More Fun

posted in A Keyboard and the Truth for project 96 Mill

Published June 02, 2005

Tonight I will be adding the dialogue that Morning says, as she goes through the 15 steps of purifying the mana well.

The dialogue is meant to show Morning's progression into mana addition, and the associated darkness that brings. I feel the dialogue does it justice.

I was going to post it, but i think that is too much of a spoiler, especialy since it seems most of the regulars who read my journal actually want to play MW when it is done.

We are still on scheduel, I just did a 'so what is left to do' sanity checklist, and the results are good, it comes down to about 22 tasks (which isnt much considering =D)

-The Company Intro
-The Game Intro
-The Tutorial(a game map with usage instruction)
-Refine Great Hall battle
-haliphen's elaboration on the evils of magic
-dialogue results of each purification showing morning sliping into mana dependancy/evil
-well purification elaboration(gotta be awesome)
-map7 spawners
-Refine the Tomb map
-Add spawners to map9
-map9 scripted battles?
-Add spawners to map10
-map10 scripted battles?
-map10 boss battle
-Great Hall rally to battle
-Final Battle intro (confrontation with Rhajad Ruhl)
-Final Battle wave1 (melee fighters)
-Final Battle wave2 (magic fighters)
-Final Battle wave3 (mixed + Rhajad Ruhl)
-The aftermath intro (narrative showing the evils of mana)
-The aftermath (mourning the dead, and decleration of counter attack)
-The credits

We are going to try and knock off most of this list before we hit the end of our first deadline (june 13th), if we can do that we are in good shape =)

Once these tasks are done, it is pretty much testing and quality assurance. there are a few other technical goodies i want to implement but they are extra, and might not happen.

Also, a little blast from the past!

Here is a very early screen shot of Morning's Wrath, Circa: March, 2003

Previous Entry Another inspired masterpiece

Next Entry Yay more enemies =D

0 likes 9 comments

Comments

johnhattan

1. Dang, that's the most impure mana well I've ever seen.
2. Well, it's a little purer than a minute ago, but it's still pretty goldurned impure.
3. Bleah, it's sure tough to purify these mana wells. It's too bad Clorox won't be invented for 300 years.
.
.
.
2. Wow, this mana well is certainly looking pure. It's almost there.
1. Yay, the mana well is finally pure. That certainly was a pain in the ass to do.

June 02, 2005 10:33 AM

EDI

1. Dang, that's the most impure mana well I've ever seen.
2. Well, it's a little purer than a minute ago, but it's still pretty goldurned impure.
3. Bleah, it's sure tough to purify these mana wells. It's too bad Clorox won't be invented for 300 years.
.
.
.
2. (Uh?) Wow, this mana well is certainly looking pure. It's almost there.
1. (WTF?) Yay, the mana well is finally pure. That certainly was a pain in the ass to do.

[grin] If you are going to mock our story at least learn to count right [grin]

June 02, 2005 10:56 AM

superpig

BTW, if you want anyone to proofread your text, I'd be happy to help out.

I might have asked this before, but are you planning on targetting any languages other than English?

June 02, 2005 11:06 AM

EDI

Thank you for the offer =)

We are only planning on english for the moment, mainly due to no default language support in the engine (easily fixable), and due to the volume of dialogue.

For instance, currently I belive our last count was ~800 lines of dialogue.

I belive our word-count was on par with that of a novelette, but I don't remember the exact count.

This fact, coupled with the lack of professional voice tallent, is why we decided not to do spoken dialogue, it would have been a massive effort, and potentialy horrible results.

We are not sure how we are going to do proof-reading, but it is likely we will need somone who is a coder to do it, since the dialogue is embeded with the script code as well.

I will keep your offer in mind and get in touch with you once all of the dialogue is in-game and final(hopefully soon =D)

Thanks again =)

June 02, 2005 11:28 AM

superpig

Ah, if it's mixed in with your script code then I can see how it might be more of a headache. If you can extract all your text into an external file (e.g. an Excel file) and just reference it by ID symbols, it's much nicer for localization - you can just send the text file off to someone to do, and they send it back with French text (or whatever) in the column next to the English. Doesn't even all need to be one person.

June 02, 2005 04:56 PM

EDI

Yeah, the issue I've always had with the ID->String,

is that it makes writing the game very hard, since it is hard to visualize how a ficticious scene goes when it looks like:

Talk($lpmorning,101);
MoveCharacter($lpmorning,20,20);
Talk($lpmorning,102);
Talk($lpmorning,103);
Talk($lpmorning,104);
SpriteAction($lpmorning,"sad",true,true);

Lol, What is the script about?

versus:

Talk($lpmorning,"Darn, let me see if it is over there");
MoveCharacter($lpmorning,20,20);
Talk($lpmorning,"Is it over there?");
Talk($lpmorning,"Nope.");
Talk($lpmorning,"Shoot!");
SpriteAction($lpmorning,"sad",true,true);

Much easier to decide what might make a scene better in the development phase.

of course, you could do the ID->String, thing after the fact, but I dont really like it at all, nor do I like the dialogue being intermingled with the script code.

The best solution i've seen is editors that let you do your work integrated, and it saves out, optimal files.

But that isnt really an option for us either right now =)

What we will probably do, is give a list of the Talk functions, and thier associated files *as a result of a find-in-files*, then edits will be done in red, and we can go through and replace the edits.

All in all I well let you know when the dialogue hits the fan =D

June 02, 2005 09:48 PM

Raduprv

In Eternal Lands (the server) we use an .h file for all the strings (to ease the translation).
There we have stuff such as:
#define NOT_ENOUGH_MANA "You don't have enough mana to cast this spell"

So then we have something like:
if(blah)print(ENOUGH);
Easy to follow, easy to translate.

June 02, 2005 10:11 PM

EDI

True, but doing that for 800 lines of dialogue!?

most of which are 20 words long lol.

doesn't sound very pheasable =/

June 03, 2005 07:11 AM

superpig

Radu's method is more the sort of thing I was talking about. It may sound somewhat infeasable, but you'd be surprised - it's not that bad, and you can ease the pain by using macros: CUTSCENE_SPEECH(PRINCESS_MORNING, EVIL_IS_COMING) translating to TEXTID_CUTSCENE_PRINCESS_MORNING_EVIL_IS_COMING just using some simple token-pasting...

June 03, 2005 08:58 AM

You must log in to join the conversation.

Don't have a GameDev.net account? Sign up!

EDI

Author

More Fun

Comments

EDI

Latest Entries

Whoa, it's dusty in here

Porting Static:IT - Part 2- Engine Differences

Porting Static:IT - C++ to HTML5

What am I up to?

96 Mill is now on Steam!

First Youtube Review of 96 MILL

First Youtube Review of 96 MILL

96 MILL Released!

96 Mill product page goes live, new info & gameplay video

96 Mill Nearing Completion

More Fun

Comments

EDI

Latest Entries

Whoa, it's dusty in here

Porting Static:IT - Part 2- Engine Differences

Porting Static:IT - C++ to HTML5

What am I up to?

96 Mill is now on Steam!

First Youtube Review of 96 MILL

First Youtube Review of 96 MILL

96 MILL Released&#33;

96 Mill product page goes live, new info &#38; gameplay video

96 Mill Nearing Completion

Reticulating splines

96 MILL Released!

96 Mill product page goes live, new info & gameplay video