Chapter Two contains a handful of dungeons and quests to complete optionally, before advancing onto the main dungeon and hunting down the primary boss of the Chapter; Stirling, the Drug Baron. The hub area, where you will spend your time, is the populated Amn-Duth city, which is quite large (and quite laggy) and contains a lot to explore. Multiple marketplaces with various prices to worry about. The city contains countless people to talk to, many of them having at least something worthwhile to say (as each one has half a dozen different things to say) as well as many buildings to explore. These buildings are anything from shops with even more wares, to quest collection NPCs, a Storytrader that sells information and clues and even a library with swathes of extra information to read up on, for those interested. There’s now about five more buildings with empty doors waiting to be filled out with extra content, but I’m still working on what they will have, sadly! Any ideas are welcome 😀
Category: Blether
I’m going to be taking a short break from DotI (not too long, a week or two, then I have a wedding to go to at the end of that) so when I come back to working on it, my head is clear and I’ve mentally rejuvenated. I’ve been working on DotI ceaselessly and it’s caught up with me; that writers block equivalent, when all you can do to improve a new map is stare at it a while longer.
I’ve also got other wee ideas that I’d like to play about with, but ones that don’t necessarily fit with my main project. Due to DotI being a long-term project, I don’t want to rush it or feel like I’m pushing aside that for lesser ideas just to get them done quicker, so I feel it’s in the best interests of DotI to get the exciting wee smaller ideas built up in the short term, so that I can focus fully on DotI when I’m back to it, and have a couple of mini-projects under my belt, too!
So far I’ve made a wee dungeon crawler, while playing about with variables and random generation, and am now working on an exploration/sim game that’ll be my first non-combat based project. For these, and other projects, I’ve made a new blog just to cover that, so that the DotI blog can remain purely about the main project and so I can still talk about my other games.
http://www.pixelbrady.wordpress.com
Have fun! 🙂
I passed! My first year of college (3D Animation, tyvm!) has been a bounding success, despite my sleeping disability knocking me out for most of the second semester, my attendance was awful but I still passed, and got a decent grade as well, considering how quickly I had to throw together some of the work 😀
So because of this, not really done hee haw today, just had a wee party of sorts with my mate! Despite all the shit stuff goin’ on, s’kept me in a good mood and had a fan-fuckin’-tastic burger for dinner! 😀
Just started back on it the now, seein’ what I can put together while I still have some energy left. Am building the Amn-Duth topside where you’ll spend the majority of your time within Chapter Two, or at least where you’ll be collecting your quests. There will be a number of quests to collect and do in your chosen order, with your important quest at the end, to investigate this Drug Baron that was paying off Sheriff Garios!
The City Centre
What I’ve been doing mostly here is getting the city built. It’s quite huge and the map is somewhat “bare” in the sense of a tileset, which is a bit of a shame but I was lacking in tilesets. I would have made it a bit smaller to appear to look better, but I was drawing the basis of the map from the sense of Venice (as you might have guessed by the Chapter Two page at the end of the Demo) and when I was in that city I got lost. I mean completely lost, the place is a bloody maze at the best of times, so I wanted my city to be a maze of smaller and large pathways and rivers and bridges and a hell of a lot of buildings you shouldn’t be going in, but with a brilliant big area in the middle.
I wanted you to feel lost within the map and have to explore and find some of the secrets and quests I’ll be dotting around, but since it’s still early in the game I wanted to keep it simple enough still, so it’s still quite basic.
The peoples of the town will be talking shite mostly and have little to say, but most of them will have one or two possible lines (as discussed earlier, all civilians have multiple different conversational lines) that direct you towards some hints about what’s going on, what your missions are, and most of them warning you about the fiendish pickpockets that steal your money before you even know what’s happened! But then again, you can always go and find the thieves den and put a stop to them!
After spending an hour now writing up a variable and dozens of conditional branches combined with self-switches so that each and every NPC, villager, and otherwise non-story-essential person will not only have different dialogue options when you talk to them, but never repeat the same line twice in a row, I start to wonder if anyone will ever, ever notice this. Typically, a normal person (myself included) will just clicky a person once to see what they say. Twice maybe, if they’re curious and happen to know there’s multiple chat options…but when you’re in an area with a half dozen people and have an exciting mission to go to kill a dragon or save the girl, you’re never really that inclined to keep testing the limits of the NPCs ability to talk shite to you, so all the other available chat options become wasted, lost, forgotten.
Yet I can’t convince myself to stop doing it and just leave it as a static chat box. I just feel compelled to make sure that I’m trying to pay attention to the small touches. They’re the ones that count after all, eh?
Context changes a lot of things, I believe. It’s a heavy basis of how the story of DotI came around, knowing that something that comes across as irrefutably evil and wrong can be seen in a completely different light, given the right circumstances. The story is about people who change their stories, hidden figures, deceit, disguise and mystery, all the things that cloud judgement and cloak context, making the true nature of any one event hard to read. To add onto that, the characters all have ambiguous natures and goals; it’s never exactly certain what they’re thinking or why they’re doing this, and I’m trying to bleed that into the story from the start; giving a very one-sided, flat concept, then throwing some ambiguity at it to create that speckle of doubt about it.
It’s the “Dance” of Immortals because nothing is just a straight line, no one is just a mug shot, nothing’s that simple. Everything is in constant motion, the characters are all moving around and changing their minds and having secret agendas… it’s more like a dance: looking at it in pieces and short segments looks like people just falling around aimlessly, but from my side, when you know what’s happening with everything at once, it’s more of a dance, more flowing than that. Everyone’s going to where they’re supposed to be, but they’re not just walking there in a fashion that makes it simple to uncover from just looking at a step at a time. Question really is; which one of them is who they appear to be? Which one of them is actually evil? Any at all? Everyone
As an example, Chapter One introduces the Imperials fairly strongly. They’re our bad guys, they’re destroying an innocent archipelago full of innocent folk. Take that one piece of information and we have a typically “evil empire” scenario. But that’s too boring, too cliche, no? So we throw in a few curve balls at their story. There’s a few cutscenes on the island as you run around as Kata, each tossing out some other viewpoints. Then at the end of the chapter they’re brought up again and once more you get a different question about their motives.
I believe that context can change the world; had my fair share of being judged and abused based on one snippet of information taken out of context and it happens a lot. People have a habit of seeing one side of things and accepting that as the raw truth, forgetting that everything is three dimensional and has different viewpoints. I’m trying, I’m hoping, that I can bring that sense of context into this game, and really encourage the idea that you need to focus on more than just what you see at first.
Got myself wanting to improve upon my signature image. Instead of having just a cut-out of the Title Screen image I went for a banner! Of course I’ve never really got down the knack of making beautiful looking banners; mine always come off looking a bit stale, but what the hell! Still looks better than a big blocky cut-out. I have a couple more variations on the characters chosen, and will try to come up with more to have more of an option and add them to my Support page at the top and see if I can’t get someone to help out and make some perfect and shiny ones for me! 🙂
Vuroja makes an appearance for my first DotI banner!
So, I first had my project listed only on one forum, hoping for some critique, inspiration, suggestions, advice etc (and aye, just that wee bit of gratification, who doesnae?) but upon realising the forum was relatively dead compared to when I first joined some years ago, I moved up, listed the game and my thread across a couple of other forums. Then realised that updating it in even the slightest was a total hassle, having to do it three times and taking so, so much longer.
So! I’m bringing everything together into a central hub, where I can make all the updates, blether and everything I’d like without having to triple up or spam posts and feel like I’m double/triple postin’ out the ass.
I’ve put all the main details stuff in the Game Details link at the top, including the blurb, a wee “about me” section, features of the game and then another area to cover screenies, links to demos (with version history) and videos when I can get one made. The rest of the posts will just be my blether about the project, and/or updates and monologues! 🙂
Dance of the Immortals 