Finale

More or less everything is done - there is only some final debugging to be done, and the mod is complete (or at least, as complete as it will get before we hand it in). Contrary to Rhiannon's earlier post, most of the voice sets are in (mostly recorded by Tim and edited by me). We weren't able to import models into NWN, meaning we needed to fall back to placeholder graphics. Other than that, though, our mod seems quite good, and quite complete.

Additional Story

Wolf neglected to mention we idly considered the idea of having Enzo, as the henchman, appearing in each world and corrupting it (hence why the good guys are enemies - they've been corrupted). The idea met with approval, but it's still unclear whether it should be put through.

So far very little work has been on done on actual tangible development of the mod - it's mostly been creating the storyline, and deciding what will and will not work in the final version. Soon, work will begin on the mod itself and we'll have something more interesting to put here than just the storyline.

Developing ideas...

Had another Games Studio class today, and so ideas have been further developed. The idea of putting multiple classic games into Neverwinter Nights seems to be fairly well fixed in stone, so now we're coming up with ideas for what the player does in this module. The basic idea seems to be some mysterious gamer person who does some mysterious thing and mysteriously puts the character into a nexus, through which he can access all the game worlds. In case it isn't obvious, our storyline isn't very well developed yet :) In any case, the character visits the worlds and fights characters/monsters that appear in them (the Pacman ghosts, as well as the almight Pacman himself, slugs(!) from Commander Keen, standard Zelda monsters, and so on). Upon completion of each world, the character gains an item unique to that world, which cannot be used (plot items). These items together are used to unlock a seal which will allow the character to fight the gamer responsible for this mess in the first place. We considered using our lecturer or tutor for the final boss - whether we'll have the courage to go through with this, I have no idea.

The Pacman world seems focused on moving through a darkened maze (collecting EXP and possibly gold for running over the unused pickups, obviously), while either avoiding or fighting the ghosts. When the level is complete, he'll be allowed to fight Pacman himself. The idea of a world structured around 'Where's Wally?' seems possible, but not practical. Personally, the only way I can see it happening is if the player needs to explore through hordes of NPCs - which will not be particularly fun. All the other worlds seem structured on the basic Neverwinter Nights game - find/kill, search/destroy.

The items we currently are considering using to unlock the seal are:

• Pacman Tablet - one of Pacman's powerup tablets, necessary to provide the power to weaken the interdimensional barrier.
• Commander Keen's raygun - The strength of this awesome weapon is required to pierce a hole between dimensions.
• Zelda Shield - The shield is a symbol of defense - in the case of the seal, it holds the two dimensions seperate.
• Kirby hat - Icon of disguise, deception and mimicry - the only way a game character will be able to put himself on an equal footing with a true gamer.

The descriptions I just came up with now (they seem appropriate - I'll ask the group) - the items to be used however were decided on in class. Probably I've left a couple off the list in my typical forgetful way. We also agreed to have cameo appearances throughout the game by characters unrelated to the worlds, such as Bugs Bunny. Undoubtedly this is going to be a very weird mod...

The Beginning

Well, today our team finally made a decision on how we were going to mod Neverwinter Nights. Our previous idea consisted of a total conversion based around the TV series Stargate, but that has been scrapped as being too difficult to implement in Neverwinter Nights in a mere 12 weeks. Our current angle involves having the character travel to other worlds based on classic video games. Only video games with very simple (and therefore easy to duplicate) graphics wil be used. Possible 'worlds' so far include Commander Keen, Monster Bash, Zelda, Pacman (!), and many others. Exactly how some of these worlds will be implemented remains to be seen, particularly given a number of them were originally 2D and have never been transferred to 3D. I've included some screenshots from some of those games below for your viewing pleasure :)

For now the team is focusing on researching these games to extract every detail, and determine different means by which these worlds can appear in a Neverwinter Nights module. Should be fun....



Commander Keen 4

Zelda

Monster Bash



Xono - Programmer