Thursday, May 31, 2007

Crisis

Having a minor crisis of faith about the module at the moment. It's due to several reasons. I'm finding getting back to building slow and quite difficult - and working on long conversations that ultimately only take up a minutes gameplay makes it difficult to feel like things have progressed much. Take yesterday - all i got done were two speak triggers and two-and-a-half conversations, and two group scripts. Oh, and an hour playing with an NPC stats until just ending up deciding they were best as they were before i changed them. For a days work, thats a bit depressing. However, its part of the problem of the story-based mod....

Another issue is my nature to question what I've done and to be quite critical of it. I'm worried these confusions are coming across, particularly as I write the conversations - some I'm worried don't flow too well and maybe my confusion is coming across in them. And all this leads on to me worrying that I'm wasting time (a considerable amount of time given how long developing takes) on somethign that wont be well received or match the vision I have.

But that's enough emo-angst from me for now; build through it, publish and be damned! Now on to Maruts. They are inevitables, creatures of logic hailing from the Clockwork Nirvana of Mechanus. Fantasy robots with specific missions. The Maruts punish those who cheat death - their motto is 'Everything must die eventually'. And as you have just risen from the dead, you've popped up on their radar! I've made Marut Alpha and Marut Omega using a tinted/scaled iron golem as the base, and given them their fists of thunder and lightning weapons. I plan on these being recurring 'villains' - retreating back to Mechanus to plan a new attack. I'll pop up some screenshots later. I've always like dth econcept of inevitables as the ultimate planar lawkeepers, and am looking forward to scripting the encounters

3 comments:

Lorft said...

Conversations, are always my bugbear also. I enjoy reading good writing, but struggle to get the zest into my own dialogs. I usually end up re-editing each tree many times over.

What I have found helps personally is breaking things up. Inserting another task like a bit of scripting, or terrain building has helped to fight the over-editing urge, and sometimes provided me with a new perspective.

Lorft

Zach Holbrook said...

I agree that breaking things up is crucial. Also, running through the conversations in-game after you haven't looked at them for a while gives you good perspective--so mixing things up is a good thing from an editing standpoint, too.

Wyrin said...

yeah, i think a lot of the issue is me just doing conversations the past few times i've been able to build - i need to get some area building done too to break it up. But dialogue is the main thing missing so far, so it's a case of gritting my teeth...