Odyssey Developer's Journal #5

The time has finally come to tie together the old with the new. I have officially begun implementation of the main quest of Odyssey Act 1!

After a period of coordination and working to get a few people rolling on side quest implementation I turned to finally cleaning up the remaining elements of the main quests for Act 1. I had long been dreading approaching the major scenario that goes down in the town of Black head for literally years. I finally took a deep breath, rolled up the sleeves and decided to delve in and I found... there wasn't much to it after all. I suppose after tackling a couple of very intricate quests for Gallomarket and coming out of that successful, I hadn't really taken into account that many of the complex elements in Black Head were really not that much more complicated than what I had just tackled, so after a few hours of reading and touch up, I finally got through the dauntless task that was hanging over out heads for so long.

With all the quests basically done being written, barring some minor proofreading, I then undertook to jump on starting Act 1's first main quest. So far it has come together very cleanly, but that always tends to be a false sense of security until you go to test it, but in concept it's coming along.

I came up with an interesting mechanic where the player can effectively be involved in a scene with multiple NPC's and provide interactive involvement into the scene. Normally with player to NPC engagement, you can only communicate with one NPC, and all scenes are pretty much static movies you get to watch but can't really be involved in. Well using a combination of tracked integers and player pop up message boxes with selection options, I've managed to formulate a scene flow where the player gets to chime in, and based on their selections, the NPC's in the scene will follow up with different responses depending on the choices the player made, which adds a whole new level of engagement and immersion. 

Additionally we are fiddling with a new "hostage crisis" system where players will have a variety of dialogue options to talk down a captor to try and save their hostage, and if the player tries to bum rush them, things could not end up so well for the captive. This has specific use in a scenario for Act 1 but the mechanical template is viable for some interesting potential use down the road for world encounter events or other quest related scenarios. 

These elements along with our more diversified faction reputation system in place of speech craft and special environmental elements based around various skills which are utilized in a very 'outside the box' kind of way, we are hoping to present a fresh approach to exploring the world, engaging in challenges, and navigating story, scenes and dialogue with NPC's in ways not previously encountered. We will be initially hand holding players when first introducing new elements to help people get familiarized but beyond that, the player will have to think more creatively in a lot of situations and look deeper than simply matching animal signs and mashing intimidate at every option.

Some members of the core team are out due to work and family situations, so things are not currently as cohesive as we'd hoped for, but we're still making forward progress and I'm feeling pretty good again about the direction of quest implementation.