5 réponses à ce sujet

[JnBaker]

Hello everyone,

I'm a Character Animator that really wants to transition into writing for the game industry.  I remember years ago Bioware held competitions to use the Aurora Toolset for NWN and create small but engaging modules.  Now that NWN is several years old, would the Dragon Age Toolset be a good alternative?  How does it compare to Aurora in terms of ease of use and learning curve?

Thank you for your time and input.

-Jeff Baker
www.jeffreynbaker.com

[Challseus]

Welcome. I too do all my building in hopes of getting into the industry. As a maker of NWN1, NWN2, and DAO mods, I'll just give you the brief run down, as my experiences has been:

* In terms of a learning curve, it depends on how you look at it. For me, it was more of a "retraining" of my brain, so to speak. I was so used to certain things being done a certain way with NWN, that it took a bit to re-adjust. Once I did that, I was fine

* similar to NWN2, the level design is not grid based like it was in NWN1, so you won't be able to knock out areas as fast as you used to. But what you *can* do far eclipses what could be done in NWN1

* if you ever created cutscenes in NWN1 using Gestalt's system, just get that out of your system, as this toolset has a fully functional cutscene creator. But, like level design, you'll definitely spend more time with it

* the biggest thing for me is keeping certain levels of quality. With NWN, we could get away with not having VO. Not anymore, it appears. So, that needs to be taken into consideration.

* depending on who you talk to, Bioware's lack of support (lately) can be an issue. For the record, I have been able to work around most things I cannot get an answer from them on (like music related things), and while it's annoying, if you are really determined, it should be an excuse to not create a module

All in all, it just takes more time to create modules of a similiar quality/length as it did in NWN1. But, if you're motivated, that shouldn't be a deterrent.

Hope this helps.

[Beerfish]

I would imagine that for writing BioWare would look at the quality of writing from either toolset and I believe that NWN1 is still probably easier to learn and to use. As Challseus says, the cutscene generator is a tremendous tool for the Dragon Age toolset.



Have you worked with the NWN toolset before? The conversation aspects of both toolsets are similar.

[JnBaker]

I've just started messing with the NWN Toolset very recently, so I have no habits or preconceived notions going into learning the DA Toolset. Thanks for the replies and I look forward to working with this community and hopefully putting up some modules for people to test out.

[Proleric]

At the DAO Builder Event in 2009, David Gaider spoke about the evolving role of the writer.

IIRC it's moved on from simply writing plot outlines and text. There's more emphasis on describing how things happen. For example, information that used to be conveyed in words can now be shown visually in cutscenes and conversation staging.

In my experience, DAO is superior for expressing the writer's vision graphically. A cutscene artist can turn a well-crafted text narrative into something visually stunning, which requires no words at all.

It takes a little longer, but it's probably closer to what the industry expects from a writer these days.

[BTCentral]

I agree with all of the above, you will generally find that working with the Dragon Age Toolset is time consuming, yet rewarding.

It's not all that hard to pick up, and if you get stuck make sure to checkout the wikis here and here and of course, you'll often find the community can help you out with questions too the tutorials section is of course a good place to start.

Modifié par BTCentral, 01 janvier 2011 - 12:17 .