Sunday 10 June 2007

Weekly update

This week, I have been mostly reworking the plot and the initial areas of my upcoming module "Planesape:Legacy". Early this year I was forced to shelve all my modding work due to real life. This left PS:Legacy fully plotted, but about 1/3 built. Thankfully things in real life settled down, and the Obsidian Grimm contest came at a perfect time for me to dust off my modding skills and get back to building.

From the contest I learnt a number of things about what generally works and what doesn't. When I returned to PS:Legacy I could see that there were a number of changes needed in order to realise it's full potential.

The main decision I made was to change the story to center around the player at an earlier point. In the original plot, the player was basically a henchman of the driving NPC (much like the Brothers in Cry Wolf). This allowed a logical 'everyman' story, which would then evolve to centre around the PC later in the series. On reflection, this made the plot a little flat, and didn't draw the player into the story fast enough. Thus, in the revised plot the PC is the central 'special' character right from the get-go. Of course, this means that a players character choice is more bounded, but I am a LOT happier with the plotting now, and feel it was a worthy trade-off.

Now, I was meaning to post a set of snazzy picture of my progress. But somehow I managed to corrupt my windows install on my main modding PC!

The good news is that I have been here before, and I should be able to recover everything (and I have recent backups anyhow). The bad news is that I left my Windows CD at my other home, and cant get back there for a week! I guess I will spend this week on dialogs, which is not a bad thing as I usually slack and leave them until last.

Some proper pictures and whatnot next week.


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