Everdark

xhrit

Everdark by @xhrit

A lone warrior needs help to brave a sheer thousand foot descent into a web filled pit of hellish nightmares to reach the Drow fortress of Everdark and put an end to an evil curse.

Short Code: NW-DPV4ZL64H
Mission Type: Story driven Platformer
Jumping : Heavy (Sheer thousand foot Drop!)
Combat: Heavy (Stacked Encounters!)
Exploration: Heavy (No quest Trails!)
Dialog : Heavy (Strict FR Lore, Romance options!)

The Moonlit Grove where the quest begins.


Lornabelle, dark elf great weapon fighter, struggling to cope with her tumultuous past as a Drow blade dancer of Eilistraee.


The Descent to Fortress Everdark.


Fortress Everdark, a place of great evil.

zahinder

Not a fan of platformers and stacked encounters, but I wish you luck with it!

One of the things I love about Foundry is the opportunity to broaden the range of missions available, and suit different tastes.

xhrit

This is a platformer style map, but the platforming is optional. There is a single unbroken path from the start of the shaft, all 1000 feet to the fortress at the bottom. There is no jumping required anywhere in the map.

Unlike most platformers, in this one you start at the top and work your way down. Falling is not necessarily detrimental to progression in this quest, but rather is actually encouraged as a way to bypass the more difficult encounters - almost every encounter can be bypassed by jumping around it, or falling down the shaft past it.

In addition, there are dialog options to remove all the stacked encounters, making them into single pulls. They are not clearly labeled as such, but they are available if your relationship with Lorna is in good standing.

A word of warning though, if you make her mad in any way, for the rest of the quest she gives you the cold shoulder and won't offer any help at all. ^^

zahinder

Oh, interesting. Maybe I'll give it a try, then!

zahinder

Oh, that wasn't bad at all, platformer wise!

5 stars, thanks!

xhrit

Thanks, I am really glad you liked it.

I like trying new things, but I hate being forced to do anything. So I try to make my maps as diverse as possible and cater to many different types of playstyles, without forcing players into using a particular one.

I am trying to make sure each quest in my campaign, as well as each area within the quest themselves has a distinctly different look and feel; yet has enough of a unifying theme to make sense as a whole. The set of quests I am working on now are each named after the location of the quest, and styled for a specific class. While any class can play through, each quest will focus on a specific character of that class and feature environments and activities typically favored by members of that class.

Here is what I have planned so far :
Mage's Quest : Puzzle Driven Elemental Arena (Spellgard, Finished and playable)
Fighter's Quest : Hack and slash platforming (Everdark, Finished and playable)
Cleric's Quest : Community building / Resource management / God Game (Riverbend, in post-production)
Rogue's Quest : Stealth / Seduction / Back Stabbing (Mikah Bay, in pre-production)

Next I am going to make my guild hall, which is going to be the location of former House Neverex. After Lady Agatha's titles were stripped for her treason against neverwinter, her assets were auctioned off to the highest bidder. Naturally, the guild purchased it as a relic of abyssal incursion. The interior of the house will of course be remodeled, and the rest of the rooms that are closed in Feast of the Moon will be opened up. Emmelyne, Aldous, Aethyta and Hexacron will be chilling with a bunch of Knights Ordos and of course the Vault mentioned by Aldous in Rising of the dark; inside will be the various different relics collected during the course of previous quests.

I actually designed the place from the start to be my guild hall; the whole plot of Feast of the Moon I wrote as back story for my character's house.

omg, so rp.

Saving the last 2 quest slots for my spelljammer campaign. I hope cryptic starts letting us buy more slots, I am almost out.

QQ

xhrit

// Version 1.2
Fixed typos.
Adjusted lighting in the descent.
Expanded fortress interior, added camp and new encounters.
Everdark is now eligible for daily quest rewards!

lolsorhand

xhrit wrote: »

Text.

QQ

Same as me then, I have this idea of forcing anything on a player is a bad design. - Things such as story, certain encounters/exploration should be optional. Atleast what I can reward explorers with currently is story, not much else

xhrit

So I've been trying to optimize "the descent" portion of the quest. I am at budget cap for the map, and can not place anymore items without deleting some first. What I am doing is deleting some of the smaller and more expensive items and replacing them with larger and cheaper ones. This way I can fill out the terrain better.

For example I noticed that each section of drow wall is worth 5 budget points, so I made every place where there are drow walls 1 wall section shorter. You can't really notice the walls are shorter, but the change freed up almost 50 budget points. I used those points to put a lot more mushrooms down; so the level is much more vibrant now.

Also I added more mobs, because my girlfriend keeps complaining that the map is not nearly "pit of hellish nightmares" enough for her.

lolsorhand

xhrit wrote: »

So I've been trying to optimize "the descent" portion of the quest. I am at budget cap for the map, and can not place anymore items without deleting some first. What I am doing is deleting some of the smaller and more expensive items and replacing them with larger and cheaper ones. This way I can fill out the terrain better.

For example I noticed that each section of drow wall is worth 5 budget points, so I made every place where there are drow walls 1 wall section shorter. You can't really notice the walls are shorter, but the change freed up almost 50 budget points. I used those points to put a lot more mushrooms down; so the level is much more vibrant now.

Also I added more mobs, because my girlfriend keeps complaining that the map is not nearly "pit of hellish nightmares" enough for her.

The limit is kind of interesting, even at the limit I found it interesting. I'll play your quest now btw, I got delayed eariler. (Free bump for the trouble.)

Edit: Played your quest, and enjoyed the time spent. Great job with the enviroments, it's obvious you spent alot of time with them.

Though, what you could do is add difficulty sliders. - For example, a certain dialogue and then (Easy) at the end, (Medium) (Hard.) and perhaps even (Everdark) or something along those lines, then tie mob spawns to the dialogue itself. (It's quite easy but it does require extra work for every slider. Also to balance it out, but worth it in the end!)

xhrit

lolsorhand wrote: »

Though, what you could do is add difficulty sliders. - For example, a certain dialogue and then (Easy) at the end, (Medium) (Hard.) and perhaps even (Everdark) or something along those lines, then tie mob spawns to the dialogue itself. (It's quite easy but it does require extra work for every slider. Also to balance it out, but worth it in the end!)

Originally I had dialog that despawns mobs tied into romance options, so that if you were in good standing with the NPC each time you talked to her you could ask her to kill specific things. I took that feature out in version 1.2 tho, because having it set up like that made it so if you accidentally fell or messed up the romance you would not be able to despawn anything and be forced to fight hard mode.

Instead I am planning on having her ask at the very top what you want her to do; the options will be "clear the nests" (easy), "delay the patrols" (medium), or "stand back and watch" (hard).