Project Zero Begins

Hello World!

It's 8pm on a Friday night and I've decided to start my two week project with the Neverwinter Nights 2 toolset. I like to think of tonight as the honeymoon after getting married to my career this week.

A career in games is nothing short of an obsession. You will never make it unless you truly love what you are doing. Not just playing game, but the entire process that goes into making a game.

I have started this blog mostly to document my learning process. It is a tool to use and remind myself what I have learned since I started working in games.

Project 0 - Neverwinter Nights 2 toolset

It was only a matter of time before Jordan and I opened up the toolset for NWN2. We have been playing through the campaign for a couple weeks now and I can only do so much gaming without learning. Neverwinter Nights was not so much of a game as it was a platform for another game: Dungeons and Dragons. The campaign is fun, but the MODs and creativity of the community is what I found more interesting than the game itself.

There are three possible drivers for the development of a game:

1. Team - A team that has a particular culture and strong set of specific skills will naturally tend to develop games that cator to those things. Teams that enjoy a particular genre will naturally have more creative ideas to bring to the table if they develop there.
   
2. Tools - Tools that are readily available provide good reason for a team to adopt and learn them. Epic just released the UDK for non-commercial purposes.
   
3. An idea - Sometimes a person simply has an idea that is so clear and purpose driven that you really can make it into a tangible game.

Ideally, I would like to develop an idea, but with a limited technological understanding and virtually no budget the main thing that is driving my first project is a readily availible toolset: the Neverwinter Nights 2 toolset.

The good part is that I've already convinced Jordan to buy the game, that was the hard part, the easy part is telling Jordan that I'm developing a test mod and he jumps on board.

So it starts, two weeks from this exact moment is the deadline for Project 0

Title: Project 0
Mission: To develop a basic understanding of the Neverwinter Nights 2 toolset and discover how a technology can inspire the development process.
Deadline: 8:30 pm 11/20/09
Criteria:

• 3+ separate and fully decorated areas with transitions to eachother
  
• 3+ different sets of scripted battles
• 1+ NPC conversation
• Fully written flavor text for all examined objects