Neverwinter Nights 2: The Labyrinth Design Document

The Assignment

As one of my first game projects during my first year at MSU I and a group of students had to put together a Neverwinter Nights 2 module which had to have an estimated play time of 30 minutes. Unfortunately I honestly did not feel like there was remotely enough potential in Neverwinter Nights 2 to make 30 minutes of dungeon crawling enjoyable. The game couldn't do anything other than strictly emulate 3rd edition D&D combat rules--and strictly interpreted D&D combat rules are just plain boring. It's like hack-and-slash gameplay designed by an irate beureucrat ("In order to attack please submit 'request to attack' form D-20 and wait for approval from the head office"). We also didn't have the luxury of being able to assume our professor's character was any higher than level 1, which limited our options much more strictly. Luckily it had a branching dialogue system so we didn't have any shortage of ways to circumvent the issue.

The Idea in a Nutshell

Labyrinth's challenge therefore wasn't in combat but in the act of finding the game's titular dungeon. Players gather information and clues from the townspeople of Jekk as they search for a labyrinth where goblins have taken all the town's children. The dungeon's exact location isn't known. All anyone is sure of is that it's in a cave somewhere, but there are dozens of caves all over the landscape surrounding the town. Only old Emmett knows which one it's in, but he's gone completely mad. So, players have several options for finding this cave: cure Emmett of his mental sickness, use deductive reasoning to determine the location of the cave based on a few clues, or just explore every single cave and discover it via trial and error. One way or another the game takes more than 30 minutes to play and--at least on paper--sounds a lot more interesting than vaguely turn-based hack-and-slash.

Breakdown

This class was required of all Telecomm students regardless of specialization as well as many outside students seeking to take higher level TC electives or filling out cognate and minor requirements. As a result it was host to a huge variety of students, many of whom were unaware of what a .zip file was let alone how to operate the incredibly unintuitive and hugely complex Neverwinter Nights 2 toolset. They weren't dumb people, they just weren't game development students and weren't interested in being such any time soon. So I ended up having to write this design document in two days by myself, with aid from the rest of the group coming in the form of the maps. The fact is that I ended up taking a lot of the burden of this project on myself. What assets my teammates did contribute during the course of development often needed significant adjustments before they were suitable for use in the game. Areas lacked any sound effects or lighting to speak of, mountains wouldn't be steep enough and players would be able to walk up slopes they shouldn't have been able to, and fairly large amounts of branching dialogue had to be re-written. What was worse nobody wanted to program anything, so I ended up writing 30 of the game's scripts in addition to all of this. Towards the last month and a half of the project it got to the point where I'd spend 8 hours a day working on it.

In spite of my best efforts the module itself turned out perfectly unplayable. All the terrain, the monsters, and everything else worked fine, but the scripts had a fatal flaw in the way they referenced variables. Conversations would randomly change when they shouldn't have or else wouldn't change when they were supposed to. There should have been some global script or something to maintain information like this but no one could seem to find it and there was a vast shortage of good NWN2 tutorials or support as the game had only just been released when we took this class. We'd been assigned a book that was supposed to be of help with scripting but it contained no information past the basics and our professor had nothing further to tell us. Everyone faced the same issue and no one found a good resolution.

The design document, however, turned out extremely well for what it was and probably shows the design better than the project itself in spite of the MS Paint-drawn maps. Therefore I present it here with my other materials in my portfolio, proud to say that it was at least a good idea.