Well, it took a little work, but I finally managed to get the cast together for a little party and to pose for a Christmas card photo. So a Very Happy Holiday from all of us here at The Sanctum! 🙂
And thanks to TarotRedhand for his NWN Map Mats Ice Sculpture Christmas Card Kit!
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you as well! Unfortunately, my artistic talent is almost non-existent, so I only have good wishes for you in this season of joy.
Hello! Hope everything is settling down nicely for you.
How is it going with SOA update?
Thanks for asking, Aderyn! Yes, everything is settling down quite nicely. The new job is terrific, and I’ve actually been able to get back to doing software development again. Our new place is larger and much nicer, and we’re getting very comfortable. 🙂
I’m just finishing up the structural changes I had to make to accommodate the two new races: the Hellmen and the Earthen. It turned out to be a huge amount of work, and quite a bit more than I expected. All the new encounters, creature blueprints and items are done now, though, and just need to be tested and tweaked. Among other things, the battle against the (now Hellman) army at the end is going to look and play very differently as a result.
(One tidbit I’ll share: General Y’thra can now be either a male or female character, and will be set to the opposite of Robin’s gender. That’s to make it so that I can emphasize the threat of making Robin his/her personal slave consistently for all of the player’s RP choices.)
I’ve also just merged all of the Sanctum-specific custom content into a single hak in preparation for one final “2DA merge” with the new CEP 2.4 and Project Q 1.5 content. That’s my next major task. After that, I need to re-write a lot of the lore to be consistent with introduction of the new races, and continue adding new lore as well. (For example, The Legend of the Defender is already in as a new book.)
After that I need to finish tweaking the new treasure system, which (apart from giving out an awfully large number of Glittering Necklaces on my last playtest yesterday), is mostly in place now and seems to be working quite well. At that point I think Sanctum 1 will be ready for a beta test.
The update for Sanctum 2 will be easier in some respects, and harder in others. The easier part is that many of the changes needed in chapter 1 either don’t apply to chapter 2 (like the treasure system), or (like the Earthen) are already done now. The real (but fun!) challenge in chapter 2 will be re-building the flying areas to use the new “Sanctum Flying Skyscape” tileset.
That’s great to hear! I’m really excited! Let me know if I can be of any help!
Thanks, Aderyn! I’ll definitely need playtesters, and fairly soon — by the end of the month, if everything goes according to plan. 🙂