Nightmares in Rivertown: Dev Diary 1- Area Creation

Following the development of my NWN mod "Nightmares in Rivertown", I've decided to do a sort of Developer Diary to document my progress. Hopefully it will be worth following along.

The first thing I do when creating a mod is always to sit down and plan it out. First, I write down the plot on a piece of paper, then detail how many and what kinds of areas I will need to make. The characters, dialogue, custom items and actual quest lines all come afterwards, but for me at least, I need to have the areas down first.

The areas are the setting for the story. Sometimes they can be dark and gloomy, sometimes they are bright and peaceful. Bioware's aurora toolset gives great tools to mold the setting of your adventure, from the shape of the landscape to the color of the sky, to the background music. (I believe the tracks are composed by Jeremy Soule, my favorite videogame composer. This is the only game I've ever played where I never had to turn off the music and put iTunes on in the background. There are really some superb tracks.)

The story for my adventure revolves around the small town of Rivertown, so logically that is the first area I started with. I wanted it to have the feel of a small rural community, with a few houses, shops and an Inn of course. The community would be sustained by farmers who live around the town center. Then I plopped a major road cutting through the town to show that it is not alone in this world, and other adventures lie outside its boundries.

Since Rivertown is the first area the player visits, (I plan on having the PC spawn there, just outside the Inn) it is important to set the mood right away. I did this by making it night time and having a dark green fog obscure the landscape. This makes all but the closest features seem like dark shapes, and along with some dark, foreshadowing music sets a mysterious and creepy atmosphere.

Rivertown

The fog makes the town seem mysterious

The outlying farmland was next. This was to be a large open space with fields, and less mysterious since... its a farm. I put several farms with a river dividing them in a large area. To show a sense of division from the townsfolk, I walled off one of the farms- the one with the granaries and storehouses. This may come into play later in the adventure.

Farms

After the farms were done I created the Wrymling Hills area, where there is a quarry that miners from town work in for stone, metal and minerals. This quarry will also be the scene of most of the mod's action, since it is one of the mod's two dungeons.

The Wyrmling Hills... not a very friendly place

The heart of the quarry- Rivertown's biggest mining operation

A misty area of the quarry- I plan on using this for a creepy encounter like with spiders or something.

Only about half of the area of the quarry is actual mine. The other half is a Kobold enclave that the miners had stubled upon and tried (unsuccessfully) to block off with a door. To move the plot forward, the player will have to rescue a certain hostage from the Kobolds' clutches, which means fighing their way through the mines and the enclave.

Ancient pilliars and a Wyrmling skeleton... no wonder they're called the Wyrmling Hills.

Part of the Kobold villiage.

I've also had time to create a few commoners for the town. Take a look:

"You're probably all wondering why I've called you here today..."

There are still a few areas to be done, mostly interiors. Main characters, farmers and miners need to be created, encounters and traps for the quarry need to be set up, and all the conversations and quests need to be done. Wow, that seems like a lot of work.

This might take a while... but I think it will be worth it.

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A new NWN project

Its been a while since I've even played Neverwinter Nights, but it has never left my hard drive. After I went on that ghost tour in SC with my girlfriend, one of the stories there suddenly sparked an idea for an adventure that had to be told through a NWN mod.

It's about a Hag, a mythical creature who flies around at night and gives people horrible nightmares, and during the daytime assumes the form of an ordinary person. In the adventure, the player will have to find a way to find and defeat the Hag that plagues a small town, before it erupts into civil war sown by fear and distrust.

I've made a few mods before, my biggest one for NWN is called A Pirate's Tale: Quest for the Pearl. No it doesn't have anything to do with Pirates of the Carribean, it is my own creation. It is not very well made, and needs a lot of work. I keep meaning to go back and clean it up, but it would require more effort that I am willing to commit right now.

I made a mod for NWN2 also, the first french mod actually, called "Le Vol de Mort" or "The Flight from Death" in the english version. Yes, I know a little french, but its not very good which became apparent when people laughed at the language in the mod. It was a short little hack n slash adventure, and I meant it to be a jumping- off point for a series, but I never got around to actually making the rest. Since this was one of the first mods to come out for NWN2, it got scooped up and included on a CD that was put out by German magazines PC Games & PC Action.

I also created a small adventure, more of a side quest really, the same mod for both NWN and NWN2. This was based on a PnP quest I had written, just discovering the secrets of an old crypt. It was short but solid.

The Flight From Death took about a solid week of work for me, but that included learning the toolset. (which is atrocious for NWN2 by the way)

This is why I'm sticking to NWN original this time. I'm intimately familiar with the Aurora toolset, and already after one afternoon of work I've created most of the key areas, set up the transitions, and plotted out the story and the quests. All I need to do now is populate the world with some characters and items, write the dialogue and do the plot wizards, and I should be good. I am challenging myself this time around with adding a henchman, something I did for my NWN2 mod, but something I've never successfully done in regular NWN. I might even get really fancy and add a cutscene or two... who knows?

Who knows if this project will actually even come to fruition... I have so little free time... but one must have dreams...

Last night I saw Bruno, the new Sascha Baron Cohen movie... and I left the theater feeling dirty, like I had just been through a gay porno... except one that I had watched it with my girlfriend and her best friend. They enjoyed it a lot more than I did. There is like 5 minutes of just a penis wobbling around on the screen in that movie... so... unless you are gay and desperate, watch Bruno at your own risk. The few laughable parts are not nearly funny enough to warrant a reccomendation.

Other than that, I'm working this weekend and I've been chilling out to my friend's Aladdin soundtrack he lent me the last time we went frolfing. Good stuff. I remember having like my 8th birthday party and playing musical chairs to the soundtrack.

Go disney! Yeah childhood memories!

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