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

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It's a decent idea, but I've never been a fan of "codex entries from nowhere", i.e. you click on a statue or a painting and then you get a codex entry from a book. I prefer to use gameplay, conversations etc. to demonstrate personalities.

EDIT: Been making a bunch of new unique items. Maybe I should sell them as DLC.

Minor update: I have a job interview with a social games dev coming up shortly and there is a chance, judging by what they've said so far, that I could get the job. This will mean both slowing progress on Thirst as well as moving, because it's too far to commute. It'd be a pretty big change in my life and I'm both eager and terrified, but I apologise in advance if this means that Thirst ends up being scheduled for 2017.

I SUGGEST finishing Thirst and making it a part of your portfolio would be a more beneficial in a longtime
[Casts a Suggestion spell]

I concur with Shadenuat. If you get the job, then don't abandon the mod, finish it in your free time.

I fully intend to do so. It's too extensive that I can't just go drop it. I'm just saying, I won't be able to spend 6-10 hours a day on it if I do end up getting the position.

Thanks for your support, guys.

sea
You're a smart guy, hard-working and still fairly young. If you don't mind me asking, do you have any ideal career path planned out here? It's something I've been thinking about - on a hypothetical level, mostly - how I would enter the gaming industry in this day and age.

I don't have an ideal career path. I want to get into game design or some aspect of it, like more specifically level design. From there, who knows - more production-related roles, etc. At this point I'm too young to have a clearly defined idea of exactly what about game development I love or how I would work in a professional environment.

I can say right now that getting into the games industry is hard - after all, I've been trying hard at it for over a year, and while admittedly I've been a bit picky (I don't think I'm willing to move halfway across the world for a job at this point in my life), the fact is that the industry is downsizing and there are a lot of people out there who are also looking for positions who are more talented than you are. Your charisma has to come across better than anything else because that's what will get you hired - the belief that you can work well and get along with others. But, the value of getting a first job can't be overstated, because that professional experience is what will harden you and give you a chance elsewhere.

Also, maybe it goes without saying, but don't be naive. You will almost certainly not be making your dream games at any time in your life, unless you get very, very lucky. Content yourself with the fact that you might enjoy the game development process itself- if all you're around to do is to realize your own fantasies, that's the wrong mindset to have. Making games is a job and a business, and you are working for someone else - that means doing what they want/expect and playing by their rules.

Last, the only real way to get hired is to have a demo reel. Make games, even tiny ones. Nobody cares how much you love games because everyone says they have a passion for the medium. Actually demonstrate it by showing you have the ability to put your rhetoric into practice. That's what I've been trying to do - unfortunately, working with the Dragon Age Toolset probably isn't as relevant these days as it would have been a few years ago. Even if you work with X tools, always try to stay on the tech curve by familiarizing yourself with the popular tools, like Unity and Unreal - you may not be an expert by any means, but just basic familiarity goes a long way.

Of course, if I could fully practice what I preach here, I'd probably have a hundred people banging down my door right now.

Have you considered joining up with a Kickstarter project? Seems to me that might be a good way to "break in" nowadays.

Question: how do you guys feel about follower influence checks that could potentially leave you without a follower before the endgame? I have a good place to put one but I'm not sure if it'd be a great idea to deprive the player of a valuable party member for potentially significant parts of the game. The check wouldn't be extremely high (probably around neutral to 20 influence points) but considering there are opportunities to lose big chunks of influence with this person, I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people lost him/her. It makes good sense from a story perspective, on the other hand.

Eh... maybe. Probably too unreliable, though, and I probably don't have the rapport/cred to really get people to take a risk on me when they're already set on making these things themselves.

sea
Depends. The bigger Kickstarters probably need to contract out a lot of work, don't they? Though I suppose in most cases it's mainly confined to art and music.

Not without a prototype (almost alpha build).

sea Maybe ITS will start a new project soon you could help out with

When it comes to keeping NPC's personality and giving him/her choices to do what makes sense character-wise, for me everything goes. I'm biased when it's about freedoms of poor NPC's against player's feel of security
IIRC combat is't very difficult in Thirst, I've finished City Guard with 2 thieves and a warrior, and with your checks everywhere to skip combat, it would't bother me.

Interesting. I'll try foreshadowing it a little bit more here and there, so it doesn't completely come out of left field for players.

Anyway, I didn't get the jorb (the guy claimed I actually would have got it if the company itself hadn't been so new and in need of more experienced talent), so for now I'll be able to focus on finishing Thirst up. From there, who knows... Unity is popular these days, isn't it?

I don't like "deception" in games unless there is the option to evade the deception once you detect it. There is little as annoying as a designer thinking they are clever enough to deceive the player and then failing to give the player the ability to react to the deception when they see it coming, forcing them to play through some tired and predictable sequence.

I also think NPC deception falls flat very easily unless the characters are well written and likeable. You will probably find that many NPCs just aren't interesting or developed well enough for the player to care about the deception. Some characters I remember interacting with in games I've wanted them to hurry up and get to the deception part as they were so annoying I didn't want them around any more.

It's not deception. The follower just decides whether to leave his current occupation and join the player, or leave the player. Depending on other related choices, this can lead to the follower turning against the player.

It's something I'm kind of experimenting with a bit - followers don't really have any obligations to follow the PC unless the PC has something to actually offer them (information, leadership, etc.). Everyone in the party has motives, and the reason this follower leaves or turns is because the motive for sticking around has run out. I just don't know if it will be a bit weird or anti-climactic in a 5-10 hour mod vs. a 40 hour retail game (i.e. NWN2, KotOR II), especially because I only have 3 followers for simplicity's sake and the player can't get that functionality through another party member.

It's interesting you brought up deception, though. It's easy to say "I saw the plot twist coming a mile away" but it's much, much harder to judge that sitting on the other side of the fence. For all I know my story will come across as bumbling and stupidly obvious, or just to genre-savvy players, or maybe some stuff comes completely out of the blue. I think sometimes developers both under- and over-estimate how smart players are about piecing together plot details. Even so, for every player who appreciates your subtlety, there are 50 who just end up confused.

Well if they're just deciding to leave because they have nothing to do, then you should only really implement that if the player has the opportunity to do something to encourage them to stay, even if it means a simple wage or something like that. If the player is accustomed to playing with companions - especially if it is to the point where they have built their characters with the party structure in mind - then it will be very hard to justify the design decision of making the NPC want to leave and not giving players the ability to stop them. If you don't at least give water-tight in-game reasons for why the NPC is leaving - and before the big climax at the end, no less - then you will probably only annoy the players.

As for it being very difficult to determine the predictability of your own plot, this is very true. This is another reason why RPGs are good; if you are worried about there being predictability then you introduce a scenario which separates players into two polar categories - people who see the twist coming and then want to act upon those observations, and people who don't see the twist coming. The scenario needs to be structured so that for people who don't expect the twist to come, the extra option being offered doesn't actually make sense to follow without that information or expectation of what is going to happen next. It is easier said than done of course, but twists are generally like this in fiction. It is very easy to alienate people when you get caught up in the false perception of your own brilliance, and it just happens that games are the only medium that let's you solve that problem, so make use of it.

This is good feedback - thanks. I'll have to think some more on this. Maybe the problem lies less in the question itself and more in the execution - more dialogue to help justify things, more signs that influence has an effect on the game, etc.

In Thirst, everyone has their own motives, and the player's quest is relatively insignificant - and unlike those same 40-hour epics, the followers are only really hanging out with you for a few days to a week, canonically speaking - so it makes more sense that they'd see the relationship less as a grand fellowship and more as a means to an end. The circumstances the followers are met in - all related to the main quest, all involved in it by association, rather than "just bumped into" like many other RPGs - also makes this seem more plausible.

I mean, I don't have any delusions that I have great characters that people are going to love, or a great story or anything like that - I'm more concerned with questions like "does this feel natural/organic" and "does this make sense in context." Sure, I'm looking to elicit a bit of dramatic tension, but I don't want it to be something I impose on the player either in your typical BioWarian fashion.

I understood as it was't about deception, it was about keeping motives of joinable NPC's straight and explaining them to the player. Virgil is all that magic-dabbling person with really good manners who would probably be interested in spirit-thing happening, while Aneza and Errol not so much. Aneza's interest was in meeting her sister, and Errol's in mercenary affairs (maybe he can be persuaded with gold, like Korgan Bloodaxe from BioWar when they actually were thinking about why's and how's). Then again demo does't go that far in fleshing companions so it's hard to judge.

At least I know my characters are readable to people as far as motives go.

Think I've got this stuff sorted out now. There are actually now two instances where you can lose companions before the endgame. However, I've added various persuasion options to keep them on board. Unless you've really, really made mistakes then you shouldn't actually have them leave, but I think it serves as a good warning that the influence system is indeed watching you.

The good news, I guess, is that I am officially now onto developing endgame content (not counting tweaks and bug fixes obviously). I'm not sure what direction would be best yet, either some sort of huge dungeon area that would take me weeks to finish, or something simpler and more straightforward... probably a mix of both.

Minor progress update:

The endgame is getting there. Due to hard drive issues, progressed slowed a bit, but it's back in order. There are three main outcomes that depend on your previous actions, and each of them, while taking place partially in the same locations, each provides a different quest - the theme of all of them is pretty much the same but the means is quite different. One quest involves a kidnapping and interrogation, for instance, while another involves searching for evidence in a certain area.

They aren't the longest and don't really have much C&C stuff, but because I need to have all the quests end more or less at the same point, that'd be very hard to implement. However, each of the paths provides different endings (I'll do a slideshow Fallout-style if I can figure out how to make it work).

After those quests, the final stretch of the game will be two dungeon areas (or, I guess, one large dungeon broken up into two levels). I don't want to expand it unduly with lots of crappy filler combat, but there will be some challenging battles in it that will depend on your previous actions in the game.

I can't give an ETA because creating those quests plus two all-new dungeons is still weeks if not months of work, and that doesn't count the inevitable bug fixing and tweaking I'll need to do throughout. But, all that said, I think I'm making fairly good progress and if I can keep things up, hopefully the full version will be released by a reasonable date.

If it is't a bother, could you tell a bit about management of yourself when you are working on module. Do you write any "vision" documents, draw any schemes or maps? Do you have a timetable? Or do you just sit before editing program until you do something and then collapse and hit keyboard with your head.

Mostly the latter. I have slowly refined the idea for the project over the last year and have had a very good idea of where it is headed for much of that time, although I introduce ideas as I go - for example, specific details about characters may change, or their precise role in the story. Without going into spoilers, the general plot has been set in stone for quite a while now (the themes, the characters, the city, etc.) but the order of events, motivations etc. have all been quite fluid.

There is a lot of stuff in the endgame that basically just came to me on the spot, and makes sense given the rest of the game (with a few minor changes here and there), but that's how just about all game development is. Design documents are important and it's good to have a precise idea of what you are doing, but you will always see new stuff that's cool to develop as you go - nothing wrong with making changes when and where they make sense.

Specifically with regards to workflow, I started out very unstructured and have since become more ordered and disciplined about it. A lot of organisation, naming convention, etc. has changed over time, and many environments and characters that I've worked on have been thrown away or repurposed for one reason or another. Now I know more or less precisely what I need since the end is in sight, so that will be less of an issue, although even just today I added a pretty interesting element to a scenario that poses some new challenges for development. That's just how it is.

Random work in progress shot of the semi-final dungeon area:



Still trying to figure out the right colours/atmosphere/etc. Also the lightmapper really, really sucks at handling the cave models it seems, ugly lightmaps everywhere unfortunately and I can only do so much to hide them.

Also, progress update on what I've been doing:

1) The main story is about 90% complete. All major quest lines have been finished and I'm basically just figuring out the endgame right now. Getting the different diverging plot threads to fit together into something coherent is definitely a challenge, but I'm working on it. The endgame content itself will include two new large dungeon areas, and potentially a few more quests.

2) Random encounters have been added. These aren't actually random, but scripted to occur based on plot progress and what sides you've taken. Some are generic and simple, while others might be difficult fights. There are about ten in total. Should make traveling around the city less monotonous.

3) Companion conversations have been added. Now you can talk to everyone and get a better feel for their motives and personalities.

4) Influence has been added for companions. Certain situations, including the endgame and a few key moments during other quests, will prompt influence checks. In these situations, companions can be permanently lost if influence with them is low enough, although they can still be persuaded to stick around (most of the time). Influence is earned or lost for completing quests and encounters - and keeping every person in your party happy is difficult, because they will like or dislike different things.

5) Mildrar's questline has been completely finished, as mentioned above. It's about as long as the other ones, maybe even a bit longer, and has the most traditional dungeon-crawling out of them all. It's also probably the most directly plot-relevant.

6) Several quests have new options based on feedback provided by players, as well as overhauled dialogue to help better tie events and characters together.

7) Several new side-quests have been added.

8) An optional combat arena featuring some very challenging battles.

9) New items have been added. There are about 25-30 unique items in total and many of them are quite powerful. Some are purchased in stores, while others are carried and dropped by bosses.

10) Shops have been changed significantly. Most will only accept certain types of goods, and their inventories have been rebalanced a bit.

11) Injuries have been made much more severe. This was always a failing of the Dragon Age rules, I felt, so now falling in battle will hamper you much more severely. To counter this, beds have been added to the City Guard and Criminal HQs that will let you rest up and recover from injuries.

12) Last, several environments have been visually updated a bit - more vegetation and props, etc.

It's at the point where the demo is looking like it will have 1/2 the final content instead of 2/3, based on all the bits and pieces I've added. There's also a lot of smaller tweaks, like adding significantly more companion dialogue in existing conversations.

Wish I had your efficiency, really. Demo already has more than most of the story-driven mods for games like NWN or NWN2. I thought there will be final dungeon and ending.

Haha. Efficiency comes from lots and lots of learning and hundreds of wasted hours on bad content or stuff that ends up needing to be demolished and changed later. It's really just too much time and not enough life. If I started out with the same degree of knowledge I have now, this project would be long done.