WIP: The Legacy of Shaylia, NW-DITFP6QSI

simplyshawn

Hello!

This is my first Foundry Quest and I've been super excited to work on it ever since The Foundry came back online in September. I used to spend MONTHS working on Modules for NWN back in the day, and this is all kinds of nostalgic for me. I hope you'll give me feedback and support as I am totally new to NWO, but not to modding/mapping/level design in general.

I've decided to take my time and really try to do my best with this, and I hope you guys think it looks like something fun to play once I finish it

Screenshots:






















I don't think it will take too much longer to "finish," though I imagine I'll keep going back and tweaking things for a while. Anyway, let me know what you think, and thanks for looking

NOTE: The screenshots below this point are very old and here for nostalgia's sake. Head to the end of the thread to see recent progress

simplyshawn

More Screenshots:

Village before "Bad Things:"



Village after "Bad Things:"


also, these are my two "main-ish" characters, Amelia and Dustin. They were both raised by the "resident in question" and have an interesting romance storyline that is optional. It's been very hard to get conversation points to make certain things happen later on in the quest, but I think I've done it. Basically, you can go through it having never spoken to Dustin at all, or, he can be a major character and even fight alongside you at one point.

However, my real question: how old would you guess these two characters to be?

simplyshawn

Villagers' home before "bad things"


Villagers' home after "bad things"

valcontar73

Amazing work dude!! I see a lot of detail and love in those scenarios.

Very promising.

Keep the good work!!

simplyshawn

Thank you very much

I've been waiting to build something in the foundry for months, so this has been pretty exciting.

torontodave

=D Nice!

wintermurloc

This looks amazing , do you have a short code for your adventure ? or is it still a work in progress ?

simplyshawn

Still a work in progress for now, sadly. It's basically done, but the engine won't let me run it through so I can't do the final "check" before publishing. Map transitions still don't work

iandarksword

Publishing the quest doesn't mean you can't continue to edit it if you find something wrong. Featuring the quest creates an entirely separate copy that is not able to be edited. There is a difference between the two.

simplyshawn

iandarksword said:

Publishing the quest doesn't mean you can't continue to edit it if you find something wrong. Featuring the quest creates an entirely separate copy that is not able to be edited. There is a difference between the two.

Hey,

I'd gotten discouraged because I thought map-transitions were totally broke, but I just saw your comment today and decided to clean up the first 10-minutes or so of my quest and publish it - and you're totally right, the map transitions work!

The short-code is NW-DITFP6QSI

I'll get back to work on it, and in the meantime I'd love feedback on the intro section

Thank you for letting me know. Again, I'm a foundry noob.

simplyshawn

I've made some cosmetic changes to the final set-piece of the forest area. I won't have time to work on it again until this weekend, but I'm hoping to re-publish the quest up to entering the crypt by Sunday.

Of course, changing the backdrop changes the look of the whole zone, and I think I like it better. The lighting bug is much less noticeable now.



What do you think?

simplyshawn

New zone is published! The forest area is now fully playable, and includes about 15 different Amelia’s so she can follow you through the zone lol. Working with AI in the foundry is interesting, but I think I’m getting the hang of it. For example, the group of mercenaries who help you fight Warren will respawn once, then if they die again they’ll reappear at the camp with new dialogue. The villagers during the demon attack in the village also now respawn once, as I want to make sure they’re alive when you leave because they’ll have dialogue when you return to the village for the epilogue (Katherine is who will give you the quest reward at the end, so it’d be pretty weird if you saw her die at the very beginning lol)

During the segment where you need to find supplies to build bridges, once you’ve found a few you can also return to Amelia for clues on where to find more.

Also, if you want some more help fighting the waves of undead, there is a secret companion token near the first bear encounter that will spawn guards to help you out. Be sure to also ask Dustin about his father in the village so you can get his letter to him from the well. You’ll have to defeat Warren before you can give it to him, but I’m glad this works. It’ll allow you to collect a mysterious gem later.

There are still a couple things to finish up in the forest zone (only two verdant trees can be gathered, but I want you to be able to collect more of them to use in optional quests later, also, I will create a transition for dispersing the energy sources) and then I’ll get started on the crypt, where most of the gameplay will conclude. (You will return through the forest (optionally) and back to the village in the morning to wrap up the story).

Oh, and at some point I will completely redo the dialogue with Aryana. Just have a good laugh with her for now lol. This quest originally started as a simple fetch-quest where she was just a drunk old lady who lost her glasses at a Tavern and Amelia had asked you to retrieve them. It’s funny how things spiraled from there!

From here on out I’ll be doing weekly updates every Sunday until the quest is complete, so please keep checking back and giving feedback! I really want this to be a solid quest that you’ll all enjoy playing a few times

simplyshawn

Oh, one last tip with dialogues: if you just want to run through and focus on combat and exploration, the top-most response options will end the conversations the fastest. (Except for with Aryana, for now, telling her to say her prayers will end it the fastest.)

If you do ask more questions to the characters to learn more about the story, I have a small favor to ask: the demon’s name is supposed to be spelled “Sheliya,” but I have noticed that I’ve typed it as “Shelyia” several times. If you catch this little typo let me know which NPC said it wrong. Thanks!

Anyway, hope you have fun! The forest zone is where the gameplay really begins so I’m hoping this will be more interesting to you all than the first publish.

wintermurloc

I ran your adventure @simplyshawn , it's awe inspiring , wow the work you put in is epic. A tip for the ones who may want to run nice foundry adventures, always look to run it at high end settings if your machine can support it to get the most of the author's work. Kudos mate , hoping a lot more are coming in the future.

iandarksword

Maps look good, I didn't see any floating objects that aren't supposed to be. Mechanics with NPC movement and summons seem ok. You've got a couple of spelling/tense/grammar errors scattered throughout your dialogs. What might help is to use a word processing program like Notepad to type out your dialog, then copy/paste it into the Foundry. The text boxes in the editor are small and sometimes it's very easy to miss spacing or grammar errors. Looks like you've got a good start.

simplyshawn

wintermurloc said:

I ran your adventure @simplyshawn , it's awe inspiring , wow the work you put in is epic. A tip for the ones who may want to run nice foundry adventures, always look to run it at high end settings if your machine can support it to get the most of the author's work. Kudos mate , hoping a lot more are coming in the future.

Thank you so much for your kind words! Yes, I have put a lot of work into this... I've actually been very sick the past few months and it's been one of my main outlets. I put at least at hour into it every other day, minus the month or so that I thought The Foundry was totally broken. So, I'm very glad you enjoyed what is completed so far! There are still at least two more zones to come

(Also, glad you mentioned playing on high graphics settings. Not in this publish, but in the next one, there is definitely a spot where there are two lights that need to cast dynamic shadows for things to look right. If "shadow casting lights" is set to 1, it'll look lop-sided.)

iandarksword said:

Maps look good, I didn't see any floating objects that aren't supposed to be. Mechanics with NPC movement and summons seem ok. You've got a couple of spelling/tense/grammar errors scattered throughout your dialogs. What might help is to use a word processing program like Notepad to type out your dialog, then copy/paste it into the Foundry. The text boxes in the editor are small and sometimes it's very easy to miss spacing or grammar errors. Looks like you've got a good start.

Awesome feedback, I will for sure copy+paste all the dialogue into a word-processor before the final publish and make sure it's all grammatically correct. That's a great tip, and as you mentioned, the text-boxes in The Foundry are tiny and I'm sure there are hundreds of weird typos I've made. (Can I blame the anti-biotics and painkillers for some of those? )

At any rate, I'm just glad you read some of the dialogue. Despite Aryana's chat, I've actually spent a lot of time making sure the story is fleshed out without any of the NPCs contradicting one-another. If grammar and spelling are all that stood out, then I think I've done a decent job so far... Hopefully... Oh heck, probably not, but that's what the final edit is for

I'm glad you didn't notice any misplaced objects and that the AI worked correctly for you (I had a hard time with the AI; the Warren you fight kept wanting to stay around after the Warren you talk to appears, so I had to split him into three NPCs). That makes me pretty sure that I'm ~95% done with the areas that are currently playable.

Thank you both again for playing the current version

simplyshawn

(accidental double post)

simplyshawn

As for updates, I'm all about lighting right now... for better or worse.

I realized static lights cast through geometry and can be used to simulate light bounces. This is probably news to no-one but me, but I was super excited.

(The sunlight appears to naturally bounce off the ground and onto the tree and fence)


I've also had luck using this trick to make candle-light appear softer and more moody in The Crypt

(Placing the lights at candle-height was waaay to bright, but about 10 units under the stairs was perfect)


It's also been useful in smoothing out transitions between types of lighting, again in The Crypt

(Some lights are above, some are below, but the lights below the floor are the only ones that actually overlap.)


And before I show you the headache I've had for the last few hours, here is the aforementioned spot where having two shadow-casting lights actually makes a visual difference.



And finally... the horrible... horrible mistake I made to simulate natural moonlight casting into this main crypt area...




Look alright, right? Some areas are a little bit too bright, but you get the idea...

Except...

These are nearly all lights. Send help, I've gone crazy.



Hahaha yeah.... basically, I created a 9-layer grid of static blue lights, spaced by half the radius and height (because I learned they're different today) of the light objects, in the area the moonlight would hit... and now I'm just in the process of deleting lights to create appropriate shadows. It took nearly three hours just to get where I'm at in the screenshots above, and I am SO done for the day hahaha.

I think it'll look great once I finish it, and do or die, I'll publish this area tomorrow night. Hopefully with the lighting finished, if not the quest objectives.

In any case, if you don't send help, please at least wish me luck!

simplyshawn

For what it's worth, if light objects height and radius not being equal is news to anyone other than me, here is what I mean:

This rotated to p = 90, Y = 90, R = 0 ---- YET, the point of origin is exactly where the green marker is; centered at 10 units above the 10-unit rulers.



It clearly casts less to the "back" of the bounding box (yet, still casts past the actual "object") than it does toward the front of the bounding box.

There is even a discernable difference in brightness between p = 0 and p= 180:

P=0


p = 180



Anyway, I'll I'm saying is... I no longer trust Cryptic's descriptions of objects... These are NOT "point" lights, these are "directional" lights - even if they're short and fat

However, for the vast majority of you in this section of the forum: I am sure you knew this ages ago, but since I'm a newb, I hope other newbs are lurking around, and I hope this is useful to them. I wanna see The Foundry get it's own Golden Age. I might be late to the party, but, hey, let's do this thing.

simplyshawn

For some reason I keep getting a "Publish Failed" error, but, this zone is no-where near done anyway lol.

Here are a few new screenshots:

I decided to go for a much more cluttered, dirty, and old look to The Crypt. Not sure if I'll keep this, but I'm also playing around with some dead-overgrowth coming through collapses areas with exposed dirt.


The lighting on the stairs is now a bit more symmetrical, and there are spider webs (and yes, spiders).


And lastly, this is the light source at the top of the room that the moonlight is supposed to be casting in from. I spent a ridiculous amount of time trying different things to make it look like this actually lead outside (Light shafts, skylights, lensflares, the sky prop for dungeons), and finally settled on just light blue and regular blue depthfades stacked together.


Thing is, after all that work on this skylight/opening... I realized it can't even be seen from the ground-level by the player!!! Soooo I may have to add some climbing puzzle to this area.

simplyshawn

Still can't publish, however - I BUILT THE CLIMBING PUZZLE!!!



I tried so many ways to make it look natural, and it ended up being Pirate's Skyhold props hahaha. Would have never thought they would be fitting for a Crypt, but they are.

I also decided (drunkenly), to rip up the entire floor of the crypt (it was made of rotated Vellosk Walls) and do this horrible, trashed, and ruined style:
(If you scroll up you can see the exact same shot with only the Vellosk Walls. Now, it's rubble and debris lol.)


Also, for fun, these are the "key" costumes I've made:
(Every NPC is custom, but these are the NPCs who say more than one thing)

simplyshawn

(also yes, during the puzzle you will see the 'outside" effect)


And also also - heck yes I built an entire puzzle just so the player could see one area I created. I'm sick, I love this, and I don't care if anyone else cares lol.

simplyshawn

In truth, I love the feedback and the comments, and would love suggestions, but as selfish as it sounds, I'm building this thing for me. This is my outlet and I just love getting the dang lighting right and an getting things to blow up or set fire when the story calls for it. NWO is nothing like NWN when it comes to scripting NPCs, (NWN was true coding), but I don't care. This is SO.DANG.FUN!!!

Please bring back publishing!!!

simplyshawn

Still can't publish this, and since The Foundry is a promised feature of NWO that I've put so much time into (as a customer who has spent several hundred dollars on this game just hoping The Foundry would come back online), it really bothers me... I really do feel like these past few months were a tease and flat-out false-advertising... but, in the meantime, here are some new-ish screenshots of The Crypt.





This quest is 90% done... there is this zone where the story climaxes and then the catacombs for the final boss fight, and that's it... I'd really like to publish it and make it playable...

simplyshawn

Still working on it, just can't publish.





(almost at the detail limit again though lol, this time in a MUCH smaller space)

Look Cryptic... Hate me, Hurt me, or Help me, but believe it or not I do have a long-time following of amateur content creators behind me. Show me I'm bringing them somewhere they can show off, and I'll bring them. Otherwise, you've all failed the promise of this game's launch... this isn't DnD... this is just YOUR foundry...

We're only late to the party because YOU failed at marketing. We flat out didn't know! Now we've finally found you ourselves and you're taking it away... c'mon... The vast majority of us are debating Unity VS Unreal, but NWO is something we can start creating in ourselves, without a team, to show a team what we can do. Market it as a launching pad. If that takes off, add more tools and market even more.

Edit: Woo! Publishing works again! Will put up a new version tomorrow (Sunday) as usual

simplyshawn

Just published my current build and played through as my real character (so much nicer than playing as "Author" lol!).

I took a bunch of notes on things to tweak before the next publish tomorrow, and I also took a bunch of screenshots of The Crypt! This is the currently published version, and it's also the zone I'm doing the most work to tonight, but, I'm excited for it to finally be playable.

----------

First off, the staircase has some changes now that the climbing puzzle has been built, as the walkways are visible from the start.
The cobwebs now catch some light from the Verdant Tree on the landing to the right.
Yup, I see the floating candles, that's in my notes

----------

As you get down the stairs, you'll search this side while Amelia searches the other side.
You can see at the top how the walkways extend over to an area above the retaining walls.
I spent forever figuring out the best-looking fire effects for the torches on the Royal Sarcophaguses.
Not sure about the torch on top of the Mausoleum though.
I just wanted to break up the blue moonlight. What do you think?

----------

The biggest addition since the last set of screenshots is this spiral-staircase though.

It's actually REALLY easy to create this, but it took me a lot of trial-and-error to figure the easy way out... I tried using math to calculate the rotation and position of each piece to give it a smooth progression to create a spiral ramp...
but really, a spiral ramp is silly and not worth the geometry calculations.

For a spiral-staircase just create a circle with four of the curved walkways, then select them, copy them, rotate that 45 degrees, position it in-line with the first set... rinse and repeat a few times... then just add +1 to each details Y value in the order you want it spiral... Boom, spiral staircase... Coulda saved myself a lot of time if I'd just tried the easy way first hahaha.

----------

However, I'm really happy with the end result, and I even got it to kinda look like this dead tree is holding it up.
It might not be the "ramp" that I pictured, but it works and it looks cool.

----------

As you make your way up here to complete a "put this over there" puzzle, you also get a pretty cool view of the ground-floor of The Crypt. This was unintentional, since this whole walkway is an after-thought, but I like this view a lot.

I wish I'd have thought to make this a multi-level room to begin with. I would have laid it out a bit different - But it's cool!
I'm not gonna rip this area up and start over anymore! I promise

Anyway, the version in this screenshots is playable now, but I'll have a new build up by the end of tomorrow, hopefully with this zone finished and a bit of The Catacombs to explore.

simplyshawn

Aaaand The Catacombs are coming along!

Since I liked the idea of making The Crypt a Multi-Level set-piece, I decided to really go for it with the Catacombs. This area looks much bigger than it really is, but the overlapping pathways and hidden crevices give it a very expansive feeling: like you could get lost. I'm really enjoying building it, though, I'm almost at my detail limit as usual lol.

This is built with "Room Builder" rooms, and takes advantage of the full height. The map is also incased in depth fades along all the walls and ceiling, which gave the fog a much smoother fall off.









Essentially what's going on here is that the orange Cave Crystals are supposed to be there, but the Spellplague corruption is growing out of a portal at the bottom and twisting itself around the cavern. This zone is much more combat focused than the previous ones, and plays sort of like a dungeon run, ending with a big boss fight with Shelyia in her hell dimension (which will be on the same map, but you'll teleport to it through that portal at the bottom.

Then that'll be it for the quest! Head back to the village, collect the rewards, and hopefully have had a bunch of fun

simplyshawn

Now that I know The Foundry and the assets/details better, I gave all the maps a fresh polish. You know, as exciting as getting new assets soon is, it's pretty awesome how many different details we can use. I think the longest part of the learning curve so far for me was just learning the detail catalogue and figuring out how to use different things. Longest, not hardest. I think that I think that was and still is encounters and NPCs lol.

Anyway, I have a question for anyone with an opinion... I don't think I like the name "An Old Battle" anymore. I never really did, I just kinda threw it on there so I could get started. Now that I'm trying to take it a bit more seriously, I think I need a better name.

Any advice? I see a lot of cool Foundry Quest titles in this forum, but I'm just terrible at naming things. The village is just "Canyon Village" and the forest is just "The Forest." How do you come up with names for the places in your quests?

I dunno, maybe that's weird advice to ask but I figured I'd try.

Either way, thanks for checking out my quest.

simplyshawn

So, lately I've been trying to get better at dialogue, and I've been having NPC's actually talk to each other. It's round-about, but if you play, let me know what you think of this interaction in particular:



In big progress, the night fight now mostly works properly. It's been a lot of encounter work, as the villagers fight as well. The details of the fire also appear progressively as the fight goes on, so it was tons of setting appear-when functions.



The portals also have effects that dynamically change as you progress.



The monster mobs are based on fire-type encounters, so when they attack, temporary fire appears. That fire is then, depending on how the battle goes, replaced by permanent fire effects as enemies and villagers die.



So basically, if you have a powerful character and easily kill the attacking demons, not much damage will be done to the village at all.




However, if you can't protect the villagers, and they die fighting off the demons, the damage to the village also increases, and it can become quite a blaze.



I wanted the fight to feel like their were actually stakes, so even though the villagers respawn three times each, it matters when they die because the flames spread further each time, for independently for each respawn of each villager.



In these screenshots, max villager death didn't get hit. This should be about "average," however, it will look a bit different every time you play this scene.



Once you defeat Shaylia's Army here, the villagers mostly stay behind to tend to the wounded and put out the fires. Except for Amelia, who has gone on ahead without you to The Ancient Crypt. Dustin will also catch up with you both later, once the village is secured.



I think this scene makes a great intro sequence to the quest, however, here is an actual screenshot of me setting the whole thing up. If I recall, I'd just realized I linked the wrong fire detail to the wrong encounter death... again...




Aside from The Canyon Village zones (maps 1-3) I've started playing around with the new Chult Assets in map 4, "The Path To The Ancient Crypt"






This area is still really rough, but it's interesting to see how well the Chult Assets work in this nighttime lighting. They give the map a whole new feel. Cryptic really hit it out of the park with Chult - these assets are incredible, especially in motion.

And I'll get to use them in this area. I decided that The Canyon Village should be located between Sharandar and Vellosk, that way it kinda makes sense that I'm using all these bioluminescent plants, yet also have details that are more forest than jungle. I'm looking forward to playing with balancing the different kits soon.

For now though, I'm going to take a little break. Let me know what you think of the direction I'm going in for Map 4 though, and as usual this build is published, bugs and all, but can be completed nonetheless.

Feel free to give the improved Shaylian Army Battle a try

arkanarge

new chult plants for u to use bet your having a field day!

arkanarge

By the way, I'm worried that you are coming close to packet corruption limit. My has hit the maximum of what it will allow for me, I think. It crashes with a "Packet Corruption" error when I place detail/encounters down. It only lets me when I delete an object to add another. Even for encounters, 5 mobs in 1 encounter pack = 5 details. Those skirmishers and extra adds start to feel more and more useless and taxing. I had to resort to using solo mobs and pack them to get the most bang out of their buck. So I had to scrap extra maps and such, even after reworking the story and deleting anything unnecessary. I have hit the absolute limit once again, I can't add anything more nor make any major changings aside from small fixes and dialogue, I can't even put down patrol points without crashing. So for a quest as detailed as yours, it may be getting close aswell. I suggest getting the details finished asap and placing out all the npcs/pathing/encounters that you absolutely need so you can scout how much you can do left before the crashing starts.

Imagine being 90% done and your like "now I just need to add some mobs" and you put down your first pack of monsters and blam. "packet corruption".

Well, I'm not sure if it happens to everyone else but then again, not many people go all out in foundry.