficiency is key... and also means sometimes that breaking up lines into two is the only way to go.

Finally, I know a lot of people give flak to games where multiple dialogue choices lead to the same response, but this in itself isn't a bad thing and is great for managing larger conversations, unless it leads to a lack of real choices. Ultimately you're probably going to want to end up with one or two endings to most conversations, with the pathways I mentioned above leading to those outcomes, but you'll also want to convey certain information to the player. In these cases it's usually best to simply loop back to the other dialogue lines if you can, which saves a lot of time. How to handle the player's potential approaches, though? It doesn't make a whole lot of sense for an NPC to speak the same way whether I've intimidated or persuaded him/her, of course, so what I like to do is add "bridging" lines which show the NPC's reaction, but then transition back into the other dialogue as naturally as possible; without voice acting this is easier, since the transition can occur in the player's imagination rather than through the performance of the actor. Here's an example:

[Persuade] Tell me what you know. Please, it's important.
-----> Oh, well, alright, I suppose I can let you in on it...
---------->Well, you see, last evening, I heard a terrible crash out in the street!
[Intimidate] I don't want to play your games, fool. Start talking, or I start stabbing.
----->You... you wouldn't! Oh, I... very well, I'll tell you what I know, just leave me be.
---------->Well, you see, last evening, I heard a terrible crash out in the street!
[Cunning] That can't have been all. Your story doesn't add up.
------> Er... well... Aye, I suppose you've got me in a bind, haven't you? Well, alright, since you figured me out...
---------->Well, you see, last evening, I heard a terrible crash out in the street!

Obviously writing full dialogue trees for all three of these routes would be ridiculous and unnecessary, and since the player is going to end up being given choices by the end on how to behave no matter what, it doesn't make sense to try to tailor every single response to the player's past actions. Ultimately this can result in a bit of schizophrenia (player is nice, then makes death threats, NPC acts as if terrified all along), but it's a better alternative than writing four conversations for every NPC, and good writing goes a long way towards minimising these issues.

COOL STORY BRO

Okay, fuck you too.

No I meant that was some good advice, I just use that term for when I like something

Apologies

In every single instance I've seen people using the term, it's been as a way of dismissing something they feel is tl;dr. I wouldn't even mind you saying it that much if you hadn't asked for it in the first place.

Still, apology accepted if it wasn't intentional. Knee-jerk reaction on my part.

Yeah sorry about that, guess I need to remember that not everyone has an encyclopaedic knowledge of me.

Still, project looks good, hope you keep us updated

Then go post some writing that's bothering you, what's bothering you, and what you're trying to do, so we might help.

I meant record/"voice act" it yourself. It can be total shit. The only point is to get the automatic lipsynch animation and then get rid of the voice-overs. This isn't something that needs 100 attempts to sound right. Record it once, and you have your animation.

You can even use the text-to-speech synthesizer and use those lipsynch animations. Even that would beat this.

Go learn. You're making a portfolio after all. (Codex needs a captain obvious emote.) Sucking isn't going to impress them.

Wrong engine. If you wanted to make your 3D RPG have just text-heavy descriptions like an old-school 2D RPG you should have chosen an engine more suited to that, like Age of Decadence does. If you're using the Dragon Age engine, this is not an option: your cutscenes will suck horribly if you don't animate. Lines like "(The thug leader turns to you.)" don't say, "I am making a stylistic choice for old-school text descriptions." They say, "Holy shit I was too lazy to do any animation work and left you with these half-assed placeholders instead."

You don't need to be brilliant, there are stock animations you can use, and I'm sure animating stuff like "(She turns her head to the side, distant.)" isn't going to kill you. You can even have these descriptions with bad animations if you want. Just make sure you actually... animate. Something.

First, I'd skip from "An arrangement?" straight to the second line. The in-between part made no sense to me. He sounds like an idiot trusting you that much. You don't need it. Next, he's too wordy. Get to the point more. A bit of indirection is fine, but this is overkill.

Yeah, that's definitely the Bioware school of fake C&C for you, where you have 3 different skill checks which all get you the exact same result. Sorry, but the only person you're doing favors with this kind of design is yourself. It's not hard to make some minor variations where you have him ramble a bit more if persuaded, get to the point if intimidated, and give you the details if you detected his bullshit. You can loop back and jump to other dialogues, but a dialogue branch like this:

Code:

        Skill Checks
        /     |     \
       /      |      \
      /       |       \
 One Line  One Line One Line
      \       |       /
       \      |      /
        \     |     /
       Exact Same Story

Is pretty much the definition of fake C&C. Also, those skill-based dialogue lines are kinda bad: the first two ask/demand that he fills you in and the third has you astutely comment that there's more he hasn't said. It makes the cunning check look retarded. I'd sooner turn it into something like:

• [Persuade] If there's anything you haven't told me, I need to know. It's important.
• [Intimidate] You better not be lying or "forgetting" anything important here...
• [Cunning] And what about [x]? He couldn't've simply [y]. Tell me what really happened.

More C&C will not even give you any of these options to begin with if your character was too retarded (Low cunning fail.) to notice that he might be bullshitting you. Good C&C sets flags to remember the impression you made on him. Small stuff overall, but it makes your decisions matter more.

Oh, I see what you mean. Yeah, that had occurred to me, but I'm not sure if that's better than having no facial animation. Honestly, it kind of comes down to preference. I'll definitely consider it.

Oh, I can do more complex animation, and have, in a few different cutscenes. Problem is that doing this extensively for conversations is a lot more work than more select scenes, and unfortunately BioWare's conversation editor does not allow for very complex dialogue animation compared to actual cutscene files. It's worth noting that my conversations do have animation, and they do often sync up with the text - but I just include the text to communicate subtlety that normally you would get in voice acting. See the second part of this video for an example of what the more developed conversations look like:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxuccGsW0Ys

Once again, I do have animation going, it's just not quite as extensive as what you see in the Dragon Age campaign (which could change as I put more polish into things). The fact is, though, that I do eventually want to release this in some form. I have to prioritise, and choice and consequence, lots of environments to explore, and story all take priority over stuff like dialogue animation. Once the other stuff's done, I'll worry about polish.

I understand what you mean here, but I guess I'm trying to communicate Errol's personality a little bit - he's not some generic thug, but he has a little bit of, er, well not class, but definitely is a sociable sort of person. And plus, he has nothing to lose by sending you off to your death to fight the Drakes. It's not like he's exposing himself unduly either - the guards simply do not have the manpower to police the slums, and in fact are actively under orders to basically ignore it at this point.

What I might do, though, is go in and switch up the lines - rather than have the player say "get to the point", I'll have the shorter ones as the default and then the player can ask for more information instead. That's something I probably should have done from the beginning, I realise, but in my defence, this was some of the first dialogue I wrote after I basically lost everything a while back.

I definitely have conversations which can go in completely different directions depending upon how the player responds. For instance, a guard you meet at the beginning of the game that hails you down can end up offering the support of the city guard in helping to find the player's missing uncle, he'll offer consolation if the player literally chooses to break down in front of him ("oh, it was so terrible" etc.); alternately he can be persuaded to fuck off, or lied to, in which case he simply leaves and the conversation goes much quicker as a result, but if the player wants to report the disappearance, he or she will have to visit some of the other guards. Just one example of this.

To be fair, that was just a quick and dirty example. I didn't think much about the cunning choice. :p

I have many instances of characters' moods being affected by the way player acts in dialogue and in quests. Every major NPC has an "angry" flag, and some have a "happy" flag, both of which will lead to the NPC either completely recoiling (i.e. merchant will no longer talk to you or even do business if you insult him), while others will lead to new quest opportunities, i.e. if you butter someone up via some skill checks, or have skill in stealth/poison/etc., you'll be given additional information, the greeting you receive will be more enthusiastic, that sort of thing. You're able to get certain major NPCs killed, or arrested for their illegal activities, you can blackmail them, etc., and this will have an impact later on when you might need their help with something.

And again, I hate to qualify all this stuff, but... well, still in development, still trying to prioritise things, still trying to work out the exact structure of the game, still building environments, etc. I do want to reinforce that I'm aware of the stuff you're pointing out, but I really appreciate you taking the time to interrogate what I'm doing all the same. I want this thing to actually turn out well, and brutal critique is the best way even though it leads to a lot of "this sucks, scrap it, stop it" that can be a bit painful to hear.