Terraland mod for Neverwinter Nights

Enter Abrante, an amazing place of technical knowledge. It is the epicentre for programming within the vast region of Terraland. It lies on the outskirts of Terra City, the capital city of Terraland. All of the best minds come here to share their knowledge on the wonders of coding, programming, debugging and compiling. But evil is afoot.

The game begins with the player character (a young man/woman about to start an education in programming) waking up late for his/her first day of programming school. Upon arriving late at the school, the player finds that no one is there. While searching for the other students and teachers, the player accidently activates an old helper robot that is designed to teach programming. Upon returning home, the player discovers that the town of Abrante is not functioning correctly, and is informed by the helper character that malicious code has been detected in the town's systems.

The townspeople begin to panic over the disappearance of the maintenance programmers and systems administrators, as more systems become infected. The town's mayor tasks the player with fighting the malicious code and restoring the systems to normal operation. The first issue to be addressed is corrupt data in the central data server. The player discovers data being stored in inappropriate data types and must change the variable types to match the data.

These pieces of malicious code are being created by the evil programmer Markulos, who is also responsible for the disappearance of all the maintenance programmers and systems administrators. As the player finds these anomalies in the town's code, he/she learns how to fix them, and eventually discovers their source ­ Markulos. The player must then confront Markulos and use his/her newfound programming skills to defeat him.

Looking Forward

As the game progresses with development and nears completion for a public release candidate, we still wish to acknowledge possible future implementations for the project. These are implementations we hope to include pending time, schedule and support near the final stages of the Terraland project:

• A dedicated server with multiplayer so students and players can interact across the internet on a global scale
• A user-friendly program that allows for easy edits to conversations within the module so that people. This would be aimed at lecturers willing to implement Terraland for their own subject.

Terraland is a high-end 3D roleplay adventure game using the highly acclaimed Neverwinter Nights engine that helps Informatics students develop strategic thinking and problem solving skills. It introduces conceptually difficult computing concepts, such as sorting, functions and recursion by presenting the student with interactive challenges and activities relative to the subject matter.

These core curriculum skills are maintained and developed because students are motivated by the fun and challenging nature of a game environment. This sense of 'play' leads to a greater sense of competency through practice and mastery. A gaming template is also planned for adaptation to a wide range of disciplines.

The team decided to continue on with the Neverwinter Nights Aurora Engine and accompanying Aurora Toolkit for a number of reasons. Primarily for the fact that it has an extremely faithful and ever helping community behind it. The amount of available content, guides and supportive members is simply astounding.

The Aurora engine and accompanying Toolkit were also the most feasible content creation system that we deemed the best to use for us at the time. Since the project began using this engine it was a good idea to take it and run with it where it left off. We did have a quick look into other engines available, such as the Freescape and Unreal engines, but due to a number of reasons we decided that these options were simply not feasible.