His Girl Fordi

I've had this idea for a while about NPCs talking to each other.  I had envisioned NPCs sharing snappy banter, similar to that between Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell in the movie His Girl Friday.  NPCs can't do this currently*; they just stand around quietly and wait for someone to bump into them.  I want to change that, so I spent all afternoon developing a new script that will enable NPCs to converse between each other.  And when I say "developing," I really mean "designing."  I have a blueprint for how the script should behave, but I have not done any actual scripting.  I guess that currently categorizes the script as "vaporware."

I'm struggling a bit with how to prioritize this script.  I think that it's important enough to focus upon, for I could really utilize such a script.  I also think that it could blossom into a huge, labor-intensive project that would require more work than its yielded benefit.  I'll need to give this a little more thought; my availability for Clan Lord projects is diminishing, and as I mentioned earlier, I need to be smart on how I spend my time.

And while speaking about how one spends one's time: may I just express how simply amazed I am that His Girl Friday is available on YouTube?  Set aside 90 minutes and watch it.  Enjoy a great classic comedy.

*[Clarification edit: NPCs can't converse with each other in a way that I want.]

Quest Clutter

The final finishing touches have been placed on the V636 quest, and I am satisfied with what I have.  I can always tweak and adjust the quest on subsequent updates.

Working on this quest, plus some recent comments on the Sentinel, has put my brain into a creative overload. I've been jotting notes on loose scraps of paper and now this collection looks like some sort of a crime scene involving a piñata.  I now have a better idea of how long it takes to develop a quest, implement it and tune it.  I would like to think it possible to get three simple quests in per update, or maybe one involved quest.  This is assuming that the quest is the only project on which I work, which, between you, I and the fence post, is an unrealistic assumption.

Suppose for a moment that I manage to introduce that many quests per update.  Then what?  What happens after a quest is introduced and everyone has completed it?  I foresee an issue of quest overload followed by quest clutter and quest apathy.  The real challenge is making each new quest refreshing and exciting from the previous quests.  It would be easy enough to add a Scavenger Hunt-type quest that involves collecting X number of item Y, but does changing the values of X and Y make the quest any more interesting?

Perhaps one approach is to have temporary quests, where a new quest is only available for the duration of the current Chaos Storm, after which time it becomes history.  Some players may complete the quest, others may just hear of it after the fact.  Once-per-update quests could be a vehicle for introducing new test items: players who complete the special Darshak story-quest, for example, receive a Honed Cutlass as a reward item.

Based on the ideas flowing from the Sentinel, suggestions by numerous players, and plus my own zany ideas, I predict that Clan Lord will one day have more quests than it has players.  I have mixed feelings on working towards that goal.

(And I think that it's time that I add a "Quests" label to this blog.  I discuss them a lot.)

No longer waiting to exhale

Whew.

Today was a long day for me, but I managed to finish most of the stuff on my V636 punch list.  I still have a couple of scripts that need revising, but all of my update content is in the mail.  I feel so relived.

The paved road and the secret tunnel leading to the University will need to wait one more update.  Sorry.

Down to the wire

Today was spent refining the areas and scripts of the new quest.  I'm realizing that it takes longer to polish the details of a quest than it does to create the "big" work (support scripts and area-building).  I find myself hair-splitting phrases: should the NPC say "lead your trustworthy party to victory," or "assemble a trustworthy group and lead them to victory."  Same sentence but with two slightly different feels.

I need to focus on areas first, as they are due tomorrow.  I can slide the scripts in over the weekend.

Tick tock.

h4X!

This day was spent reading someone else's script.

The script is an older script – tried and true – but I had wanted to add new functionality to it.  It took a lot of reading and a little bit of luck but I managed to implement a new, novel hack to the script.

It works, but now I need to learn if I can break it.  Getting a script to work is one thing, but making it crash-resistant is quite another.

Two days until deadline.  Tick tock.

Nicely Nicely

I need to stop rocking the boat.

The problems that I now face are (1) my update is due in three days, and (2) one of the quests that I am submitting keeps getting revised, re-revised and re-re-revised.  Tonight while finalizing the quest, I came up with yet another idea for it, which means another change to it.  The great news is that I think I finally nailed the quest down solid and I think that it will be a lot of fun to do, but on the other hand, the latest revision of this quest is generating more work for me than I have time to give it.

This quest is the priority, so everything else that I've been doing may need to wait.

Why do I do this to myself?  I say to myself sit down.  Sit down, sit down, sit down, SIT DOWN.

V636 Crunch

This is update week, which means that I will spend the week pulling together content.  I spent today polishing some areas and refining some upcoming quests.  This will be an action that I repeat through Friday evening.

I always get nervous the week before an update.  There's so much to do and so much to manage.