Welcome!
Sunday, April 27th, 2008
Okay folks. Here’s where we are:
I am a longtime player of video games. Well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration. I’m a 44 year old man, and I’ve been playing regularly since perhaps 2003. The first game I picked up (after some amount of research, but it was still an amazingly fortuitous purchase) was Morrowind. A beautiful game. So let’s say I’ve been playing regularly for the past 5 years or so.
I play RPGs almost exclusively. For those not in the know, RPG is “role playing game.” RPGs tend to be immersive, deep, complex. In an RPG, you create a character, and that character is set in the middle of a huge, fictional world. Oftentimes, that world has some parallel with what we think of as Western Europe or Great Britain in the middle ages, though of course RPG worlds aren’t limited to that…they’re limited only to one’s imagination. Some take place on other planets, or in a post-apocolyptic America, or in a distant future. A few are based on other media, such as Tolkein’s books or the Star Wars movies.
The games I most often play are based on the pencil-and-paper game Dungeons and Dragons. Icewind Dale, Baldur’s Gate, and Neverwinter Nights are perhaps the best well known of those games. They take place in The Forgotten Realms, one of the campaign settings developed for D&D. The Forgotten Realms, in many ways, really is like the middle ages: it is populated by peasants, knights, and kings. It’s a low-tech world, with horses instead of automobiles, plows instead of tractors, bows and arrows instead of rifles. The skies are clear and the water is clean. There are no atomic bombs, no labs full of superflu viruses, no clones of Dick Cheney walking around pretending to be vice president.
Faerun differs from our middle ages, of course, in that it contains the occasional dragon, along with a host of other creatures that one wouldn’t want to run into.
And elves, from a variety of cultures, and dwarves. And gnomes.
Magic is common. Gods are numerous.
Exactly as in our world, dark forces are at work. Unlike our world, however, there is usually a pretty clear delineation between those of the dark and the rest of us. Once in a while, a hero comes along who tips the precarious balance of the world back toward the good. It’s satisfying that way.
In any case, the D&D universe is one in which adventures abound. In some ways, the computer rendition of the game is even more satisfying than the old P&P version: it creates a world not just in your imagination, but right there on your computer screen. It populates that world with others that you can interact with, and creatures that will best you if you’re not quick on your feet. It provides stunning vistas and epic spaces, forests and crypts and dungeons and cities and ice-packed wastelands. And it even provides a stirring sound track.
From time to time, I wonder what it must be like to work on the teams that create these games. These people are computer programmers, of course, but they’re also artists and poets and storytellers.
Neverwinter Nights is a D&D game that opened up the creation of these stories to the rest of us, in providing a toolset along with the game. The toolset–the same thing that the developers used to create the game–can be used to make modules that anyone can download and play themselves. These modules might be little mini-adventures that can be completed in half an hour, or they might be as big as the original game itself. I’ve played no small number of these modules, and some are of a quality that rival what the original developers were able to create.
I don’t know how many hours I have invested in the game…surely a few hundred. For some reason, though, in all of those hours I never clicked on the button that opens up the toolset. I guess it seemed beyond me. An interesting thing that other people used.
This last week, though, I decided to have a go with the toolset myself. I don’t have the slightest clue how to go about creating a module. But, in a long life, I’ve done all sorts of things I didn’t know how to do when I first set out. We’ll see what happens, eh? Sink or swim, they say. Perhaps in a month or two, I’ll quietly remove this blog from its home on the net, and then you’ll know that I’ve sunk.
I don’t intend to create anything earth-shattering. I’ll never be one of those “hall of fame” developers that exist within the Neverwinter Nights community. But I hope I’ll be able to come up with something that is playable and interesting.
As I go along, I’ll try to provide the occasional update on how things are progressing. I’ll report on what I’m learning and what I’m thinking about. Perhaps I’ll provide the occasional download of my work so far, if anyone wants to see it.
We’ll have fun!
