Contest

Spent a lot of time finishing up Bertram's conversation, which ended up being a little more complicated than I thought because I had to account for the fact that a player might go to the bandit camp before going to the monastery, pick up the cup, and then put it back. It's also possible that they might see the cup and not pick it up, but I'm not going to bother accounting for that. I also got another area 95% completed. I'm starting to find area creation tedious, mainly because I'm just recreating the same rural areas over and over again, and there's only so much I can do to make them look different when they're basically a bunch of flat plains with a road and a few trees. Fortunately, this is the last Kingsroad area I need to do, although there are still plenty of other rural areas to work on.

I just saw this weekend that Bioware is having a module-building contest with an eye toward hiring a world designer to work for them in Austin. As such, once I'm done this subquest with the bandit camp, I'm going to start working on the forest section - which I hadn't planned to get to for some time - next, but with a few changes. I'm going to build it as a self-contained module, and it won't have any custom content. The beginning is also going to be very different from what I originally planned - there will be a cutscene but there won't be any elves, and I'll probably replace the first challenge with something else. The other two challenges will probably be designed as I originally envisioned them, and I'll import them into my current module once I'm done with the module for the contest. I figure the chance of me winning is slim to none, since I don't really have the technical chops, but I do have the creativity, and I think I can do dialogue better than most. Besides, it's not like I have anything to lose.