In the comments on my post, “A New Face for Robin,” Michele asked: “When is the next installment coming out? I’ve been checking up on it ever since I played #1 last summer.”
Michele, thanks for your interest in the sequel! Here’s a little more information about the progress of “Sanctum of the Archmage II – The Miracle Worker.”
Players of Chapter I may remember that I gave a pessimistic estimate (“sometime in 2007,” I think I wrote) about when I might be able to have Chapter II available. Unfortunately, I’m more or less still on schedule with those expectations — but my plans for Chapter II have also expanded significantly in scope since then. As I describe on the Sanctum Projects Website, I’m now planning to release Chapter II as a series of three short modules or “Acts” for Neverwinter Nights 2. I’m hoping to be able to release Act I, titled “The Alliance,” sometime in the late summer of 2007.
The main reason for the delay is because of the demands of my “real life.” Currently, I’m juggling a full-time job in quantum optics with part-time coursework for a graduate degree in physics. What little spare time I have left is split between my writing projects (including the modules), and of course spending time with my wife. Unfortunately, that means that during the academic year (between September and May), my ability to spend focused time working on the modules is very limited. I wrote Sanctum I in my spare time over the course of a year, from August 2005 through July 2006, and I’ve been using more or less the same estimate for how long it will take me to develop the first act of the sequel.
That timetable has been complicated by my decision to build Sanctum II in NWN2 rather than NWN1 — which means, among other things, having to learn a largely different and much more complicated toolset. And it has also been complicated by the fact that my plans for the sequel have become much more ambitious in the past few months. I’ve been plotting it on my drives to work using a new attachment that turns my iPod into a voice recorder, and I now have the basic storyline for all of Chapter II entirely worked out. The good news is that it has now grown into a fairly extensive and complex plot that will support a somewhat longer sequel trilogy — but each Act of which I should take less time to build than the full sequel that I had originally planned.
All I can say is, wow! This is great news, indeed! I really enjoyed Sanctum when I played it and now I’m eagerly waiting for the sequel in NWN2.
My one question is, how will the player character and his/hers unique equipment and items port over to the new platform?
Keep up the great work, mate!
-R
Ridge, thanks for your comment, and for your enthusiasm about the project!
About setting up your character for the sequel: the first area of Sanctum II includes a "character configuration interview" that will ask you a series of questions about how you played Sanctum I (or allow you to quickly select a set of "default" choices). This will allow you to restore your character’s level, important possessions, special abilities, henchman relationships, and so on, to as closely match what they were at the end of Sanctum I as the slightly different rules of NWN2 will allow. If you create a NWN2 character to play with that has the same statistics as your NWN1 charcter, then for all intents and purposes he will be the same (aside from the appearance differences that unavoidably go with the new engine).