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 Sunjammer, 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.

[Linked Image]


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.


Last edited by Windemere; 12/11/17 08:49 PM.

DOS2 Mods: Happily Emmie After and The Noisy Crypt

Steam Workshop
Nexus Mods