I have no idea what the average gamer's demographic is, but I'm pretty much that. Gaming for 20 years, modding for 6, I have a bad habit of jumping into bed with a game, modding the hell out of it then moving onto the next game. Hopefully I'll find my perfect partner. Currently playing (and modding) Dawn of War, Skyrim, Portal 2, Oblivion, Company of Heroes, Doom 3, several iOS games and Solitaire.

Report RSS Enter Phoenix - Branching the Campaign

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After a hard day's work scripting 1992 lines for mission 6 of the Enter Phoenix campaign, I thought I'd share a little progress on how the mod is coming along.

Every single subsequent episode of the campaign has resulted in longer and more complex scripts, which I envisaged but hopefully this will challenge and immerse the player more as the campaign continues. For example, the original Single Player demo has a measly 280 odd lines of code (the updated campaign version has just over 1000!) right up to Episode 5 which has just over 2500 lines.
One thing I have noticed is that I go back onto missions and replay them to check that they have replay value. Thankfully, each mission has several ways to play them and to complete ALL objectives in one Episode can take up to an hour for the earlier ones.

A new method I'm using is the branching narratives in that the player can decide what course to take, ignore certain objectives or even miss them completely by not following instructions. This changes the later missions into a a sort of tree and instead of having a 10 mission campaign, it's actually more of a 25 mission campaign (but not all playable in one sitting) as some are duplicate files but with some additions (or subtractions). Totaling up, this actually gives NINE different endings, instead of the original THREE.
The other thing I've learned to do is CONTROL the enemy. Anything that happens that isn't intended is immediately ironed out, right down to giving direct commands to enemy units whilst disabling the ai.

All in all, this is coming along nicely and each mission is getting completed every 3-4 weeks or so now.

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