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).

A feature that no game calling itself sequel to Outcast should be missing is the ability to travel between different regions freely (the game world Adelpha was connected through portals – the so called Daokas).

Is it possible to transform a merely linear First-Person-Shooter like Crysis Wars into an adventure game that supports this kind of free travelling?

See for yourself:

NOTE: The morph targets for the Cutter model weren’t finished, so his lines aren’t lipsynched. What do you think about his voice? Should it be changed – maybe YOU can do it better?

When introducing free travelling we also had to think about following issues:

• Will the inventory/questlog of the player be kept when travelling to another level?
• Will modifications performed to the current level be remembered when travelling elsewhere?

Our solution for both of them was the development of a persistence system (check the corresponding feature on ModDB for more). We were pretty much relieved when it worked out the way we imagined, since it wasn’t clear whether the Crysis Wars SDK would permit such sort of modification altogether.

This and the dialogue system (presented in an earlier news post) were features not clear to be doable with the SDK – so we decided to implement them first to make sure we chose the right engine for our project.

Again we were confirmed in our choice … while it is still a long way to go until we’ve finished the programming work (not to mention asset creation) we are at least certain now that the remaining things we want to alter are definetly possible.

You also may have noticed that some custom UI elements for the questlog were added. Under the hood we further created a Lua-driven quest system that fits our needs better than the stock mission system of Crysis Wars.

And finally we added some screenshots of the new marketplace, city walls and the tweaked Cutter model with the incredible Backpack 3000:

The next step in terms of programming will be the implementation of an improved 3rd person camera with support for proper aiming (in combat mode) and collision detection (everyone who tried Oasis surely noticed that navigating in buildings was pretty annoying).

More on that soon…

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And finally some advertisment for vacant jobs:

We are always searching for motivated and talented people who want to help us release open Outcast some day and improve their portfolio along with getting experience working in a team with a professional claim at the same time. Currently we have a considerable shortage of 3D artists (modelers and the like) and besides we could need some tool programmers (C# knowledge required) and community managers (who can translate news postings and “spread the word”).

Take a look at the official job announcement at ModDB to learn how to apply and what the detailed requirements are.

Who doesn’t know the charming “Inventory is full” or “You are over encumbered” messages popping up when you want to pick up your reward for killing some tough boss enemy. Now there is a solution for these kind of problems: the Backpack 3000!

To get a full overview of it’s capabilities (along with testimonials and a list of famous people already using it) make sure to read the fact sheet.

Now seriously again:

In the last weeks we were working on our quest system and custom user interface (adding a journal for example). Tests with saving local data when travelling between levels were positive and we already implemented the basics of our persistence system that will enable free travelling between levels, while your progress and your modifications to each level aren’t lost.

It’s hard to give an exact date but expect some ingame video showing all of this around the middle of May.

To avoid any confusion: In spite of the date this posting is (fortunately) no joke at all

Crysis Wars has a feature rich Dialogue System including support for all kinds of facial expressions and generating lipsync pretty much automatically.
The trouble starts though as soon as you try to make dialogues nonlinear: the integrated system only allows Dialogues which run straight from top to bottom.

Since interactive dialogues will play an important part in open Outcast we had to find a better solution. Together with our Game Designers we set up following feature list for our own implementation:

• Dialogue flow is nonlinear (influenced by chosen options and logic / Lua scripts)
• Dialogues are defined in XML files
• Translation support
• Different camera modes that are configured over a config file
• Triggering actions that can be defined using the Flow Graph System of Crysis
• Starting sequences and optionally resuming the Dialogue again after they finished
• Support for Lipsync and facial expressions
• Providing simple Flow Nodes so Leveldesigners can integrate Dialogues easily
• Skipping lines of the dialogue

Now all of these features have been implemented, see for yourself:

If you are interested in the technical details or ask yourself how your mod could benefit from our system, read along in the corresponding feature on ModDB.

Successfully adding a modification of this magnitude to Crysis Wars confirmed us that we chose the right platform for our project.

A Highlight of the system are the camera modes you can see in the video below.

The next challenge is the extension of the Quest system and support for persistence – you heard right – that would enable travelling between different regions (levels) freely without losing quest progress!

More on this to come after we implemented it.