• Homework: Create a Town

• Create an Area in NWN

GAME CONCEPT AND DESIGN
COSC 320.101_SU09
SUMMER 2009

Introduction to Neverwinter Nights

Neverwinter Nights

The first Neverwinter Nights computerized game was hosted on the old, old, old AOL (QuantumLink) site. You can read all about that from Wikipedia (LINK).

....which brings us to the NWN before us....

When Bioware decided to do a stand-alone, updated version of NWN the announcement raised quite a ruckus (as mentioned) because:

• They were going to use the entire version 3.5 of the D&D ruleset and stick to it! (Now out-of-date as the D&D ruleset has been updated!) Many previous games had claimed to use the various rulesets, but really only used a tiny portion of the rules and often abandoned entire chunks either because it was too difficult or the just watned to "get the game out the door." Bioware did good, although not completely "stuck-to-it."
• The game was going to allow for easy multiplayer capabilities and allow user A to "host" a game on his computer so that users B, C, D, and E could connect to user A's computer via the internet and they could all play the same adventure, at the same time, co-operating or hindering each other...just as if they were sitting around a card table in the basement.
• The host of the session could set himself up as a DM (more on that in a bit) and actually change the game---the computer game--while the game was running!
• Bioware had decided to include their toolset in the same package as the game. Buy the game, get the toolset. Players could then create their own content, their own adventures, their own worlds....and then make those creations available to their friends, available for online mulitplayer sessions, or to the world at large.

The 3.5 Ruleset

You don't need to know the rules to play, DM, or even construct a fun NWN adventure. It helps, but you don't have to.

The Online DM

As you can probably realize from learning of the pen-and-paper D&D, the DM is a vital part of the game.

• The players will decide to go where they really shouldn't be going...and the DM either has to say "you can't do that" (which is no fun), or create entire new content "on the fly."
• The players talk to people that aren't really part of the game...the DM will have to improvise conversations.
• The players will carry equipment that isn't appropriate for the current adventure. The DM will have to remove the equipment, limit its use, or increase the difficulty of the adventure to compensate.
• Sometimes the players will rip through content faster that anticipated. The DM will have to create new content or new obstacles to slow them down while (hopefully) keeping the level of fun up.
• Sometimes characters will play well but through a series of unfortunate dice rolls may be wounded or die in such a manner that would slow the game or end it entirely--or spoil the fun. The DM can "fudge" the rules to allow the character to escape that near-fatal-wounding and allow the game to continue.

Computers don't behave like pen-and-paper games, however, and having DM-powers in a video game is nearly impossible.

But Bioware did it rather well.

The NWN DM can jump to any area of the game at will. She can access a visual list of all the players online and can jump to their location, or teleport players to her location. The DM can be invisible and watch the players without their knowledge. She can become visible to interact with them. She can take on a variety of disguises and thus appear to be an in-game NPC. She can kill or revive players or monsters. She can create new monsters to engage the players. She can create (with some limitations) new scenery. She can examine the characters' digital data sheets and make changes to the characters. She has access to all the spells in the game. She can create new treasure items and make them available to the players. If players are abusive or troublesome, she can kick them from the server and ban their re-entry.

The Toolset

You may be asking what's so important about the toolset? Why is it such a big deal? For the non-programmers among you, let me try to walk you through the thinking and the process. (For the game programmers out there...sorry, bear with me).

Bioware created the engine that runs the game. It knows about every tree, every blade of grass, every building, every monster, and so forth. But writing a new section of code for each item on the map would take a crazy amount of time. So instead, they approached it a different way.

They began by creating an object called a "tree" and giving it a list of properties to define it. Then they programmed the engine to recognize a tree and to make it behave in a certain way. They did this for every object in the game. Once they had all the objects created and told the engine how to make them behave, they bundled all these objects into one program that they called the toolset.

Having done this, they now don't have to program each tree individually. They just drag a tree object from the toolset and drop it on the map. When the engine sees the object, it says, "Oh..a tree is here." and knows how to make it behave. If the designer doesn't like where the tree was, he doesn't have to reprogram it to a new location, he just opens the toolset and drags the tree-object to a new location. If he wants more trees, he doesn't have to write or duplicate hundreds of lines of code for each new tree, he just drags new copies from the toolset and puts them on the map.

So here's the thing: All of the official games that came in the box (Neverwinter Nights, Shadows of Undrentide, and Hoards of the Underdark) were created, by the designers, using the very same toolkit that you will be using. It's what they used to create their huge critically acclaimed games....and they just gave it to us!

Of course, they are professional programmers and designers, and they know the ins-and-outs of the engine and the toolkit. Nontheless, should you take the time to learn, you can create games that are as complicated and as engaging as they did because you have the exact same tool that they used.

When working with the toolkit, you'll be working with a lot of pre-built "objects" like the tree, orc, house, land-tile, and so on. They all exist in the toolkit ready for you to use. Each object has a sometimes daunting collection of properties that define the way the engine will make the object behave. For instance, an orc object has a property called "hit points" that tells the engine how many hit-points that orc has. Let us suppose that the orc has 34. When you put an orc on the map for your players to battle, you may decide that 34 hit points is too many. So you can access his properties and change that number to 3. When the engine sees the orc, it'll look at all the properties and see that it only has 3 hit points. Now he's a total wussy.

Nearly everything in the game can be customized in such a manner.

If you decide you want all your orcs to only have 3 hit points, you can add him back to the toolkit as a customized object. Now, instead of manually altering every orc you put on the map, you just drag a new copy of this guy out each time.