NWN1:EE-project in a German school 03 - 2nd meeting

Blog #3 - 2nd meeting:

I prepared a special little demo adventure for them with a “get something back for me” type of quest. In addition to that I created a PDF on the basic handling of the game (on features, which I showed in the first teacher-demo), so they have something to look things up.

What I learned from my past computer courses with Game Maker and the PMs with Jimdad55 is, that one should not reveal too much “specials” at the beginning! More than once I was tempted to add an awesome special effect, show more options in a conversations (like mentioning the gender or the name of the player)! But students tend to want to have similar complex things accomplished right away without having managed the basics. So I kept the demo-adventure pretty basic.

Well, from one thing, I couldn’t keep my hands off: Custom content! I just love to play around with NWN-content in a 3D-programm! So I had the idea to recreate our PC room with a bit more modern looking character and with this to also give a hint towards the possibility to add one’s own content to the game.

So here is what our PC-Room looks like:

And here are some in game shots of this room:

At the end, we took some time to analyze, what was in this demo-adventure. Some things I built in were:

- Custom content.

- A locked (PC-room) door, which is unlocked after a chat with the teacher.

- Conversations, which show more than one option and not all possibilities at the same time.

- Creatures can have custom names.

- Not all creatures attack.

- Creatures can be turned hostile after a conversation.

- Objects can be examined.

- Signs with descriptions.

- A locked chest -> The key for this is dropped by the meanie, when he is beaten!

- Sometimes, for some creatures, the player needs a special weapon to be able to cause damage.

Again, some rabbit holes were waiting for me:

1. Some wanted the English version! I prepared a setting.tml edited to call up the German language, with tuned down graphic settings and other little bits (like gore = 0 :-) ). So they didn’t copy over my version and got a pretty laggy game! Well, a few clicks, and things went better. I should have prepared an English setting.tml.

2. While playing, the students - of course - tried numerous things, which I didn’t think of in my module! Here is a small selection:

- They attacked a cow behind a fence. For some of them, the player character was “pulled” into the fenced area (because there was a walkmesh-hole I didn’t notice while play testing) and they got stuck!

- Some attacked the main character (the teacher). I thought, that they would try that, so I made him immortal. But I forgot, that they then can’t continue the adventure at that point. Luckily, the teacher is un-hostile-ized after a respawn of the player! :-D

- I placed in a mummy and put an according effective weapon into a chest. Some players missed the chest and then didn’t know what to make of the message “weapon ineffective”. So, the demo adventure needs another hint here!