» Tue Mar 25, 2014 3:31 am Just wanted to let everyone know where I am now on the http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/972857-arissa-the-wandering-rogue/ project.
* First, I know I announced Arissa almost a year ago to date. I'm sorry it's taken this long. It was 80% finished in June of last year; since then I have started http://www.theoryform.com/people, started a new day job, and found a lot of things in Arissa's original design that just wouldn't work. That last 20% has been hard to get finished.
* The good news is that she's about 95% there. I'm pushing hard to be done with her by April the 3rd.
* Her final line count is ~450 lines of original spoken dialogue. Nothing earth-shattering, but I think everyone will agree when they get a chance to play the mod that the audio quality of those lines is original-game quality.
* In a lot of ways this has been a game design experiment of mine. Sometimes experimentation takes time. Some ideas, like her being able to observe when the player performs a successful lock pick or solves a puzzle and gives a reassuring "Nice!" or "Very clever..." has worked out really well, and feels satisfying. Other things, like her being able to get arrested, or leaving the player's side unprompted while in a town, either didn't work out or interrupted the flow of gameplay too much in practice and had to be scrapped. The player can now tell her that "You'll catch up with her later", allowing the player to control when she leaves the player's side temporarily. This has worked out a lot better in practice.
* A good chunk of her dialogue (almost 50 lines) is knowing about the world; she is a wanderer, after all. She can now talk about an area as soon as you enter it instead of having to continually ask her, "What do you know about this place?" You can disable this behavior in her dialogue.
Also, I'm excited to announce that my indie game project, in development since June of last year, is almost ready to be revealed publicly. My love for creating new player experiences started right here, in the Skyrim modding community. Therefore, I've decided that the /r/skyrimmods subreddit, the Bethesda Forums, and Skyrim Nexus will be the first places I announce our game; it only seems fitting. The http://www.theoryform.com/people have been working our tails off to get to this point and I can't wait to show it to you sometime in the next couple of weeks.
Thanks for reading!
