An Update on Sanctum 3

3 - Mission to Rayche

It’s been a while since my last blog post, so I just wanted to take a few minutes to say “Hi” and to give everyone a quick update on the progress of Sanctum 3.

I’ve finally gotten to the point where I can spend most of my spare time working on the next chapter, and I’m having a great time at it. It’s coming along so well that it’s actually exceeding my expectations, which I’d set pretty high for the project. I’m still aiming for a release sometime this summer, although it’ll be a couple of months yet before I know how well my progress is matching that goal.

One of the things I’ve done to help expedite the next release is to scale back the scope of Chapter 3, which as I’m now planning it will only cover the quest to ally with Rayche. I’d always intended the Rayche mission to be the most extensive and elaborate of the quests to form the alliance, and I think that will give the module a good starting point as well as a good point of closure. Now that I have most of the quests written out in detail I’m also realizing that it’s going to make a sizable module in its own right (and will certainly be much longer than Chapter 2 was).

It’ll also have a somewhat different design from my previous work. Chapter 1 and especially Chapter 2 were very linear, and had what I think was an unusual quest structure compared to most other modules. In Chapter 3, though, I’m planning a more non-linear plot with a more familiar adventuring quest style — but without compromising any of the story-driven focus that players have come to expect from the saga. The different quest threads will be thoroughly interwoven with the main plot, but they will also offer a lot more choice regarding which quests to do, in what order, and how they can be resolved. Indeed, I expect that it will be difficult to complete all of the available quests on any one playthrough (and impossible to see all the outcomes), which I hope will make Sanctum 3 an especially good module for replayability.

The Sanctum Team

AME, General, Sanctum: The Modules

Although I’ve been talking for a while now about my intent to finally get back to finishing Sanctum of the Archmage, circumstances have for some time had a habit of conspiring in one way or another to delay those plans. So I’m pleased to announce that I’ve recently made several decisions aimed at ending those delays, and at speeding up when the remaining chapters of the saga will be available.

The first step was finally completing my graduate work. I had gone back to college part time for a second Master’s degree (in physics) several years ago, but it had ended up dragging on longer than I had expected. Sanctum chapters 1 and 2 were actually built in the spare time I could find between (some very challenging) classes, which is one reason for the slow pace of the saga’s development. I finally graduated earlier this year, and that’s started to allow me more time for other projects again.

The second step was one that I initiated a few weeks ago, when I regretfully announced my resignation as Chairman of the Academy for Modding Excellence, effective at the end of 2009. Working with the AME, first as Vice-Chairman and then this year as Chairman, was a wonderful and fun experience that also allowed me to meet some really terrific people. Although I’ll be retaining my membership with the Academy, it will be with a much reduced workload that will allow me more time to work on my modules.

The third and most recent step, which I’m pleased to announce here publicly for the first time, is that I’ve decided to form a modding team to finish the Sanctum of the Archmage saga. I concluded that this would be a good idea for several (probably obvious) reasons, not the least of which is that my chances of being able to finish the modules in a reasonable amount of time would be significantly increased if I had some help. Since modding is beginning to move more and more in the direction now of team-based rather than individual work, I thought this would be a good time to make that transition myself.

I think this is especially true given the plans that I’ve hinted at in previous posts, but would now like to make official: that the final part of the Sanctum of the Archmage saga, The Alliance, will be developed in Bioware’s new CRPG, Dragon Age (or DA). Some of you may know that I was a member of the DA Toolset Beta team earlier this year, and participated in Bioware’s “DA Builder Event” this summer. These unfortunately also helped to delay my work on developing the next chapter; but they were good opportunities that I think will ultimately help me to improve as a modder and to make the series even better in the long run. Since it has a much more complex and powerful toolset than Neverwinter Nights, team development will probably be typical for modules developed for Dragon Age.

My plan for the Sanctum Team is to have two groups working on parallel development tracks. One group will be working on finishing the last two modules of Part II of the saga, “The Miracle Worker,” which will be in Neverwinter Nights and will use the fabulous new Project Q content. The second group will start development on the first act of Part III, “The Alliance,” in Dragon Age. It’s my hope that with these parallel development efforts going on simultaneously, that the end of Part II and beginning of Part III could be brought out without too much time between them.

It’s a fairly ambitious plan, and you can probably see why I’ll need to recruit a team of folks to work with to make it happen. So far, I’ve got four team members from the Neverwinter Nights community interested in the project (including myself), and I’m hoping to at least double that in the near future. The team will need folks with several different skill sets, from level builders to the voice actors that we’ll need for the Dragon Age modules. I’ll be in the role of lead writer and designer, and the prospect of working together to make an RPG with a group of really talented folks is one that I’m really looking forward to. 🙂

Add the Rayche Quest to the End of Sanctum 2?

2 - The Quest, 3 - Mission to Rayche

I posted this to the Sanctum 2 module page, and thought I’d post it on my blog as well.

Here’s a question for players. I’ve seen a number of criticisms and downvotes on Sanctum 2 recently for its short length and ending in the middle of a quest. I was planning to release Sanctum 3 as a new module with a new architecture using project Q, but setting all of that up is understandably taking some time. I could get the “Mission to Rayche” quest out much more quickly if I added it to the end of Sanctum 2, where most of the necessary infrastrucure is already in place. I did the same thing for the Wind-Walking / Flying scenes, since the first version of the module actually ended with leaving the peak to start on the mission to Rayche. (I thought that players would appreciate the added content, and that the price of having to stop in mid-quest to continue my graduate work would be worth it.)

Adding the rest of the Mission to Rayche at the end of Sanctum 2 would make the module longer, and allow me to once again end it at the end of a quest. This could help address the criticisms and downvotes of those who are objecting to the module’s current length and ending, and to get some sequel content out faster. I could probably even rig up the necessary scripts to allow players with a savegame at the end of Sanctum 2 v3.2 to jump right to the continuing point in the new module, so re-playing the whole thing might not even be necessary.

The price, though, is that the quality of the Rayche quest wouldn’t be as good, partly because it would be missing some of the new features and the new Q-based infrastructure. Those seem to be particularly well suited to the Mission to Rayche quest, which is one reason why I’ve resisted adding the quest to the end of Sanctum 2 in the past.

So what do players think? Should I continue with my current plans (which would probably get Sanctum 3 out in Spring ’10), or add the Rayche quest to the end of Sanctum 2?

Dragon Age is a Huge Success!

Dragon Age

Dragon Age was finally released this week! I’ve received and installed my copy — and after playing it for a while, I have to say that so far the game exceeds my expectations. Since my expectations were pretty high, that’s saying something.

First, for those who may have missed my earlier posts: I was honored to have been asked to participate in both the Dragon Age Toolset Beta test and “Builder Event” this summer. I was one of about a dozen experienced “modders” from the Neverwinter Nights game-building community who were invited to come to Bioware Edmonton this summer to test out the adventure building toolset that they’ve developed for the game. That amazing experience was covered in the Bioware Blog a few months ago (Dragon Age Toolset: Builder Event II, Part 1, and Part 2), and in a pair of articles in Gamespy Magazine (Build Your Own Adventure: An Exclusive Look at the Dragon Age Toolset, and Voices of Creation: The Dragon Age Builder Interviews). Our team did the mod with the cat described in the last article. And I just noticed that the “Toolset Video” on the Collector’s Edition Bonus disk includes some footage from the Builder’s Event, including some showing me sitting in the front row. 🙂

Dragon Age has already been receiving some amazing critical reviews. For example, Gamespot gave it a 95, saying that “Incredible storytelling, great characters, and exciting battles are just a few of the things that make this fantasy role-playing game so extraordinary.” The latest Bioware Blog post (Dragon Age to the World!) lists a number of other rave reviews as well.

The game system is simplified and very easy to understand and to play, compared to the awkward and cumbersome D&D ruleset of the Neverwinter Nights series. That’s something that I was hoping would be the case, and that I have to say that I very much appreciate. It’s also incredibly fast and efficient, smoothly delivering quality graphics and extraordinarily detailed animation with short load times. But what’s impressed me so far is the quality of the cinematic storytelling that the engine makes possible, and that the game builders at Bioware have demonstrated with the Dragon Age: Origins campaign.

I’ll have more to say about the game once I’ve had time to play some more of it, and to take a look at the final version of the game-building toolset. Suffice it to say, though, that I’m positively salivating at the idea of starting to build adventure modules using this incredible new engine. 🙂

Sanctum Version 3.2 Released!

1 - The Sight, 2 - The Quest

The v3.2 update to Sanctum of the Archmage Chapters 1 – 2 has finally been released!

I heard from NinjaWeaselMan today and got his OK to host the Romantic Animations Suite on my website, so I decided not to delay releasing the Sanctum v3.2 update after all. I just finished updating the module pages and I think I’ve got everything set up OK, but if anyone has any problems downloading, installing or running it, please let me know. 🙂

Sanctum v3.2 Update Delayed

1 - The Sight, 2 - The Quest

Since it’s now been nearly two weeks since I announced that I was about to release the Sanctum of the Archmage v3.2 update, I feel that I owe the community an explanation regarding why it has been delayed.

Since the Sanctum update uses NinjaWeasel’s Romantic Animations Suite (which I have been helping him to beta test), I have been waiting for him to make that publicly available before releasing it. I last heard from him on August 15th, in an email which said that he was submitting the RAS and that it would be available in a couple of days once it cleared the Vault. That should have been around August 18th or so. It was on the basis of that information that I posted my announcement that the long-delayed Sanctum update would be uploaded shortly, and prepared it for release.

The RAS hasn’t become available as I expected, either on NinjaWeasel’s website or on the Vault. I’ve emailed him several times over the last two weeks to inquire about the matter, but with no response. I’ve also tried to reach him through others in the community who know him, but no one seems to have seen him around recently. I hope nothing’s happened to him.

My only choices right now are to cancel my plans to release the Sanctum update until further notice, to release a version that doesn’t include the RAS, or to temporarily host the RAS hak on my own website. I’m not comfortable acting on that last choice without his stated permission, though, since I know that he wants to control the distribution of his work.

As I said in a previous post, I have a lot of RL related issues to take care of in the immediate future. So since I no longer have time to properly support a module release right now anyway, I’ve decided to postpone the Sanctum update until I do. I’m not sure exactly when that will be, but it will likely be in late September. Hopefully by then the unexpected confusion about the release of the RAS will be resolved, the Sanctum update can finally be posted, and I can get started in earnest on the next chapter. 🙂

Sanctum Mentioned on GameCritics.com

Gaming & Modding, Sanctum: The Modules

I wanted to share a recent article that I just came across, which gives a very positive mention to me and to the Sanctum of the Archmage series. It was on Brad Gallaway’s blog at GameCritics.com, in a guest post by romance and SF/Urban Fantasy author Ann Aguirre. Here’s the link:

Guest Blog: Writer Ann Aguirre talks games

It can also be found here with some comments on Brad’s personal blog, Drinking Coffecola. Here are Ann’s very kind comments about my module work, for which I would very much like to thank her. 🙂

“Write a script that determines the NPC love interest according to the gender the player chooses. That way, you only need to write one romance with minimal tweaks. I’ve seen this done with real expertise in player-designed modules for Neverwinter Nights. Andarian has designed an amazing module called Sanctum of the Archmage, where the romance is really well-developed in addition to combat, traps, and story. He integrates this swing-sex NPC with great skill, so if he can do it, why can’t the bigger companies?”

 

Ann makes several other observations with which I agree, particularly about RPG developers’ all too common lack of emphasis on writing decent romances — a topic that has been a hot button of mine for years. I particularly resonated with this one, which I’ve jokingly offered a couple of times myself:

“So why are the romances so half-assed, seriously? If you guys don’t know how to write one, CALL me.”

I think she’s right that this often reflects an unwillingness on the part of game builders to prioritize writing romances as a development goal, and to invest resources in hiring the writers they might need. Writing good romances is a skill, to be sure, but it’s also not rocket science and there are folks out there who know how to do it. And as she observes, this is a wide-open market — not only for female gamers, but for male gamers who know how to appreciate a good romance. And trust me, we’re out there. 😉

With that said, though, I do think there’s another factor that’s helped complicate the evolution of writing for RPGs in general, and not just for romances in particular. That’s the fact that writing for an RPG isn’t the same as writing for a novel or a movie. RPGs are a new medium for narrative art, and while there’s a lot of overlap, it has its own distinctive requirements as well. Those involve developing new writing skills, and to some extent ways of thinking about plot construction, than what experienced writers for other mediums may be used to. Because an RPG is interactive, the plot needs to be both integrated to a central theme and adaptive and multi-dimensional. This “dance” between linear and non-linear design is distinctive to interactive fiction, and it forces you to think about the central plot in more abstract terms than in other media.

As both a programmer and an amateur novelist myself, I can see how RPG writing to some extent involves an integration of both kinds of skills and thinking. That’s actually one of the things that fascinates me about the genre, and has motivated me to invest so much of my personal time in writing and building them myself. As experienced writers from other media begin to do the same and to learn these new skills, I think we’ll see something of a sea change in the depth and complexity of story-based gaming. Indeed, I think we’ve already started to see this happening.

All of this holds true as well, I think, for writing romance plots. One of my goals with the Sanctum of the Archmage modules was in fact to explore not just how to write a good RPG, but how to design and write a compelling RPG romance — so I’m especially gratified by Ann’s comments about my work. Thanks!

Sanctum of the Archmage v3.2 to be Released Shortly

1 - The Sight, 2 - The Quest

Just a quick note to say that the v3.2 update to Sanctum of the Archmage Chapters 1-2 should be ready to upload shortly, and hopefully by this weekend. I’ve finally had the time to finish the remaining work I needed to, which included updating the documentation and credits and helping to prepare and package some of the new custom content. I just finished my final playtest of Sanctum 1, and expect to be done with Sanctum 2 by tomorrow. 🙂

A Quick Update

1 - The Sight, 2 - The Quest, Dragon Age, Sanctum: The Modules

I just wanted to give everyone a quick update on the status of the Sanctum v3.2 update, as well as some news that may be of interest to readers of my blog.

Between the demands of my job, vacation, managing the AME, and some other projects (see below), my schedule has gotten very busy in recent weeks — and that has unfortunately delayed my efforts to get the Sanctum update posted for general release. I have only a few remaining tasks to finish before I can upload it, but unfortunately my available time is still going to be very limited for the next few weeks. Hopefully when some of the smoke clears from my “real life,” I should be able to finally get it completed and online by the end of the month.

The very talented Estelindis has graciously offered to develop some high quality custom NWN head models for the Sanctum update. We’ve been collaborating for a few weeks now on how to get the look just right for the various characters, and the results are truly amazing (if I do say so myself). Robin (both genders) and Orion are basically done, and Diana is currently in development as well. Here’s a link to a screenshot featuring (female) Robin’s new head and the use of the Romantic Animations Suite. Este, thank you very much for your fantastic work on this!

Although sworn to secrecy until recently, I can now also reveal that I’ve been a participant in the beta test for the Dragon Age Toolset since early this year — and I was invited to travel to Bioware HQ in Edmonton last week to participate in the Dragon Age Toolset Builder’s Event. I plan to blog at more length about that amazing experience when I have time — but for now, to see what it was all about check out the posts on the Bioware Blog here and here. I’ll only say for now that from what I’ve seen, the tools that Bioware is making available for Dragon Age are going to change the landscape of RPG modding. I’m very excited about it. Although I’m still committed to finishing “The Miracle Worker” in NWN1, I’m now giving serious consideration to completing Part III of the Sanctum Saga — The Alliance — in Dragon Age.

Thanks again to everyone for your patience and interest!

Cheers,

Andarian