Release Schedule

I realise I have been posting extremely infrequently here, but I have reached the point where I am going to commit to having a release of the Shattered War before the end of the year.

My posts have been infrequent not only due to me being able to spend less time on the project than I would like due to other personal commitments, but also because updates on bug fixes don't really seem as though they would be that interesting to people. I can assure you that they're not particularly interesting to write.

But more importantly, there will be a release coming within the next two months. In anticipation of this, I'd like to share some stats about the size and scope of The Shattered War:

• Over 3500 lines of voiced dialogue across dozens of characters.
• 30 completely new hand crafted areas to explore, including, villages, forests, ruins and mountains.
• Lots of side-quests, each with multiple options for resolution.
• Special hidden set-items that require puzzle solving to find.
• Fully fleshed out companions, each with their own backstory and romance subplot.
• An adventure of substantial size: a testing run takes me over 10 hours from start to finish, and I know exactly where I'm going and what I'm doing.
• A main plot where you can't do everything, you must make choices and take sides, and this will affect how characters treat you and your ultimate ending.

Needless to say, this has been a massive undertaking, and processing voice acted lines and ironing out all the potential issues relating to the various choices the player can make has been a far more time consuming process than I expected. I've had some amazing voice acting from a bunch of people, and I'm grateful for all the talent that they have provided.  However, effectively creating an expansion for Dragon Age: Origins has been no small undertaking.

I should say that there are certain issues that I have been unable to rectify. For example, there are a few characters I was unable to find voice actors for, but I want to get a playable form of the adventure out for people. I can potentially revisit some of these issues if the release garners enough interest from people to help me solve such problems.

In short, stay tuned for more information in the near future, and I hope you'll be keen to play The Shattered War.

Bug Testing

Despite the long time between posts, The Shattered War is drawing nearer to release. I'm currently going through what I hope will be my final phase of playtesting and tweaking now that voice work integration is essentially complete.

I'm about two hours into my current playthrough, and while there are some minor cosmetic issues, everything is mostly looking pretty good by now. A complete run of the game will probably add up to at least 10 hours (though likely more), and the wide variety of choices means that it is absolutely impossible to experience all the content of the game in a single run.

No one wants to see this released more than me, and I feel more than a little disappointed and frankly a bit sheepish that it's taken me so long to get the mod to a releasable state. The scope and scale of this project were possibly a little too bold, and the sheer time and dedication required to get full voice acting means it has been a massive undertaking for one person. While my efforts have probably been a bit lax for a while, I'm keen to get The Shattered War completed and in the hands of anyone who still wants to revisit the world of Dragon Age in its Origins incarnation.

I'm hoping there are still people out there who want so explore the world of Thedas and a new adventure and story within its bounds.

Voices, glorious voices

After a substantial casting round, I managed to find voice actors for all but four roles for The Shattered War - and all of those roles are for Orlesians. Looks like I have my work cut out for me finding people who can and are willing to voice Orlesian characters, but even without them, I've got a whole lot more voice actors and characters added to the roster. The people I've been receiving lines from have been talented and almost universally friendly and professional.

Of course, all of the voice actors who contribute will be credited in the final product, but I feel I should reiterate here how important they are to the project and how grateful I am to them for their efforts. Since I set the bar for this adventure to feel like a "real" Dragon Age experience, I can't deliver that unless I have full voice acting for the entire project.

I could have delivered it quite some time ago if I didn't have this restriction, and arguably a lot more people would have played it if I had done so. Personally I don't think DA:O's combat has aged well, but I'm hopefully that people will persevere through that to experience this adventure and the myriad of choices and characters voiced by these talented actors.

That said their work is just the start for me. After the voice actors have done the hard work of acting their lines, is then up to me to make sure that the delivery matches the overall tone I'm looking for - mostly this is the case because in the scripts I provide appropriate context and emotional direction where necessary - but still give the voice actors enough leeway to give their own interpretation and representation of the character. Some of the lines have been delivered in ways slightly different to how I imagined them, but have been absolutely brilliant and given characters more depth to their personality.

The next step is make sure that there's appropriate silence (or lack thereof) on either side of the line - if a character is having a monologue/dialogue then there needs to be appropriate gaps between each sentence, but if there's an argument or an interjection, there's obviously virtually no gap present.

Then I have to ensure that the overall volume levels are consistent across all characters. For this I have a line of reference dialogue that I use as the benchmark volume to compare all other lines against. If a character is angry and shouting, it'll obviously be a bit louder than the reference line, if they're sad or otherwise speaking quietly, it will be a bit softer, but ultimately the aim is to ensure that all lines within the game have a consistent volume so individual characters do not have vastly different volumes so the player would have to adjust their speaker/headset volume up and down while playing.

These things might seem trivial, but their important for making sure that there's a consistent experience for the player. Finally, once all that is done, it's time to integrate the line into the game, including setting the camera angle, facial expression/tone and individual hand/arm/head/body movements to match the lines being spoken.

This process then has to be repeated to every single line of dialogue I receive. As you can imagine, this can be quite time consuming. Nevertheless, the end result is fantastic, and thanks to the efforts of the wonderful voice actors I've been working with, the characters in The Shattered War are really coming to life beautifully.

Test, Find, Fix, Repeat

Doing playtesting for The Shattered War has been the order of business for the last couple of weeks. This has been a series of playtests starting the game from scratch and experimenting with different decisions and choices within the game. Across a few characters I've tried a number of approaches, in one case I finished every quest and looted everything I could find, and in another I blitzed through doing the bare minimum of what I needed to progress, not to mention some options in between.

I still haven't gone through a full playthrough from start to finish and have hit on issues of all shapes and sizes...

• Typos or grammar errors in dialogue, item descriptions or codex. 
• While the voiced dialogue is basically problem free, there are a number of unvoiced characters that I noted some errors in.
• There are still unvoiced NPCs - female voice actors have been particularly hard to find. I will have to make a dedicated push to finding the remaining voice actors in the near future.
• Minor scripting errors, glitches in characters not moving where they're supposed to within an area, a player's reward not being correct, an enemy not spawning when they are supposed to.
• Major scripting errors - anything that stops progress of a quest. Say, items not becoming interactive when they're supposed to, or enemy deaths not triggering quest success.
• Camera angles for conversation looking weird.
• Missing or incorrect markers on the mini-map.

Of course, while the laundry list of bugs has been a decent size, I've been able to wipe them off the list fairly rapidly as well. Smashing through these issues has been a refreshing change of pace from spending time almost exclusively in the toolset with very little playtesting. Those darkspawn never knew what hit them...

Sometimes, you just need to resort to the trusty "sword to the face" option

The good news is that the mod really does feel like it's made big strides since my last round of playtesting. A bunch of long-standing niggles and annoyances have been struck off my list, and everything is definitely coming together to make a cohesive gaming and Dragon Age experience. I've been recording some of the conversations in an effort to put together a small video of the voice actors and acting present in the mod - I'm hoping to put that together and have it available on YouTube in the near future. This won't be another trailer cut with combat - just some (spoiler free) teasers of dialogue that should whet people's appetite for some of the characters and intrigue in The Shattered War.

Tying things together

So I received a comment on my last post from someone eagerly awaiting the release of the mod. Well, despite my silence, there has been ongoing work on the mod, and some fairly major milestones have been achieved since the last update.

• All areas have been completed in terms of structure. There are a few combat encounters that need tweaking, but effectively all level design is 100% complete.
• Epilogue text and slideshow have all been written in their entirety - this was basically the last significant writing to include.
• Staging for almost all remaining conversations has been completed, and a lot of syncing, camera shots and animation has been touched up for remaining conversations.

On my to-do list before having a ready "alpha" are:

• Finish remaining encounters.
• Complete "glue" scripting to ensure appropriate transitions to/from certain "set" scenes / locations.
• Use custom backgrounds for epilogue slideshow.

Things to do before final release:

• Obtain and integrate remaining voice acting (some characters have proven extraordinarily difficult to find VAs for)
• Fix a few animations for cutscenes - there are a few short action and romance shots.
• Remove any bugs found from testing (there are bound to be some).

While that might seem like a fairly simple list, making sure that everything works is no small task - there are a *lot* of moving parts in the mod and a lot of references and consequences as a result of the player's choices during the adventure, so I have to make sure that all those bits work together.

In short, news is good and so is progress!  

Mapping it out

Recent modding efforts have been dedicated towards level design - putting the finishing touches on existing levels as well as getting the last few levels completed for the game itself.  I'm currently working on the decoration and walkmesh stage of the final large level in the game - once that's done, I'll have three small interiors (which should hopefully not require too much effort), and then one small exterior in order to complete all level design.

This will see all of the functional structure completed, and should basically require a test run-through of a few things to ensure that all the scripting elements are in place to ensure that events occur as they are supposed to based on player decisions. I've also recently gone through and tidied up the minimap appearance for all the areas - the generation of these is done automatically by the game, but unlike the original game, the minimap is basically a zoomed-out snapshot of the level from above rather than the sepia line drawing style.  While I could potentially produce minimaps in-line with the original game, I don't feel that this is entirely necessary, nor particularly worth the time that it would take me to do.  2D art isn't really something I'm particularly good at, so it would probably take me a while to create something that would be suitable. I'm happy that the level design is of a high quality such that the change in minimap style won't be an issue.

Part of a recently completed level

Once this is done, I'll have a bit more work to do to finish off a puzzle that has caused some real hassles in terms of scripting not behaving reliably, ensure that the last few special set items are added at appropriate locations within the game, and then add a very small amount of writing to one of the characters in the game and ensure the epilogues are put into the game.  At that point, all that remains to do is a full test run of the adventure, and attempt to get voice acting for the remaining unvoiced characters.

Thus the end of this modding venture is in sight - I'm hopeful that it will deliver a great roleplaying experience for people!

Levels, scripting and hooking together

My supposedly regular updates have not been forthcoming, and my apologies to people for that. However, on the whole, a lot of what I've been working on hasn't necessarily been that exciting to write or read about.
A large amount of my modding time over the past few weeks has been working on getting the overall flow of the mod strung together and debugging issues relating to plot progress. If that sounds unintelligible, put simply, I'm writing scripts to make sure that the game continues properly.

To explain in more detail, this work is what ensures that the game carries on when the player completes quests and works towards completing the main plot.  When the player completes sub-quests that progress the main plot and change the situation of the setting and The Shattered War, it is this scripting that ensures that the next key part of the plot unravels, and that characters react appropriately to the player's decisions thus far.  This scripting is what makes other characters remember the player's actions and then react to them - if the player has aggravated particularly individuals with their choices, they may act to hinder the player instead of help them.  There are a lot of different options in The Shattered War, so working through the different possibilities and combinations of player choices takes a lot of time to ensure that the appropriate consequences (both good and bad) come about as a result of those choices.

That said, I have also been working on a few new areas, including a couple of areas that I had previously planned to cut out entirely.  This means that there is even more content in the game for players to explore and experience...

Are these merely abandoned ruins? Or are they something more?

I will attempt to make more regular updates (I think I've suggested I'd do that in my last few irregular posts), but at the same time, I do want to make sure that the content is interest for people to read. If there is something people would like to know more about, please leave a comment and let me know, and I'll endeavour to answer your questions!

Testing and Internals

In addition to my ongoing testing, I've been working on some level design lately that is a little more challenging than previously - primarily because I'm working on an interior rather than an exterior.  I don't think it's a significant spoiler to say that the vast majority of The Shattered War will occur outdoors.  This is an adventure focused on the events of an area within the wilderness, and the natural landscapes, forests, hills, valleys, and the settlements built on these are where the bulk of the action will occur.

However, there are some times where the player will have to go indoors. For these areas, I've largely been taking existing areas from the campaign and making some modifications so that they're not immediately recognisable - but I'm hopeful that this will be to far better effect than was done in Dragon Age 2.  I'm definitely avoid repetition within my own adventure, but there are a couple of layouts that will likely seem very familiar to those who know the campaign intimately.

That said, I have been working on getting the structure down of some completely new areas largely created from scratch.  Here I've been using an existing levels as a base, but only as a starting point from which to add my own rooms - effectively stripping the original level down to very little before adding my own new rooms in.  This gets around some of the initial level creation issues, and also gives me a base of model names for room components and structure models to use for my own work.  I became quite familiar with model names for exteriors, so having to do interiors meant learning a whole new set of model names, which increases the amount of time taken by quite a bit.  Also critical in indoor levels is ensuring that everything is lined up. Exteriors are a bit easier to "eyeball it", when it comes to placement, but interiors really require that everything fits together nicely in order to work properly.

Working shot of part of an interior

This shot is one of the "easy" options - stone corridors are far easier to match up than caverns and cave interiors.  What's worse is that the models in Dragon Age really don't match up very nicely and often require you to match specific pieces with each other, making it harder to get a more unique look and design without copying the original Dragon Age levels. I want to ensure that the "special" locations in The Shattered War are exactly that - special - and not make the player think "wait, I've been here before." Hence the need for the effort required to create these unique interiors for the adventure. 

Bugs squashing continues...

Yes, it's been more than a couple of weeks since my last update, so my apologies for the silence. Again, I'm aiming to have regular updates, but I'm trying to make sure that I don't just put content like "found 5 bugs, fixed spelling mistakes" or the like.

As for details of the progress I've been making, there are a few fairly significant things that I've managed.

I've finished processing all the voice cuts for one of the party companions. I've previously described that this can be a fairly time consuming process, and this represents a considerable chunk of time, as that's over 300 lines of dialogue for this character. To give you an impression of how much dialogue that actually is, here's a list of the number of lines of personal dialogue for characters in Mass Effect 2.

Now, the numbers there don't actually represent ALL the possible lines of dialogue for ME2 characters, but given that The Shattered War is a one-man development effort, you can see that there's a LOT of content for players to experience.

Taraz is a dwarf with plenty to say.

Secondly, I've worked on creating several sets of items that the player can find - customised sets with their own backstory and codex entries, and the items offer significant bonuses to the player should they explore enough and solve the puzzles required to find them.  There is a major set each for the warrior, rogue and mage, so no matter your character or party composition, they will be useful.

This has also meant that I've finished up a couple of the puzzles I mentioned in a previous post that will allow the player to get their hands on some of these items, and done a bunch of bugtesting to make they work without a hitch. That took a little finesse, as they were initially unsolvable due to some errors I'd made.

Aside from those two major things, I've been doing quite a bit of playtesting on the major plot quests of the game, which are all looking fairly solid at this point. This also included a number of cosmetic changes just to add more flavour to the experience - added ambient NPCs and behaviours that are shown in response to the player's actions so that they can see some of the effects that their choices are having. For example, if a player rescues a group of people, these people will then return to the town they are from, going about their business and other people in that town may comment on their rescue. 

Small things like this aren't critical to the plot, but they do reinforce the work I've put into place to make sure that the game will react to the decisions that players make. Seeing effects and consequences is one of the major goals of my design for The Shattered War, so I'm confident that touches like this will make it a memorable experience.

Filling out content

In addition to the playtesting I've been doing to piece the core plot of the game together from start to finish, I've also been working on designing and adding in some extra content that has been in my mind for a while. I'm talking about "light content", which is the little subquests that revolve more around exploration and puzzle solving that reward the inquisitive player.  Generally, these things are much less time consuming and demanding to implement for me than fully fledged quests. Think of these quests like the "Chanter's Board" quests from Dragon Age, but without a central location to kick them off for you.

There are a few things that I want to make sure that I do with these quests in order to make them interesting, and so am trying to follow a few principles when creating them.

Don't make it immediately obvious

The point here is that I want the player to start the quest by finding something, not by going to a person with a marker above their head or a notice board in the middle of a village. It could be a journal, a scrap of paper, a strange item, some kind of key, or anything really.  The main point is that the player should find something that gives them a clue that there is something else that they could do or find.

Require exploration
These objects should be spread out across the areas that the player will explore - they won't just be found in the main locations that every player will have to visit. The levels I've created for the mod are reasonably large - and I'd like to encourage players to explore them. With many modern games, we're often forced down very linear paths, so trying to get players to search and experience the fun of exploration is something I'd like to be able to do.

Monsters are easy to find, these should require more effort

Puzzles can be fun
One thing I find really annoying about puzzles in many games is that they're either really obscure and illogical (the worst of Monkey Island syndrome, or Anna), or blatantly obvious (Towers of Hanoi).  The other annoyance is when puzzles are presented in a way that they're not solvable when you encounter them, either because you don't have the right skills/items to solve them (e.g. Batman, Assassin's Creed), or worse, that the player cannot complete the puzzle until they are explicitly told what to do. Where I implement puzzles, I want the player to be given enough information to carry them out, but without beating them over the head with an answer. This is a tough balance, but I'm hoping to provide a mix of puzzles that should be interesting.

Use player skills
Skills like tracking, herbalism, pick pocketing and the like are things that are often neglected by designers. Even in Dragon Age itself, it felt like these were mostly for facilitating combat rather than being useful for anything else.  I want to be able to use these skills to assist, or possibly even be required to complete some of these quests.

Give rewards
The player should get something from these kinds of quests. They're exploring, uncovering secrets and the like, and thus should be rewarded with different and unique items as a result. This is the icing on the cake to make the player go "that was awesome!" This is where I'll be giving out the most interesting and powerful items in the game, because it rewards dedicated players, and makes people want to explore and find those hidden secrets.

So that's my update for this week. Stay tuned for another update next week!

Playtesting: Old and New

One of the big things from doing a bunch of playtesting is that you quickly realise where things don't quite work. This is blatantly obvious when it comes to show-stoppers, of course.  If you can't progress a quest because of some logic error, an area being inaccessible (either in or out) or not receiving an object you need to complete the quest, this is immediately recognisable.

With the title of this post, what I'm talking about is where things don't "fit" quite so well as they should.  While I've been focusing primarily on the big show stoppers, I also hit upon the continuity, realism or general flow of the game issues that mean things just don't come together nicely.  One such issue was relating to a major quest, where part of it occured on the same area as a main town map area.  This was originally to make sure the player got to see the whole town map area, but as I played the game, I realised that it simply didn't fit in terms of the content of the quest.

This means new area time!  Now, in this particular case, I didn't actually want to spent hours and hours on making a new area. This is basically a one-shot area that isn't really designed for much more than a single encounter. I've created almost all my areas from scratch in The Shattered War, but there are a couple where I have used existing work as a base for an area. In this case, I grabbed one of the default areas from DAO... but modified it to suit my own purposes.  Doing this, I've managed to create an entirely new area with basically only a few hours of effort. 

The really good thing about this is that with some clever editing, it's quite easy to change the area such that it's not easily recognisable as one of the original areas even for someone who has played the game a lot.  By removing a bunch of items, changing texturing and vegetation, and doing a few key modifications to the existing terrain, it is possible to make it look dramatically different. Here's a shot of my modified level below - if you've played DAO, see if you can spot where it came from!

You never know what's around the corner...

If you're interested, here's a link to a comparison shot of the original level compared to my modified version.  I'd still like to do a bit more work to the decoration of the level, but given my current focus is getting the mod "content complete", that will have to wait.

Playtesting and Bug Squashing

My modding efforts for the past week have all been working towards my stated goal of getting the game in a more playable state. This was to try to get through as much of the game as I could in its current state. There are still a handful of things that need to be fixed before I can run through from start to finish, but that glue that links all the individual finished components shouldn't be far off.

So the weekend saw me spend a fair amount of time doing a playthrough from the very beginning and exploring as much as I could, noting down any issues along the way.  I'm focusing primarily on the gamebreaking issues, but noting the cosmetic ones as well for future attention. Then, sometimes you just pause for some reason and manage to catch a party member leaping at an Ogre and looking a little bit odd...

Flying goose strike!

The good news is that I managed to get through quite a lot of the mod before I had to stop.  There were, of course, things that I missed, but that's inevitable when you've got an adventure like The Shattered War. Some choices cut off some content, meaning you can't see everything in one playthrough. It also means there will have to be lots of testing before I can finally call it finished.

There were a bunch of little things that tripped me up along the way:

• I was missing stages for couple of conversations - which unceremoniously dumps the player (and the person they're talking to) outside of the walkable area of the level.
• I'd moved/renamed some resources/levels, which means they were inaccessible when referenced by name by some scripts/variable names.
• The ability for supposedly mutually exclusive quest lines to be run simultaneously due to some bad logic.
• I'd failed to set attach some scripts to plots - so when the player completed particular actions, the necessary consequences didn't occur. While this really puts a dampener on a playthrough, I've done this a few times now, so it's one of the first things I check (and subsequently solve a number of issues in one hit).

Smaller issues were things like:

• Areas having very quiet ambient sound. To be honest, I'm not actually sure how I can fix some of this, because there's simply no way within the toolset to increase their volume. This is actually one of the most annoying issues, because the ambient sound really makes a huge difference to the overall atmosphere of the area. If anyone with DAO modding knowledge has any idea about this, I'd really love to hear from you.
• Tweaks to companion approval scripts causing the approval for one of the companions to not work.  
• Some recorded lines of dialogue were uncharacteristically louder or softer than they should have been. There was a nice conversation and then suddenly ONE OF THE CHARACTERS IS TALKING REALLY LOUDLY.
• A large battle scene where one side simply refused to fight and simply stood there, oblivious to any combat around them.

On the whole, I've made some great progress, and should be able to make even more over the coming week.

Breaking the Silence

A long overdue blog here for readers...

No, I'm not announcing that I'm no longer working on The Shattered War.  In fact it's pretty much the opposite.  I'll be up front here folks, development has been in "slow time" for the past couple of months. I've been spending maybe an hour a day to work on the mod, and some days I haven't worked on it at all.  As such, things have been progressing slowly. 

Some of the things I've been doing have been very time consuming, but haven't really contributed much to the "content complete" nature of being able to run the mod from start to finish. We're talking dialogue tweaking - the animations, the flow, the voice cuts. It's things like making sure the decorations and appearance of levels is "just right" - making sure they have wind, checking that there are lootable items for players to discover adjusting ambient NPCs and behaviours to make areas "look inhabited.  Then there's creating new custom items and giving them their own descriptions and codex entries.

All this is fantastic stuff and I feel it really adds to that undefinable "quality" factor of a mod, but it's not great for maintaining developer motivation in feeling like you're making progress towards having it "finished".

Perfectly phrased codex entries aren't gameplay

As such, I'm going to switch my focus for the time being on getting the game "content complete" and making it completely playable without glitches and bugs from start to finish. There are a lot of components to the mod and a lot of choices that the player can make, so I'm going to make sure that those can be followed through to completion. This will mean using "unfinished" levels in a few instances, but in this case I'm going to ditch my perfectionist nature so that the mod can be completed.

From now on, I'll be looking to post a weekly update on my progress - so stay tuned for more regular information on the development process!

Not all saves are created equal

A quick post today regarding progress on The Shattered War... or rather as I could put it more accurately, a loss of progress.

One of the quite time consuming but important things I've been doing lately is VO integration. This is where characters animations, the speaker's facial expression and the camera angles used for every single dialogue are checked.  It's making sure that a speaker's arms or hands aren't moving when they should be, or that I customise their movements to better match with the line of dialogue they're speaking.

As I do this, I save regularly.  Unfortunately, unbeknownst to me, that doesn't actually directly and immediately save this information. The Dragon Age toolset saves everything to a database, and it seems that when you hit the save button, that doesn't mean it automatically saves it to the database. Instead, it appears that it merely prepares them to be written to the database.  It appears that the changes aren't written until you either close the dialogue that you're working on within the toolset, or close the toolset entirely.

Why is this a problem? The problem is that the toolset isn't the most reliable of tools. It can, and does, crash periodically. It can easily occur while you're generating lip sync information or previewing dialogue lines, both of which are things you need to do on a regular basis while doing VO integration. If the toolset happens to crash, then all those prepared changes are lost. They're not written to the database.

Unfortunately, I didn't realise this the way that the toolset worked. I've come to this conclusion after losing several hours of VO integration work. After that, I needed to take a bit of a break away from the toolset.  Now that my anger and disappointment have faded, I feel I can restart the process of redoing all the work I've already done once today. I'll also be closing and re-opening the dialogue/toolset on a regular basis to ensure I don't lose any more work.

Shattered War: Still Progressing

I realise that I've been less active on this blog of late that I would like, and probably less active than I should be.  This is partly because I've been slightly busier than usual and been able to dedicate less time to blogging and modding than I would like, but also because a lot of the modding work I've been doing lately for The Shattered War hasn't been terribly interesting for people to read about.

Why is that? Mainly because a lot of the work has either been testing and fixing bugs, or writing dialogue scripts. Dialogue scripts are the text files that get sent to voice actors once a role has been filled. This is a test file with a full export of all the character's lines, but heavily annotated. It provides a character biography, so the voice actor has an insight into their personality. It has any background information on the lore or setting that people may not be familiar with that is relevant to the character and their dialogue, along with details of any plots/storylines that the character may be involved with. It also contains a pronunciation guide for the names of other characters or locations.

Voicing a templar would be less convincing without relevant lore knowledge

Finally, the lines are divided up into logical segments to indicate the structure of the dialogue, and also an indication of the character's emotions or thought process behind the line is provided. This allows the voice actor to inject their own skill and take on the character's personality, while remaining true to the core persona with which the character has been written.  There is a delicate balance here - being too prescriptive doesn't allow the voice actor to act properly or give a good range of emotion and characterisation, but too little information and the voice actor may convey something completely different from what is meant in the context of the conversation or situation.

However, all the dialogue and all the scripts for the entire mod have been written, so I'll be running open auditions for all roles until they're filled. If you're at all interested in providing voice acting for any of the characters in the mod, please check out this page for details on characters and how to audition.

That said, there are still a handful of levels in the game that haven't yet been finalised. Some of these I'll be keeping in reserve and won't be publishing screenshots for them - I don't want to give away all the eye candy in the game. Of course, I can't tease you like that with giving a shot from another area that shows off the cold and unforgiving landscape of the setting...

Brrr, it's cold out there...

I'll endeavor to get back to more regular updates of progress on The Shattered War, it's been a very long journey of development thus far, and there's still a substantial amount of work left, but there will be quite a lot of gameplay to show for it once it's finished.

Shattered War: The Many Faces of Dialogue

When people think of dialogue in a roleplaying game, frequently mentioned items tend to be the content, the player responses, the player's choice and the quality of the voice acting (if it exists). Lower on the list of things mentioned tend to be the expression or movements of the virtual actors, except for when they are notably bad. A twisted head or a cross eyed expression will draw some raised eyebrows, but a wooden performance will not.

Working within the bounds of the Dragon Age toolset, it's impossible to break free of the "BioWare face" for the NPCs within the game. NPCs can gesticulate fairly wildly, and sometimes in a fashion that makes absolutely no sense in the context of their conversation. So such, it comes down to me to manually tweak the animations for each line of dialogue within the game after I've received the final recording from the relevant voice actor. I've been doing this a lot lately, so I thought I'd talk about some of the associated issues in today's post.

Stay a while and listen. Wait, that's not my line...

Now while this might seem like a fairly trivial and insignificant thing to some readers/players, having believable gestures actually goes a long way to assisting the believability of the delivery of the lines. If someone is upset or angry, they're more likely to wave their hands about, and they're more likely to move them faster. Someone who is calm and confident is much more likely to have smaller and/or slower movements while they're talking. Manually adjusting these actions can support the delivery of the line, or help uncover the truth that the character is trying to hide.

However, if you study people in real life, you may notice that some people barely gesture at all. Now while it should follow that some characters should also not gesture, this should be kept to a minimum. Even small and subtle movements suggesting some type of body language can make a big difference in helping convey the line delivered by the character.

The other key part of adapting the character to the delivery of the line is their expression. This can make a huge difference in how the line comes across while viewing it. The exact same line can give  a different impression upon the player when combined with the facial expression. Take the following screenshot for comparison:

Neutral, happy, and coy

These three different facial expressions, especially when carried through the delivery of the line, convey quite a different feel to the player as they are watching. The expression can help convey a subtext for the character's emotions that would not be present otherwise. A nervous or worried expression while talking about another person can help imply that they care for that person, adding an extra depth to the character that never has to be explicitly stated, but can be determined by the player through the combination of voice acting and facial expressions.

So every single line you'll see in The Shattered War has been watched and listened to by me, and for a significant percentage, I will have manually adjusted the emotional expression and hand and arm gestures, and/or body and head movements for those lines. I'll also have picked which camera angle I want to use, and any transitions that occur. Dialogue is a very important part of The Shattered War, so I want to make sure that every single line is as good as I can make.

Level Design: One Simple Idea

Level design is both extraordinarily complex and mind numbingly simple. In essence, a level must be aesthetically pleasing and functional for gameplay.  Simply put, it must look good and it must let the player play the game. Unfortunately, that is not a straightforward task. To demonstrate some of my thought processes, here's some of the steps I've taken on a level I'm currently working on.

As I've stated previously, I always try to start with some kind of idea or map sketch. For this level, I started with a map. (Forgive my pictures here, as I've quickly sketched these on the computer because I don't have a scanner) My first idea looked a little like this:

Draft map

This is a simple design, a dual level area, with a stream off to the side. A few extra buildings would added here and there. The main problem is that this just didn't inspire me. Functionally it works, and there is the potential for it to look good, but it lacked "one simple idea". What I mean is the idea of a single view within the level that inspires you, and hopefully the player. You may end up with more than one of these per level, but you should make sure you have at least one of these in your mind before start building the level in an editor.

I attempted to try and rework this idea a few times, but I couldn't manage to get something that really appealed to me. The thing to do in this circumstance is to throw it away. If you have to work really hard to make something feel right, you're better off trying a completely new tack. You may end up returning to this idea at a later date and turning it into something you do like, but you need to be willing to throw away ideas that don't work. So I drew this instead:

Take 2

I came up with this idea after wandering around in some bushland and combining different fragments of the landscape that I'd seen. The four trees in the middle on the edge of the cliff were my "one simple idea", and the view of a tower on the hill in the corner was another. Aesthetically I had more ideas that appealed to me and that I wanted to create. The only real problem I felt was that there could be a bit of backtracking, so I decided to add in a set of steps on the right hand side, which both would prevent that from occurring and also potentially add in another nice visual cue.

I'm part way through developing the level now, so I won't really show much of it, but here's the view that started as the core idea for this level. It doesn't look that great because it's using default lighting and isn't decorated much, but the kernel of the visual appearance I had in mind is there.

One simple idea

The final thing to remember is that fluidity in the design as it translates into an actual level is necessary. My final level will not end up looking exactly like the map as it was originally drawn, but the key visual and functional elements will still stay there. I've already made adjustments in terms of locations and tweaked the structure of the level, but the core layout for movement and the "visual cues" that I want to have present will all be there in the release version of the level.

Shattered War: Update

I've spent a number of posts in recent times focusing on more design concepts in The Shattered War and how I'm using principles to make sure it's a well-developed and interesting adventure. While this is interesting from a design perspective it doesn't really tell anyone what I've been doing to get the mod finished. So today... that's what I'm going to cover.

First up, is writing. Writing, writing and more writing. Story and characterisation are very important to me when playing an RPG, so I make them a priority when making one. As such, I've been doing a lot of writing, covering the dialogue for major characters. This is a significant body of work, as there are several keys NPCs in addition to the four party members available in the game.

You can expect party members to talk. A lot.

To give you a sense of the amount of dialogue, second tier NPCs, which play a significant but not primary role in the story) have around 80-140 lines of dialogue. Primary NPCs are party members have in excess of 200 lines of dialogue, containing 4000 or more words of dialogue. Once these are written, they must be proofread and checked for consistency and clarity. Characters must be understood readily by players, so their language must not be ambiguous.

After the dialogue has been written and checked, then the script to send to voice actors must be created. This involves an export into a text file, and lines are organised logically to provide context and background. Many lines must also have specific direction/commentary to give the voice actor the necessary emotion of character's thoughts behind their answer. The voice actor needs to know if someone is being serious, sad, determined, playful, or any other relevant emotion to direct their performance. If I don't provide this information, voice actors can have a difficult time trying to bring characters to life.

I can't have these people being dull cardboard cutouts.

Aside from that, there's dealing with the dialogue once I receive it. This involves making sure the volume is consistent across the recording and across characters, so particular lines or characters don't drown out others. There's also making sure that there's an appropriate amount of silence between sentences. This is relatively simple, but it is time consuming, and while it's not noticeable by players when they play the game, it's very noticeable if it isn't done.

Even then, there's the final integration with the game itself. This includes: making sure the character staging is done correctly, that characters have appropriate facial expressions, that the same camera angle isn't used for too long, that camera cuts occur at appropriate times, and that the gestures that characters make match with the lines they are speaking. All these things are required to create and maintain an immersive cinematic experience.

Creating a stage is essential for a good cinematic conversation

On top of all that, I have been doing some playtesting work, general scripting and plot/journal entry writing as well. There's also been some conceptual planning for the levels that I still have to create. This primarily consists of me doing sketches or overhead map drawing for the areas to plan out the structure of the level. My inspiration usually comes from various landscape images or places I've seen in person, combined together to create a brand new environment. Of course, there's a healthy dose of pure imagination as well, along with general practical considerations to consider player movement and gameplay: avoiding backtracking, movement blocking during combat, texture/item/foliage pop-in, and so on.

So there's a quick rundown of all the work I've been doing recently on The Shattered War. I hope it provides some insight into the amount of work that is required, and what I'm doing with all the time that I've been spending on the project.

Shattered War: Choices

One thing I've really tried to do during the development of The Shattered War is to pose players with difficult choices. The adventure is aimed to give the player every ability to make meaningful decisions and have those come back to affect the events that follow on. So in today's post, I want to talk about how I'm doing that.

Small detail
The first point that I want to make is that decisions will affect that the way others interact with the player. Decisions will be reflected in small off-hand comments made by NPCs about past events. They will make a quip or jibe based on decisions, just to reinforce to the player that their decisions have been noted. While this is subtle, it help inform the player that their decision has been noted, and leaves them wondering "what if I'd made another choice?"

Real ramifications
Events turn out differently based on your choices. It's that simple. People could die, and almost anyone is fair game. From very early on in the game, the player could kill off NPCs or potentially pit them against you. They might have offered the player help which would provide assistance (potentially money, items, or even make a battle easier) for the future, or they might make the player's life more difficult. Again, they could simply just be dead entirely. No replacements issued.

Some key NPCs. You might kill any or all of them based on your choices.

Delayed Consequence
Not every decision will have immediate consequences, and I feel this is one of the more important factors to making meaningful choice. The potential drawback here is that it means that players might not necessarily know the cause of a particular outcome, but the small details and comments will help overcome that in a way doesn't break the Fourth Wall (See The Witcher for example of how not to do this). This means that player don't simply get to a make choice and find out what happens, which means that players have the option of a decision then immediately replaying the last five minutes to see whether they like the other outcome better.

The other potential problem here is that players may be making a decision but not realising that they are making one. This is something that I'm not really going to apologise for, because then I'm aiming for those "real ramifications" that really hit the player hard and show them that their choices to help or not help people have consequences that they may not have intended.

Your decisions might turn a rescue into a massacre

Compound Interest
Not all outcomes are affected by a single decision. People and events aren't simple. One single decisions should not make or unmake key aspects of a game, just as they do not in real life. The opinions of others about the player are formed over a series of decisions, which will eventually influence their overall attitude to the player. The same is true of battle-related decisions. The collective effect of multiple decisions will be used to determine the outcome of key aspects of the game. Just because you turned your back on someone when you first met them doesn't mean that they should despise you forever, even though in some cases that may be true.


Once again, the key aspect I want to reinforce in The Shattered War is that the player will be driving their adventure, potentially from decisions they don't even realise they are making. The outcomes may not always be happy, but they come from the choices that the player makes.

Shattered War Characters: Farouk

It's time to meet another character from the cast of The Shattered War. In today's post, I'll introduce a key NPC from the adventure: The Templar Commander Farouk.

Farouk was born into a Chasind family, but his the rest of his family was killed by The Chantry under suspicion of being apostates. In an act of kindness, of the templars rescued him, for he was just a young boy at the time. As a result, he was raised by the Chantry and soon led into the life of a Templar after becoming a devout follower of the Maker. He does not consider himself one of the Chasind people, and is grateful for path his life has taken.

"Templars act to protect the safety of everyone, and sometimes that means making hard decisions in an instant. The Chantry trusts us with that power, with that burden."

He takes his duties as a templar very seriously, and rarely engages in humour. He is greatly distrustful of any mages outside of his jurisdiction, particularly Dalish elves, but is even suspicious of Grey Wardens who are also mages. He does not hate apostates, but will attempt to bring them to the Circle/Chantry in order to fulfill his duty. While he has no love for mages and does not trust them, he does not wish to chain them up, and finds the Qunari treatment of mages distasteful. However, if a mage was deemed to be a maleficar, he would see them killed instantly.

 "Rest assured that the Chantry recognises those who follow their duty."

In the Shattered War, Farouk is responsible for the templars within Fort Velen, and is responsible for overseeing mages who are part of the militia force. While he shares the same rank as Norvac, he makes no claims for seniority, as he recognizes Norvac's greater experience in conducting military operations.

As a significant character in The Shattered War, he will be an important character for players during their adventure. It will be their choice as to whether the relationship with him will be friendly or antagonistic...