No pretty picture today

December 07, 2007 by Adam in NWN2

No pretty picture today. Just imagine I'm posting about an old school text adventure or something.

I debugged the alphabet game yesterday, which continues to amuse me. Little pop-up text over the letters say things like "A is for Armor" and "B is for Blindness". When you spell a word with those letters, that effect happens. I've only got a quarter of the way through the alphabet, so things like Z don't do anything exciting yet. You can also spell words such as "Sword" that in addition to the letter-based effects, also make the party do maximum damage with melee weapons for the duration. I'd like to add more of these to reward the thoughtful wordsmith.

I also did basic area building, making the level actually look like a real place. It's amazing how much time it takes to create a single level, placing lights, placeables, and so on. I'm going for a straight dungeon-crawl feel, which is actually pretty different from most of the areas I have in the game. Today I'd like to work on getting creatures to "drop" new letters, with more powerful creatures giving out bronze, silver, or gold letters which give a more dramatic effect.

I had problems uploading the latest build to FileFront yesterday, so I couldn't pass things out to the testers. I'm going to try again today, and switch over to several other file sharing servers if it fails.

Update: I just noticed that there was a new developer post on Obsidian's blog today. Looking at their plans for the 1.12 patch, it appears their #1 item is:
Eliminate the errors caused by transitioning with familiars summoned.

So, it looks like it's not my fault. In my next build, I'll see if I can unsummon Daniel's companion before each area transition. It's a bit silly, but should work.