Now that the spring semester is finally over, I’m ready to start turning some serious attention to the task of building Sanctum II. As I’ve written previously, I have the three acts of the sequel pretty much plotted out, and I have some very ambitious plans for the romance plot as well. I’ve been tinkering with the toolset on the initial areas to get the hang of it, and I’ve imported and fixed up most of the important items, as well as the extensive utility scripts that I used in Sanctum I. Now I’m ready to start hacking away at it in earnest!

The thing I’ve been dreading most is the task of area creation. From everything I’ve heard (and my own limited experience has been consistent with this as well), creating areas in NWN2 is a royal pain, requiring much more time and effort than it did in NWN1. However, I’ve learned an interesting tip from some other developers that has made me a bit more sanguine about this prospect: using a terrain tool (such as L3DT) to create realistic terrain, and then importing it into NWN2 using YATT. I’ve heard that using these tools can dramatically speed up the process of area creation, so downloading and familiarizing myself with them is my main building project for the next week.