This week's outlook

I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel! It's not a little ironic that area building has become the most fun part of the process for me, considering that it's what I was dreading the most when I first picked up the toolset. Thanks to the useful Cave Roof placeable on the Vault, I've been able to fake a few of my interiors as exteriors instead, which is something I never thought I'd want to do. :) I think I've done a really good job duplicating NWN1 tilesets using NWN2 so far, particularly the forest tileset in one of my areas and the underdark tileset in my more recent Endless Caverns. The Dire Wood and The Sisters have their own charm, as do my first few Star Mounts areas--towards the top, one area in particular reminded me a ton of the first area you step into after beating Xantam the Beholder in Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance on the PS2. It was mountainous, a blend of dirt and stone, and there were ogres and gnolls everywhere. Bet you can't guess what kinds of creatures you'll be fighting in that area! ;)

So let's see...apart from making pretty areas, I've created almost all the blueprints for the game. I can think of 4 more that need to be done for various sidequests, and then I have a few to do for the latter part of the main quest for Chapter 1. I also have three more interior areas to create, but two of them are really quite small. I did a good bit of scripting yesterday to give a few of my areas some interesting flare; things like slipping on slick, wet cavern floors near waterfalls and setting off unique elven traps in a tomb of Earlann...without these, it would just be a lot of combat with exploration, but I'm going to add as many points of interest to my areas as I can so as to spice them up as much as possible.

There remains, of course, the matter of writing a bunch of conversations. That's really what I should focus on this week. So, today I hope to finish up (or at least get some good work done on) some stuff for the secret project, then I want to make those two quick interiors and do some other miscellaneous work that needs doing. I don't anticipate having many new screenshots this week, but hey, there are over 80 in the gallery, so y'all shouldn't be running out any time soon. I will have new ones before release, of a few of my interiors in particular, but those won't be for awhile.