Appreciation..

kroandar

After spending 60~ hours on my foundry quest (and sadly still not complete), I just wanted to say that I have a very new-found appreciation for all the work you Foundry authors do. The detail that goes into the environment, the painstaking work on dialog and minor nuances, it is amazing how much work goes into it. I just wanted to say thank you, and that you all have been a huge inspiration for me.

ovaltine74

Your welcome. Now get back to work.

chili1179

ovaltine74 wrote: »

Your welcome. Now get back to work.

I lol'd IRL.

I can't wait to see what masterpiece comes from this!

kroandar

ovaltine74 wrote: »

Your welcome. Now get back to work.

I have to admit, my wife and I laughed too after reading this.

hercooles130uscg

Many people don't realize how much they experience in a Foundry quest was PUT there by the author. Sure you can pop in a pre-made map, but most of the better quests are all built from scratch, and that takes time and imagination. Unless you have experienced the Foundry editor, you will not grasp how much work it takes to make a quest look and feel authentic.

Thanks for noticing. I wish everyone had at least some experience with the foundry, even if they don't publish, to get an idea of what they are playing and not be so harsh on criticism where it is not needed.

Now, like he said, stop mucking about and get back to work.

drakesigar

ovaltine74 wrote: »

Your welcome. Now get back to work.

*Snort*

raphaeldisanto

One of the good things that's come from the Foundry is that it's raised awareness, among the larger gamer community, as to how much work goes into creating these things. I don't just mean Foundry quests, I mean development as a whole.

Foundry Authors who come from creative backgrounds already know this, of course - The folk who are here who already have put their time in working for indie dev houses, or spent hours tweaking some piece of NWScript in the Aurora Toolset, artists, animators, writers - They already know how long it takes to put together a cohesive NWN Persistent World. They know how long it takes to animate a skeleton for an emote that's going to be seen for all of 10 seconds. They know how long it takes to fight with NWScript to make an NPC behave exactly how you want. (And they already know that their viewing audience -WON'T- realize that it took that much work)

But the Foundry's opened up the potential for normal gamers to try their hand at making stuff... And they're finding that yeah, it's a lot harder than they thought. It's a lot more work. At least... It is, if you want your final product to be worth anything.

It's a little bit like back in the mid 90s when companies started releasing the first WYSIWIG HTML editors. Just like back in those days, any fool can slap together some premade templates and tie some objectives together and call it a 'quest', but if you want something special, you have to get into the guts of the thing.

Write your dialogue and get someone to proofread it. Storyboard your quest and make sure the flow makes sense. Design your maps from the ground up, eschewing premade zones and rooms. Tweak your encounters, find the right mobs for the right situations, using the right triggers.

It's a whole ton of work, but the end result will look, feel and play better than some guy who spent 10 minutes with PageMill and threw together a web page.