Common mistakes?

sirknightnight · February 2015

Hello! I'm kinda new to the foundry (i'm working on my second mission now) and I'm wondering, any common mistakes authors make or any advice you can give to a new author. I love telling stories but writing descriptions of places and action was always my weakness so the foundry looks like a good way to get around that.

Any advice is appreciated, Even the blatantly obvious stuff, I'm kinda stupid.
Thanks!

vegeta50024 · February 2015

I'd say you should probably be careful about balancing characters talking and combat (both space and ground). Just look at what most of the STO missions consist of.

markhawkman · February 2015

Also... sometimes you can't do what you really want to do, and need to rewrite the mission to work within the confines of the game. So it's good to be flexible about what you want the story to do.

paxfederatica · February 2015

markhawkman wrote: »

Also... sometimes you can't do what you really want to do, and need to rewrite the mission to work within the confines of the game. So it's good to be flexible about what you want the story to do.

Within the confines of the Foundry editor and available assets, to be more exact. There's a ton of things the devs can do in Cryptic missions that we Foundry authors either flat-out can't do, or are forced to devise elaborate workarounds or fakes for. (Ziplines and rappelling, as seen in a couple of Delta Rising missions, are examples of the former and the latter, respectively.)

Unknown · February 2015

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erei1 · February 2015

I'd say, build your story with the Foundry mechanisms, and not the other way around (which is what most people try to do at first).
We have a lot of limitations, and tricks to make it works. Also, bugs. Trying to "force" the foundry to do what you want to is usually bound to fail.

Make a simple draw of your story, add it to the foundry and build it. If it doesn't work, then adapt the story to make it work. Doesn't try to adapt the Foundry over your story.

westmetals wrote: »

Precisely. I was basically forced to abandon a project fairly recently over the lack of a suitable dialogue-contact (non-combat) NPC; unfortunately, the storyline really wouldn't work with any other species and there are no non-combat Voth NPCs available. If it was a Cryptic mission, they would just make one; all I can do is beg for it and hope.

Since nearly a year, a change in a ceiling height of one of the map made my mission basically broken. A mission I spent hundred of hours to make. The bug was reported, and acknowledged by Crypticfrost. Still no fix.
The only way I have to make it works now, is to change 3 maps (on 4), and rebuild them from scratch. Basically, rebuild the entire mission. With the risk the ceiling get bugged again, and I have to restart once again.

And it's probably just a simple value to change somewhere in the code.

Haven't worked in the Foundry since them. I tried a while back, on a new mission, but quickly stopped, because what I really want to do is finish my other mission, and I can't.

So yeah, I can totally feel your pain

djxprime · February 2015

Test you mission by publishing it. There are some mechanics that don't work right in the preview map mode of Foundry, such as patrol paths for NPCs. You usually can go back and republish or withdraw the mission and republish to make corrections.

adverbero · February 2015

Its an obvious one, but worth putting some extra emphasis on.

Grammer and spelling, it really really is worth as many proofreading passes as you can be bothered to do

johnnysnowball · February 2015

adverbero wrote: »

Its an obvious one, but worth putting some extra emphasis on.

Grammer and spelling, it really really is worth as many proofreading passes as you can be bothered to do

Right. I do all my writing in MS Word, so it sorts all that out for me. Then just copy paste.

If you want 10 reach markers that each trigger, say, an explosion, don't lay down 10 markers and link 10 separate explosions to each one. Just lay 1 marker, have it trigger an explosion, then select both and duplicate as many times as you need.
Each marker will automatically trigger the explosion it is duplicated with. This can work for any items that are trigger-related.
On the same note, if interacting with a console makes 100 items disappear and another 100 appear, just put any object down, set it to appear when console object is complete, and another object set to go hidden. It is much easier then to copy the objects and just change them to whatever other objects you need by altering their costume, so to speak.

Common mistakes?

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