The Fine Art of Conversation

Just got done a four-day weekend, which gave me some time to work on the module, though I didn't spend as much time on it as I would have liked. I finished tweaking the third area, but I'm still left with some unresolved problems: the player still can't loot the body of the soldier, and in the hobgoblin conversation, the animations are only firing on one of the hobgoblins. I also nearly finished the third area, though I haven't tested it yet. This involved creating a merchant for the first time, which wasn't too difficult. It also involved my first complex conversation. It actually turned out to be more complicated than I originally planned, because I ended up putting in more dialogue branches for roleplaying purposes. This involved putting in both alignment checks (which I've already done), and skill checks (which were new). I spent some time looking up how to write a skill check, only to discover that there's an automated way to do it in the game. However, the game method only lets you make it easy, medium, or hard, so I think I'm going to have to write my own script after all so that I can set specific difficulty numbers. Otherwise, I don't think the player will have any chance of making a medium check, much less a hard one, which will make big chunks of the dialogue superfluous.

I also got in more practice with setting and retrieving variables in a conversation. Although you can set this automatically, it can still be tricky. I originally created three different variables, each representing an amount of payment the player is supposed to recieve for completing a task. Then I realized that I needed to set another variable which would indicate that the job was done. While I could have created a new variable, I realized it was smarter to have one variable with four different values (three for the payment, and one indicating the job was done), rather than having a bunch of different variables.

Finally, I made the process a little harder by making the task a little more complicated. Originally the player was just supposed to bring back a wagon wheel to fix a wagon. Instead, I decided that the player would have to bring back a mule for the wagon, and that they'd have to find some food in order to get the mule to follow them. Since I was basically stealing a similar idea from Cormryean Nights, I opened up the module to see how it was done. This was harder than I thought, because the animal you have to recover in that game (a dog), wasn't painted down. Rather, it's spawned through a conversation. So I had to find the conversation that spawned it and the conversation used to lure the dog and copy the scripts, which I'll eventually modify and use. Also, the actual script that gets the dog to follow you does so using a method I don't understand, but so long as it works in my module, that's fine. However, I can't do much of this until CEP 2.0 comes out, because there's no mule in the standard toolset. I think there'll be one in the CEP, but I may have to change it to a horse instead.

Next up will be to create the areas involved in the mule quest. Although it's a relatively simple quest, it involves the creation of a small village, which means I'll actually have to create several areas. It'll take a long time, but at least it'll mostly be painting instead of scripting.