Hi there and welcome to the next Gamedesign feature here on openoutcast.org! This time I want to give you an insight about how we developed our storyline for openOutcast and what the needed steps are to turn a written storyline into a game. And there is one thing I can tell you about it right away – It’s NOT about copy & paste

We started to create our backstory for openOutcast some months ago. We already had a baseline from the last few years but this was rather unorganized and chaotic in many ways, so what did we do? We launched a so called story contest, built two groups and told those groups to develop a new story for openOutcast. Either from scratch or based on the old baseline. The only restrictions were:

• Cutter has to be the player character
• Take in some of the old and well-known characters from OC1
• Also take in some of the old regions and give them a new look

The rest was completely freestyle. The two teams started their work in May and worked through the whole June and in the end of June we had our final story decision meeting. The two proposals were REALLY different in the end, which was great. One was completely freestyle and new and the other one was mostly based on the old baseline but evolved and detailed it in a really cool level. I am not going to tell you which one was winning

Alright, so as we had the story decided, we had that huge almost 40-paged-text-monster of storyline with character descriptions, location descriptions and with – of course – the main storyline divided up into 4 acts. Now what to do with that? Just copy & paste it into a list and derive a few quests from it? Na, not really…

First of all we needed to get an overview about WHAT happens WHEN and WHO is doing that. The best way to do this, was to split up the storyline into the smallest pieces possible. We took each important action of the storyline, categorized it (Is it a cutscene, is it an action of Cutter, is it an information, is it an action that is happening without Cutter’s notice etc.) and put it together into first raw main quest lines.

To show you how this worked, please see the example below.
First, the written part of the storyline:

So far not useable as a storyboard for a questline, right? It’s only text and you don’t know what exactly is useable and what is just information for the player. So we needed to split it up a bit more and categorize the elements. This brought us to the following kind of list (which we created with the application XMind by the way):

This is now perfectly useable because here you see the quest itself (the red board), the actions that are happening (the clocks) and the conversations (the two-people-symbols). This helps a lot to get an overview on how many quests there are, how many game-actions are in there and how many conversations we need to write.

In the end, this was done for all of the four acts that we have in the openOutcast storyline. In total, there are over 550 different nodes for the whole story. Quests, conversations, actions and fights…this sounds like a whole lot of stuff to do, right? It gets even more interesting when you take into account, that we aren’t on the highest possible level of detail!

To give you an example: One of the above listed conversations probably consists out of 10 lines of text and 5 different camera views. Maybe this quest above needs 20 lines of script logic and needs two more conversations  to be done. And after such a conversation is written up and developed in textform, it needs to be prepared for localization and converted into “real”  ingame dialogues. For this purpose, we are using a specifically created dialogue editor where we write and setup the dialogues in the engines language. Stuff like “start/end quests”, “if-then-logic”, “cameramodes”, etc.

Okay, now I think I should really move my ass back to work

Best Regards,

Reto Schmid alias madcybi
Lead Gamedesigner oOC

Write me on madcybi@openoutcast.org

Oh, and before I forget! If you’re interested in joining our team, please check our new detailed job listings. We are in need of multiple 3D artist and translators (e.g. french).

There are some good news for those of you, who wanted to have the artworks from the artbook in a Hi-Res version. We now finished uploading all of the artworks to our gallery here on the site.

In addition to that, we created a profile on Issuu (an online page reader software) and published our artbook there.

Hey there!

It’s quite a long time ago, since we last posted some news here. But don’t worry…we are still there and are currently working on the first in-game region “Okasankaar”. As we are still in the concept phase at the moment, we decided to give you an artistic insight in the form of an “Artbook” on how Okasankaar looks in the minds of our concept artists.

The Artbook features drawings from all our concept artists and shows as well landscapes, flora & fauna and even some talan sketches directly out of Okasankaar. The artists were able to write a short comment to their pictures and in addition, the Artbook is being produced in high-quality to give you the possibility to print it out and enjoy it on real paper also

Use the link below to download the Artbook!

DOWNLOAD ARTBOOK

See you guys in the next news release!

The artists of ooc

The myth about gamedesign

If you ask 100 gamers about gamedevelopment and what position they would like to have if they would work in gamedevelopment, 99 of them will say:”Gamedesigner”. What is the reason about that? I personally think it is still the common prejudice that being a gamedesigner means that you can play games the whole day and only have to do with the funny parts of gamedesign.

“Coding? No, let the coder-gnomes do that. 3D Art? Yeah…sure…Sound? No way…! I’m now going to write some fancy ideas and do some brainstormings about cool features in the game and afterwards I play other games to have a reference…”

I’m really sorry to destroy all your dreams, guys. But the reality looks somewhat different. Gamedesign is hard work. Gamedesign is about trying to think, how the player will react. Gamedesign is about psychology. About the human thinking and about predicting, what the player is now going to do if you give him that particular quest. As a gamedesigner, you will WRITE a lot. Word processors  and applications like Excel will be your best friends. Oh, did I mentioned the writing? You are the responsible guy for keeping the game together. To make sure, that everything fits. And not that you have some “Beaming”-features in a mediaval role playing game. Know what I mean?

But how does that look in oOC? What are the tasks of a gamedesigner there?

In oOC, I’m the responsible guy for the gamedesign document. The bible of the game. This is where all the features are described. How stuff works. Or how it is intended to work. It’s more from a player’s perspective and not from a technical one. That’s the job of the coders after I wrote my stuff. They take all my spacey features and try to put it into something useable. Also my job is to hold the guys back from having too much ideas. Often it happens, that during the design process, the feature fixing, a thousand ideas come to your mind. And you want to tell the team ALL of them. This is okay, since no idea is bad and could at least give some inspiration for other ideas. BUT, the big issue in a lot of mod project out there is, that they start to have too much features.

To be honest, everyone can think of some nice features and ideas. The point is, that writing those ideas down in the gamedesign doc is not the whole work. It’s not even 50% of it. The real work has to be done afterwards. Assets need to be created, logic has to be coded and levels have to be designed. Making a game is not writing the gamedesign document. It’s a part of it, but it’s not the whole work.

To go more into the oOC project now, currently we are in the feature finding and fixing process. We are discussing about features, that we think have to be in the game. During this process, a lot of really hard discussions happen because everybody has different views on certain things. And that’s a very good thing. This way, you are able to see a problem from ten different perspectives and that gives you the possibility to decide the right thing. We are doing this in our boards and the process looks like this…

1. Having an idea
2. Discuss about it
3. Vote about the decision
4. Include it in the feature catalogue

All in all it’s quite a creative process. But in the end, it’s a whole bunch of administrative work to do. Moderate the whole discussions, keep the concept together, kick unwanted ideas out and in the end decide about the features and document them in the design doc. Huhh…

To finish this article now…I want to make clear, that I don’t want to complain about my job. I’m in a team of really talented guys here and it’s a pleasure to work with all of them. My job is fun! Gamedesign is fun! And hey, I wanted to be a gamedesigner since I played my first game. Just like the other 98. So you want to be a gamedesigner? Then go out and try it!

Write me an eMail or comment this article below…

madcybi@openoutcast.org

Best regards,
madcybi

May the yods be silent! Welcome to the new home of open Outcast!

After long and hard work from all of…wait…again…after long hard work from s87 and some little work from the rest of the team, we are now able to present you our new and fresh oOC site. *fanfare*

Yeah, lets go a bit into the details about the reasons for this switch of homepage. That’s quite easy, it was just because the old page was really terrible to update. No CMS or anything in place, just plain html. Not that we are not competent enough to make updates in HTML – we are – but we somehow just didn’t have time in the last month. As you all know we had something else to do

Okay, but now the new site is live and several things are going to change now:

• More regular news updates on the page
• Weekly developer’s blogs
• More content – Videos & Pictures, maybe some music even
• A lot more activity in the boards

But wait, that’s all? Nothing else?

No, not even close to something like “nothing else”. Lets see…

• We now have a finished OASIS – check
• We received a lot of good and enthusiastic feedback – check
• We all look as good as David Beckham – che…wait.

Okay, maybe not. But at least, we have a plan. And it seems, that it is a good plan. In theory…

But I really should stop talking nonsense now and come to the real important points. One of them seems to be how we are planning to proceed now after Oasis? Releasing other demos? Going the episodic way? Going on holiday with the dev-team? No not at all. We had a long and exhausting developer’s chat the other week and nailed down our masterplan to finish and successfully release oOC. And this is the direction we want to go to:

Four milestones

• Gandha – Pre-Alpha
• Eluee – Alpha
• Ka – Beta
• Fae – Final / Release

Don’t expect us to write any of the release dates down. They are kept internally until we are sure that we can publish something that will hold the pressure. Oh, and by the way…There won’t be any new demo releases for the next milestones.

“D’oh! But why not”, will some of you now ask us.
It’s easy, we want to finish oOC in an acceptable time span. And if we release demos between the milestones, it will last 100 years and when we release it then you are all dead. And that would be a quite unfortunate situation as you could imagine.

So we decided to kick out the new demo releases and just concentrate on the big game.

…
…
…

Okay okay, you are right. Something has to be release anyway to keep you interested. We know that. “Bread and Circuses” as the old romans would have said!
To get serious again…we are planning to release regular update packs for the OASIS demo.

This means the following. If we finished a package of new interesting features (like a new HUD, the quest system, the conversation system, climbing on the walls, camera etc.) we are implementing them into the OASIS demo and release a patch. And you can try out those features right away. Okay, you won’t get anything really new in terms of game assets and quests – at least not in every patch – but hey…there has to be at least some last good reason that you will stay with us to play the final game, right?

We are expecting a lot of feedback about those features from your side and because of that, you are an important part of our developer team. You guys are the one’s we are making this game for and that is why we want to integrate you as much as possible. Tell us your ideas, critics and feedbacks as soon as a new patch comes out. Of course there will be some separate boards for this – just like the OASIS one – where you can post everything you get out of the new version of OASIS.

Yeap, so far so good. That seems to be all for the moment.
*turns around and shouts in direction of the developer’s jacuzzi*
“Okay guys? Did I forgot something?”…
…*blubb*…*blubb*…

Believe us, there will be A LOT more action on the site and the boards, than it was before and even than it was EVER. So stay tuned, guys! The adventure of getting serious in creating oOC has started right now with the release of this news post and you will be a part of this voyage. We are counting you in. Lets rock!

“Even the longest way starts with a single step…”

Best regards,
Eternal Outcasts