Sticky Brain

                                         Available to download here

For the next 2 weeks I will sit on my arse and do absolutely nothing. Mind, that's not likely to happen since I get like a hen on a hot griddle if my mind isn’t at least partially stimulated. Might be a good time to get through the huge backlog of games I have stacked up on my desk. Have a tonne of movies to watch as well. What else will I do.. Oh yes, a long, long drive is in order. Being the small country that we are, if you pick a direction and drive for 2 hours, you’re likely to end up somewhere nice. Nothing like clearing the head with a good big drive in somewhat unfamiliar territory. Will probably have the Tron soundtrack on. Hans Zimmers Inception, too, with a sprinkle of John Murphy. Yes, I like my ambient, composer music. Although that will remind me of sitting here, working on Craggy Island, which is what I’m trying to rid my mind of.. Blargh!

Welcome to Craggy Island

Coincidently, my last long drive into the wilderness was about 10 months ago. I had taken a weeks annual leave, with the intention of deciding what it was I wanted to do with my life. I remember that morning very clearly. Blue skies, the quietness of the roads as everyone was in work, constantly flicking through rubbish radio as the Ipod I had on charge all night, somehow hadn’t charged at all.. Mind you, I didn’t get very far. The intention was to get at least get outside of Dublin. Meath is 10 minutes down the road and is chock full of beautiful countryside, but for some reason I always go the other direction. I won’t note to self, it‘s irrelevant here. It’s like travelling through France, but the minute you get off the ferry, you fall asleep, only to awake as you arrive at your destination. The journey is the best part.

So yeah, I didn’t get very far, yet in other ways, I did.

Production Schedule

Craggy Island has been the focal point of my life for the past 9 months and finally, after something like 600+ hours of work, it’s done and available to download. I’m one part hysterical, one part scared, one part disappointed.

Hysterical because I’ve actually released something.  I’ve achieved my goal and there sure is a sense of elation. There was part of me that felt like I’d never see this through. That part is well and truly gone and is not likely to show up ever again. Never doubt yourself. I’ll take that to my grave.

Scared because it’s scary! Not the module, but the whole experience of releasing and hearing peoples opinions on something you’ve been so close to for so long. Critic will be invaluable and feedback crucial. I will be extremely thankful to anyone that downloads and plays it in its entirety. Even more thankful if you let me know what you think.

Disappointed because I don’t think that it turned out any good. Ok, it was my first attempt at a mod of any kind, in that respect I’m happy with the results, but I hold myself to ridiculously high standards and am a perfectionist to a fault (I’m working on this!) That side of me is not happy.

Development began in late April. As I was completely new to mod building, many a mistake where made, some of which have left an impression on the end product. The terrain that is present in the final release, is the first terrain I ever created in the toolset. In hindsight, I would have built some dummy terrains before committing to the final one. Of course problems were going to arise and as they had only showed their ugly head after I had much of the terrain moulded out, I couldn’t simply start over. I had no idea about terrain chunks and lightmapping, so I was more or less using the default settings for a new terrain. I ran into many problems early on with lighting and it seemed that I had committed some grave errors. Nothing was working, everything seemed broken. I was out of my depths and there was seemingly no hope. I just persevered. After weeks of hair pulling and scouring forums, I had finally gotten light maps to work in my favour and things started to pick up from there.

At this point, I had absolutely no idea of the road that lay ahead. Building the Island turned out to be the easiest and most enjoyable part. The Island itself, minus some tweaks and polish, was finished mid-July.

A Map of the Mind

Originally the idea was to create some dungeons. Having played WoW and of course Dragon Age, I felt that DA had lacked the distinguishable pacing and encounter design that makes WoW so enjoyable. That idea didn’t materialize, as I had looked at some of the available dungeon models and felt that they weren’t going to support what I had had in mind. (Not to mention the scripting needed!)

The next idea, was indeed to create a small island. At this stage, if I had built that and it looked good, that would nearly have sufficed. I knew I’d add a story and some quests, possibly a boss fight or two, but I had no idea of the complexities of doing so and assumed I could just throw stuff together relatively quickly once I had the Island complete. I had actually planned on doing the scripting myself as well. I actually got high grades for programming in college and felt that I could get my head around it. I’m not ashamed to say I was naïve and while I eventually did do some snippets of scripting, without Timelord, there would be no Craggy Island as you see it today.

An Early Render of the Inn

I was adamant about doing every aspect of the project myself. I wanted the experience in all channels, primarily to see how everything worked and to gain a full understanding of the modular nature of game development and how everything slotted together to work in tandem. Secondarily, I was curious to see which skill set that I not only enjoyed the most, but also, the one I was most suited to.

As September approached, I knew that I would have to find someone to do the scripting. At this point, I also began building the characters and started work on the dialogue. There was no point looking for a programmer if I only had an Island as a blank canvas to give them, so as the first few characters and script had been laid out, things just fell in place. Perfect timing from Timelord (no pun intended) as he replied to one of my blogs and from there, things were on course for a November release. There was also a solid plan in place. Conceptually, the module had a beginning, middle and end. It would be comprised of some quest chains, some cutscenes and a small dungeon encounter at the end.

Design Document

One of the big disappointments for me with CI, is the script. I’ve determined that I’m no script writer. Quest design is also rubbish. I’d of liked the module to be longer too. With the time scale we had, I decided to cut our loses and think small, so it all turned out rather plain and dull, I think. It’s also not much of an investigation; the narrative leads you in one direction, with little to no room for trial and error. There was some big ideas floating around, some really unique quest designs that would have required a part-recoding of the DA GUI amongst other things, but there wasn’t time to realize these things. One example being, an integrated clock. I’ll just say that there is a certain time pressure aspect to the module and I wanted it emphasised. How long you took to finish the case, dictated how tough the final encounter was, as well as giving the player access to multiple endings.

After months of passing emails and B2B files, CI started coming together. We had our fair share of game related issues and delays. I had to re-write portions of the script (still rubbish, mind!), sometimes things just flat out didn’t work and I reckon I’ve rendered lightmaps about 20 times now, those little black jaggies just never stopped showing themselves. Bioware use a more powerful renderer in-house and the python lightmapper we’ve been supplied with, is frankly rubbish. I’ve also recently discovered that certain models were not rendering at distance, so I had to go and create low-LOD versions, which forced a re-render too.

As October hit, the worry about voice-overs kicked in. I knew this would be a huge undertaking but it was crucial to a module that relies so heavily on immersion and character. ~450 lines of dialogue have been recorded by various artists. It took 2.5 months of chasing, emailing, re-recording, sampling, directing and outright headaches, but it got done in the end. A huge thank you to everyone involved. Some of it turned out really well, others, not so well (mainly down to poor quality microphones) but overall, I’m really happy with the results. DahliaLynn also provided some excellent feedback on camera work and dialogue flow; even if I didn’t have time to implement the changes across the board, I will carry this advice forward.

To think that simply adding the voice-overs was the end of the line, I had a rude awakening when I discovered that I had to add specific animations to every one of the 430 lines, to make sure they were as believable as possible. That alone, was enough work for one person. Add in the building the stages and changing cameras; it was a fairly substantial undertaking.

Character Mapping

Music was supplied by Daniel Byerly, who kindly allowed me to use his pieces. It took a bit of effort to get it into the game - note of thank you to Cuvieronius of the Baldurs Gate Redux team for this excellent Wiki tutorial. The choice of using custom music was an easy one after listening to Daniels work. Be sure to check out his YouTube page - Alacazam.

Running out of steam here. All in all, Craggy Island has been a massive experience. I’ve had the opportunity to work with some very talented people and for that, I’m extremely grateful. It was all so worth it. Again, as massive thank you to everyone that helped out, particularly TimelordDC. He has given me much of his time over the last 4 months, even though he has his own module to complete and a job and family to take care of. No doubt I tested his patience on more than one occasion! I’ve also learnt a fair bit of scripting over the past few months. Thank you Dilip, for everything. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

Be sure to add his blog to your reading list and follow his progress on Blood and Lyrium. Having read the design document, I can tell you first hand that it sounds terrific. He’s also given so much help and support to the Dragon Age community - something that should be acknowledged.

It has been a tough 9 months. Ok, in average I’ve spent almost 3 hours a day on this, but even when I’ve been away from the computer, it’s been with me. I did try separate myself from it with varying degrees of success, but it was always on my mind. I’m sure that will get better with time, being able to distance yourself from your work, will be a vital skill to possess in the industry, I imagine. Not only because you can lose perspective on your work, but also to avoid burnout.  I never did once feel burnt out, but I’ll sure enjoy my few weeks break before I set my sights on the next adventure.

One thing is for sure though, I will not be undertaking so much work, from so many different disciplines again. Level design, for me, feels like the most natural fit. Now that I have ‘credentials’ so to speak, I will most likely look to join a larger team. Building one is also a tantalizing prospect. In future, I’ll leave the writing to the writers and the cutscenes to the animators. I’d like to now focus my efforts on level design and improve my skills there. I’ll have to wait and see what becomes of Dragon Age and its toolset once DA2 is released. If they update the existing tools to support development for DA2, I might very well stay put. Branching off has its obvious benefits though; we’ll see.

This is the end of the first, of what will hopefully be many more journeys to come. An exciting year lies ahead with many possibilities. If things go to plan, I’ll be a college student once more, come September. With budget cutbacks and pay cuts taking a chunk out of my projected savings, it might not happen this year. I won’t risk anything, so if I have to work and save for another year, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. More time to develop, right?

I hope that you’ll get something out of Craggy Island, but whether good or bad, I’d really appreciate any feedback I can get.

Thanks to anyone that has been following my blog. I have plans to move it to a new custom website over the coming months, so stay tuned for that.

See you on the other side.

Paul Conway