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Dragonlance Adventures: Part I

Profile by Jay Watamaniuk

The word DragonLance instantly brings to mind many lost evenings (followed by mornings, afternoons, and eventually evenings again) sitting around the kitchen table with friends exploring the treacherous lands of Krynn. Krynn's younger and slicker kid brother, the Forgotten Realms, has received a lot of attention recently, but that will soon change in the world of Neverwinter Nights. Robert, a.k.a Steel_Wind, heads up a dedicated group of programmers, artists, and writers who are getting closer every day to bringing the lands of Krynn back in a new way using the Neverwinter Nights engine.

Where can I go for more information on DragonLance Adventures?

Robert: http://www.dladventures.com

Just so everyone is clear on this, DLA is not a Persistent World (PW) project, correct?

Robert: That's correct. We are developing a FAN XP for DragonLance and using it to create a downloadable version of the classic PnP module, DL1: Dragons of Despair. (We've renamed it "DLA1" as a nod to the significant changes we have made to the module.)

It is not a permanent world and we have no plans for a DragonLance PW project of any kind. There are, however, several existing DragonLance PWs within the community and we expect most of them will adopt our content very quickly.

What is your position? At any given time, how many people are working on DragonLance?

Robert: I'm the Project Lead and main writer/designer. At any point in time, the DLA team has had between 30 and 35 active members since December 2002. The majority of the members, about 20 or so, are 3D and 2D artists.

How did this all start? Who were the founding members?

Robert: Personally, I had played with Forgotten Realms Unlimited Adventures 11 years ago and dabbled with doing a DragonLance FRUA module. For a number of reasons, it did not work out very well, but I swore I would do it again when the tools evolved and I had better software to attempt it with. When I heard about NWN from the floor of Gencon, I got busy planning what became DLA that same day.

As for DLA itself, I wasn't the only one planning a conversion of the classic PnP DragonLance modules. A group of three people, Bruce Hodges, Stephan Dickinson, and Ted Thompson, formed DLA in the early part of June 2002.

I was working on my own web page for an identical project, and before I went live with the page, I did a search of the BioWare forums and found a post announcing the formation of DLA about a week previously. I joined DLA immediately.

From that original Gang of Four, I am the only one left. Our longtime members from the early days of NWN (Summer of 2002) are Kathy Nielsen (Copperkat), Ron Norton, Derek Lo (Blackmoon), and Robbie Powell (Arcana).

The core of the DLA Team really came together in January of 2003. It was at about that time some additional key members joined: Brian Holder (ThallionStellani), Mirko Zohren (Velmar), Gabe Weiss (Astorax), Brian Chung (Thrikreen), and Martin Ellis (Martin E). We have had several key members join since then, of course, but no core member of the Team has left since January of 2003.

DLA1 has been in development for quite some time. Can you tell us some of what you have learned developing such a large project with so many people?

Robert: That's a very good question and I am not sure where to start, the answer is that long. A few observations on managing a large mod project stand out though, so I'll list them briefly:

1. Formal organization is critical: Weekly meetings, including meetings of sub-groups within the team, are important to maintain participation, create structure and a sense of deadlines and work flow, as well as maintain important lines of communication between members.
2. Project management of a mod team is all about morale: Mod team management is all about the morale of the team. It's fickle and can change like the weather. You have to keep your eye on it constantly - and I do mean constantly.
3. Never, ever stop recruiting: A mod team is inspired by its members and no one is more inspiring than a new member. Just as the team can slow due to a perceived group malaise, the engine of creativity gets all fired up for everyone when new members join and start contributing fresh ideas, art, and code out of the gate.

   And yes, Mr./Ms. Community Member, if you are reading this - we are always recruiting.

   http://www.dladventures.com/apply/

4. Trust your Leads: A mod team is only as good as its worst Lead. The best way to manage a team is to find and recruit competent people who know their craft and then trust them to do their jobs. A large mod project is much too large for any one person to micro-manage.
5. Feature creep: If you are going to succumb to feature creep, at least do it in a big, flashy way and make it a selling point. Put another way, if you are going to die, better to get chomped in half by an alligator than nibbled to death by ducks. Alligators are good marketing. No one cares about killer ducks. (Editor's note: Well...I would care about killer ducks if they ate my momma -- Jay W.)

What have been the largest difficulties you have encountered in bringing the DragonLance universe to life?

Robert: It all comes down to the art. The DragonLance characters, settings, and villains all have a particular look which, for better or ill, left a tremendous legacy and a long-lasting impression on the fans of the modules and novels. Larry Elmore, in particular, created his most famous paintings for the DragonLance novel covers. While fans of TSR and WotC might be hard pressed to identify any particular artist as being the artist for the Forgotten Realms, DragonLance art has always been very strong and several artists have shone brightest when their work is set on Krynn. It's a tall mountain to scale.

So, we've had to change the look of NWN to make it look right for DLA while at the same time preserving an artistic compatibility with existing art assets. What we create must visually co-exist with the rest of the game BioWare and Floodgate artists created or we might as well just overwrite existing game content.

All DLA has done in the community in terms of custom content, whether it is creating modeling tools and utilities or maintaining the Custom Content Guide Wiki, has been directed towards developing the ability and tools to recreate that look and feel of the DragonLance artists.

How does the module start out? Can we expect to follow the DragonLance books or is this a new take on the lands of Krynn?

Robert: The module starts very much like the novel Dragons of Autumn Twilight. The opening scenes are highly scripted and are a series of part dialog, part in-game cutscenes to get the story and the player exactly where we want him or her to be. Some players may feel a little horrified and feel like they have very little control for the first ten minutes or so. That's only for a little bit though, and after the Song of Goldmoon in the Inn of the Last Home plays out, control and meaningful choices confront the player(s) throughout the balance of the game.

It's also just after the Song of Goldmoon that the module diverges from the paper module and the novel. While the setting is familiar and the characters obviously are too, DLA1's plot flow changes from the novel and PnP module for about the first two-thirds of the mod. A lot of DragonLance fans may be a little put out by this, but we've kept it logical and it makes sense. It also removes from the player the ability to make decisions based on "metagaming" (doing things based on player knowledge that your character does not know) and returns to the DragonLance fan a feeling of suspense and genuine surprise.

The final third of the module is mostly like the paper module and novel, with a twist at the end. NPCs killing the Boss monster for the party may work fine in a PnP session, and you don't notice it as a problem in a novel. In a CRPG though, having an NPC defeat the Boss monster is more than just a little anti-climactic, so we had to change the way that works.

Do the players have to use pre-generated characters?

Robert: No they do not. The game is intended to be played using the pre-generated characters though, and to get the most out of the module, we advise that they should be used.

Still, we have designed the module so it is not an absolute requirement. That is up to the player.

What technical changes have been made or what new ways of scripting have been used in DragonLance?

Robert: We certainly have faced a lot of them, but like anything else, after you pass the challenge its importance seems to dim and fade from memory as it recedes in the rear view mirror. Initially, just figuring out the NWN .mdl format was our greatest challenge and we worked long and hard at it. As time has progressed, it turns out that the .mdl format and our knowledge of it has become our greatest strength. We can't change the underlying code in NWN, but we can change the way our models are built and the process through which we create them. NWMax has continued to evolve into our main weapon. Without it, systems like our new robes, cloaks, and rideable horses would simply not have been possible to do. Joco has made a great contribution to the team as well as to the community. He has my heartfelt thanks.

Our greatest challenge has been to create a party control system for a single player game experience. DragonLance is about the Heroes of the Lance, not the Hero (singular) of the Lance. We were faced with trying to tease the game engine into playing as a BG2 style game experience in single player mode. Given the reintroduction of single player party control in Dragon Age, we think that BioWare recognized the same shortcomings in terms of the story telling ability within NWN that we have faced with the engine at DLA.

Unfortunately, in NWN, the Multiplayer tail wags the Single Player dog and it's difficult to make the engine do what we want. That said, along the way we have had some help from BioWare staff in accomplishing our SP goals, for which we are thankful.

At the same time, we felt that it was important to keep the multiplayer experience of the module for a significant core group of the community who really prefer it. I won't claim this MP goal of the project was wholly pure and idealistic. To be honest, if I had been certain that we could pull off a party based Single Player game from the get-go, we would never have put the work into multiplayer that we have. Multiplayer compatibility vastly complicates writing and design by a few orders of magnitude. But the truth is, we doubted our ability to pull off a party style SP game for a long time (and this battle is not yet over), so we needed the MP fallback in case our efforts failed.

The challenge of writing a single player game at the same time as a multi-player game where the NPC party members interact with - and interrupt - the party members in so many dialogs is very difficult. Add to that mix the proviso that you don't know which of the 7 possible PCs (if any) will be NPCs and it has made both writing and designing the module very, very difficult. It approaches insanely difficult to write and script at times. Astorax had to create a new dialog control system to accommodate the writing style.

What do you think will be the thing DragonLance Adventures gets remembered for when it's all said and done?

Robert: Gee. I feel like I have just been invited to label myself as "the education President"!

What I'd like people to say years from now is, "Those guys started out as a mod team? Really? Yeah - they made the DL XP for NWN."

What we will probably be remembered for is "the guys who did rideable horses that took forever to be released."

Really though, that's not for us to say - we just make the content and the mod. It's the community who gets to play it, use it, and write the epitaph. You get to do everything you want when you develop your own game as a mod team - except write your own review.

Are there plans for your group to tackle another project, perhaps not even Neverwinter related?

Robert: That's an unqualified "Yes".

The group's main interest has evolved greatly over the past two years. The team has developed into a strong, close-knit group of developers who are fiercely loyal to one another and we have come to discover that it is simply a lot more fun building games than playing them. And most of all, we love doing that together.

Over the course of the past two years we have been looking strongly at other projects, for other games and even on other platforms. I must confess, if our lead programmer had not been a guy who automatically disqualified us from participating in the "Make Something Unreal" contest, we may well have jumped ship from NWN back in early 2003. That was certainly touch and go there for a while. (In retrospect, that disqualification may well have been a blessing.)

Whatever the case, it is our intention to move on to other projects together after DLA1 and our hope is to do it as a commercial start-up. Whether that's developing our own title or on a contract basis doing asset creation for other developers remains to be seen.

But all of that is for "some day." Before we can plan for any of that in a serious way, we have to have a finished title under our belts. The one thing about game development you can be certain of is that - sooner or later - you have to finish the dance with the girl who brung ya.

So don't worry, Jay. You aren't getting rid of us that easily!

Next week: What exactly is going into DragonLance? Can we expect new creatures? New Tilesets? Rideable Horses and, dare I ask, cloaks?

Robert: In a word: yes.

If you haven't already, check out Part II of the DragonLance Adventures profile.