Faithless: The Making of an NWN2 Module

My most popular contribution to the defunct NWVault was a module called Battle of the Builds. I like to call it BoB for short. As of last count, BoB had gotten a total of 31 votes with an average rating of 9.63 out of 10. With over 18,000 downloads, this module earned a place in the Vault's Hall of Fame. (I didn't memorize any of these stats, by the way. I had to look them up in the Wayback Machine .) As the Vault had breathed its last about a month ago, BoB had been homeless during this time. Thanks to Thibaut Charles, whose comment in my last blog post alerted me to the spiritual successor of the old Vault, BoB now has a new home. Players can download the Battle of the Builds at the Neverwinter Vault . I don't really expect BoB to get much attention anymore. Its glory days are long gone. Still, it's nice to know that BoB has a new place to hang its hat in and reminisce with fellow refugees from the old Vault.

I recently found out that the Neverwinter Vault had closed for good about a month ago. Although I had already said farewell to Neverwinter Nights a couple of years back, I feel as if a part of me had just died. Quite a few of my creative efforts were at the Vault – some 3D models, a couple of scripts, and my piece de resistance , the popular and highly rated Battle of the Builds module. I should also add that I had contributed a short but atmospheric adventure to BouncyRock's Halloween campaign, another popular mod that also garnered high ratings. All those contributions amounted to several months of my life. Now they're gone, all gone. To me, the death of the Vault marks the passing of an era, a golden age of prolific modding that I had never known before or since. It was through modding Neverwinter Nights that I learned how to program combat AI and create 3D models. I had helped and been helped by fellow modders at the official forums. It was a wonderful experience, and I w...

Between updating my Battle of the Builds module and creating a new utility program for NWN2 players called Peek-a-BIC , my progress in the Faithless module has been slow. A few days ago, I managed to get my groove back when I resumed work on an interior area that had temporarily taken a backseat. When I started working on it, this particular area disgusted me. I mean that quite literally. There was something about how the area looked that almost induced in me a gag reflex. Perhaps it had something to do with the greenish brown muck on the floor that, when coupled with the darkness of the place, made me think of sewers. That wouldn't have been so bad if I had been designing a sewer area, but it's actually supposed to be some bad guy's fortress. The fact that I was using the crypt tileset explains why the place looked filthy. The area would have looked more like a fortress if I had used the castle tileset instead, but I liked the chains hanging from the rafters that only the...

Michele from the Neverwinter Nights Podcast interviewed me regarding a number of things, including my Battle of the Builds module and the new one that I'm currently working on, Faithless. She also gave me a chance to air my views on game design and story writing. Now everyone can hear just how bland my voice is at Episode 57 of the NWN Podcast .

When I first took screenshots of the desert area in "Faithless," Corrugath told me that the landscape looked too mundane. He suggested changing the color of the sky to make the area look like a truly strange place. (Those were not his precise words, but I don't want to quote him directly and risk giving the story away.) It took me a while to change the desert landscape. I wanted to finish the mining camp first, after which, I got sidetracked with enhancements for "Battle of the Builds." It was only yesterday that I finally had a chance to redo the desert area. This entailed changing the colors of the sky and repositioning the sun. Although I didn't touch any other part of the area, when I was done, I sat in awe of the results. The desert acquired a strange kind of beauty. I don't think I got the effect I was going for, but the screenshots I took were amazing nevertheless.

I haven't been able to do any work on "Faithless" over the past week. Instead, I enhanced my "Battle of the Builds" module by adding three new power builds for player characters to fight. I had considerable difficulty creating the custom AI of one of the NPCs, the Blood Scholar, mostly because I had to work around the limitations of the NWN2 engine regarding NPC wizards casting spells with metamagic. When I finally released version 1.18 of "Battle of the Builds," I discovered a flaw in the rangers' AI. To make matters worse, I realized that a long-standing bug in the NWN2 engine was confusing players because clones of their characters were sometimes more powerful than the PCs on which they were based. I immediately set myself to ironing out these flaws. Three days later, I released version 1.19 of the module. Changing and debugging my scripts was unexpectedly difficult. It's a good thing I had invented a trace debugging technique for NWN script...