The Plot

Trying to write the plot for the game has been fun. In many ways, it is a traditional story, a young bumpkin finding his own strength and resources on his way to becoming an adult. On the other hand, we're trying to make it interesting by keeping the plot twists from being obvious. For instance, there comes a point when someone we thought was a good guy is actually a bad guy. The important thing there, I think, is not to give any hints to the player that the person is going to turn, so that when they actually do reveal their evil nature, the player is shocked. Of course, this undermines the opportunity to build suspicion in the player. However, I think that, just as economy of characters in movies makes raising suspicion extremely difficult without giving the game away, attempting to cast characters in doubt in games inevitably makes their betrayal unsurprising.

To take the movie comparison further, I'd point to The Departed. In it, you know who is good and who is bad; tension is created by the two people trying to find one another out for most of the movie. The real twist in the plot only comes out at the end, leading to a conclusion that no one really anticipated (at least I didn't). Or in The Usual Suspects the tension for most of the movie wasn't "Who is Kaiser Soze" but a more traditional heist movie plot "How are these guys going to pull it off?" Again, the twist at the end really comes as a shock because so little had actually been done to cast Kevin Spacey's character into doubt throughout the film.

I have to admit that I haven't completed Bioshock yet, but from the spoilers I've read, it follows this pattern. The whole game goes by and you don't realize you've been conditioned to follow orders, until the very end, when the plot unfolds a layer that you never thought was there. The same for Portal, and to a lesser extent, the first KOTOR (though there were some pretty significant clues in that one). In all of these games, the levels/characters/designers play it very straight until late in the game, when the rug gets pulled out from under you. I'm hoping to emulate these games, at least in part, because I think I'll follow the plot of The Matrix more than some of the other things I've mentioned: the big reveal will come in the second act, and the rest of the story will be a much more standard hero journey kind of thing.

Ben is Onboard

I think that getting a few songs put together has finally gotten Ben motivated. He's said he'll be putting together a practice level of some kind today, so that he can start getting used to the toolset. His enthusiasm has renewed my verve for getting the songs written and recorded so that we can keep moving forward. A couple of songs are at least partially done, I'll post them pretty soon.

Songwriting

I've been trying to write songs that will reflect a wide variety of musical styles. So far, I have a sort of driving post-punk song which I think will work well for the scene in which the hero has to take on the mantle of his heroism, and another sort of sad guitar driven light-rock ballad which I think will probably come at the end of the first or second act, when the hero has either suffered a personal tragedy and has to leave home (end of Act I) or when he finds out his ideas about the world are unsound (Act II). I will definitely need some kind of anthemic song for the end, when he emerges victorious, and probably some kind of twelve-string guitar light rock for the idyllic early days. Or I could go with some early Beatles sounding pop for that, I'm not sure.

Additionally, there is a lot of music to write for little things like the dialogue (not sure if I'll have all of this be singing or just some of it) and music stings when exciting things happen, etc. I am not sure if it's possible to write custom background music, but that would be a pretty big job.

I'm coming along more quickly on level design now; I have a better feel for the toolset. However, I haven't started actually doing real things like scripting, etc., so I have a long way to go.

The Origin of the Project

Ben and I were huge fans of NWN. We played through the whole first campaign, bought all of the official expansions, and then a few low-cost expansions available online. It was great fun, and because we like playing co-op more than playing against one another, it was one of the few games really ideally suited to our weekly gaming sessions. After NWN2 came down in price (we play cheap games mostly) it was an obvious choice.

This time, my brother John joined us, and we play a couple of times a week now. One night, while I was playing guitar through Steam voice chat (much to the annoyance of Ben and John), I said we should make a module for NWN2. Ben and I had tried at one point to make a NWN module that was based on on the Robert E. Howard Conan stories, but we never really got that far with it, because Ben wouldn't actually work on it, and I got busy and so never really finished. As I struck a particularly raging chord, I said we ought to make a rock opera using NWN2. Ben instantly said that was an amazing idea, one he could actually spend some time working on.

Being the songwriter and the only one with music recording capabilities, I'm in charge of the songs. Ben is supposed to be designing levels, but I think I've got to really do most of that work myself as well, since he's demonstrated no real commitment to getting it done. If nothing else, it will be a good excuse for me to write and record and album worth of songs in a genre that is a bit of a change for me, and get some more practice recording rock music. I'm hoping to post on this blog regularly about my progress, and eventually get the mod out on a mod site. We'll see how it goes.