Faithless: The Making of an NWN2 Module

For several days, my foray into composing music drew no reaction for the most part, which is generally not a good sign. There was one frank comment at the NWN2 boards from someone who wrote, "That is SO weird I feel like I just took drugs or something." My assessment of my own music is admittedly biased, so there's nothing like an honest comment from someone else to bring my opinion back to reality. Also at the NWN2 boards, I was advised to remove the drum beat from the music. I did that and rearranged the composition a bit to make up for the loss of the drum beat. Two days after I first posted Peccata Mundi, I uploaded version 1.1 of the song at the Vault. Perhaps the best outcome of my song is that it gave Henry Solberg some ideas for composing angelic battle music. Within a few days, he wrote a glorious piece called Arrows of Angels, Knives of Men . Henry was able to fuse together the renaissance church style with a warlike beat, and he designed the music so that it ma...

It is with a sigh of relief that I now declare the area design of the "Very Bad Place" to be complete. All that remains for this area is for me to add encounters, puzzles, NPC dialog, and whatever else is necessary to bring this place to life. That will have to be postponed for another time, though. My current plan of action is to create all the areas of my module before proceeding to other tasks. As with all areas that I have "completed," I may go back and modify a few parts here and there, but I expect this to be minor tweaking at most. All told, I have worked a total of four weeks on this area alone (five if I count the first week when I temporarily abandoned the module because I couldn't stand the color combination of the crypt tileset). By the gods of Faerun, never have I spent so much time designing an area for Neverwinter Nights 1 or 2. Technically, this Very Bad Place is actually composed of two areas, the ground floor and the second floor. Regardless, e...

Last week, I tried to explain to Henry Solberg, the composer on our team, what kind of music I had in mind for Faithless. My idea was to have theme songs for the more important NPCs in the module, like what was done in NWN1 and NWN2. Unfortunately, my ideas for some of the theme songs were difficult to pin down. As an example, for one of the NPCs, I wanted the music to convey a sense of both sacredness and profanity. That is easy enough to say, but how does one actualize this idea into music? I realized that my words were inadequate for expressing my vague ideas. I figured that what I needed was to send Henry my ideas in MP3 form. I intended to "compose" snatches of tunes and arrange the music monophonically. (That basically means having only one note playing at a time, which is what happens when you use only one finger to tap a tune on a piano.) It generally takes talent and/or training to produce good polyphonic music (the ones that have more than one note playing at the sa...

Good evening, and welcome to a private showing of sixteen paintings, displayed as NWN2 placeables for the first time. Each is a collectors' item in its own way - not necessarily because of any special artistic quality, but because each captures on a canvas, and suspends in time and space, a frozen moment of a nightmare. With these words, which I shamelessly stole from Rod Serling, I introduced my latest submission at the Neverwinter Vault, a hakpak that I call the Fright Gallery . This is my first time to create custom placeables, although the ones that I made are basically reskinned versions of the paintings that come with the game. Despite its simplicity, this submission has earned me the right to call myself a custom content developer. Yay. I created this hakpak because I needed some paintings to hang at the gallery of the Very Bad Place. Although there are many paintings available in the toolset and at the Vault, none of them are edgy enough to decorate a psychopath's castl...

This week, I created the upper level of the very bad place that I wrote about in my previous post. Although the area that I am making is supposed to be a fortress, I continued to use the crypt tileset with excellent results. This tileset is wonderfully versatile, allowing modders to create sewers, castles, and, of course, crypts. With the right placeables, lighting, and visual effects, I was able to set the kind of mood that should get players' internal alarm systems ringing like mad. This place is dangerous, no doubt about it. Despite having poured a lot of my time in developing this area, I haven't finished it yet. There are still a few more rooms that I have to furnish and illuminate. I'm seriously thinking of creating custom paintings to hang on the walls. The ones that are in the toolset or at the Vault are too pretty to decorate a psychopath's castle. Originally, I envisioned this area to be laden with combat encounters. It's supposed to be a fortress after al...