• Design

Neverwinter Nights 2: The Labyrinth (Design Document)

The Assignment

"The Labyrinth" is a Neverwinter Nights 2 module I made during my undergrad with a team of four other people, meant to fill about 30 minutes. I had no faith in NWN2's mechanics and the fun to be had in hack-and-slash dungeon crawling, so instead I built the narrative for this mod around a more open-ended problem. The player has to rescue children from the lair of some goblins--but nobody in town knows where the goblin lair is, so finding it is the real challenge.

We built multiple ways to do this into the game--either curing the town elder of his raving dementia and learning the location from him, piecing together the labyrinth's location from clues gathered in the town, or just going out and looking for the blasted thing. It's the first nonlinear narrative I developed in a digital environment, and an extremely ambitious one as it easily exceeded its 30-minute timeframe--not because of a broad generation of content, but through presenting the player simply with an open-ended problem.

Unfortunately it has been several hardware generations since I've been able to get Neverwinter Nights 2 to play, much less get this module to work, and so apart from the design document these screenshots from the crash-happy editor are the best photographic evidence of the mod I can provide.

What Went Right

• Interesting Problem: The module's open-ended central problem made an effective focus for the project and was able to extend play time well beyond the 30 minute mark established by the assignment.
• Challenge Curve: Density of encounters and monsters never felt too challenging or overwhelming for players--assuming a level 1 adventurer, anyway.
• Atmosphere: "The Labyrinth" maintained a relatively consistent atmosphere thanks to the guidelines in the design document.
• Content: Compromises were required in the generation of caves, mainly due to time restrictions; multiple caves in the same environment had to be condensed into a single shared cave, for instance; but otherwise, all content, particularly dialogue trees, made it into the module.

What Went Wrong

• Bugs: Many scripts in the module faced serious bugs in execution; occasionally dialogue trees would jump to the wrong state or even fail to jump to the right state.
• Low-Level Design: The "level design" of this module could stand to be more well-structured. This lacks the "challenge-focused" flow that I developed in graduate school and therefore is rather simplistic.
• Writing: The dialogue and characters in this module are very dry and utilitarian. They work, some of them are interesting enough, but the town of Jekk could feel more alive.
• Teamwork: Ji and Michael didn't have computers powerful enough to run either NWN2 or the editor, I couldn't receive Ji's Email as it came from an Asian Email client that mine recognized as spam, and poor Adam, who was a senior at the time and trying to manage everything that came with that, happened to get mono during the course of this class. Jack was far and away the most productive of the group aside from myself, but I still ended up spending a lot of time rushing around fixing things and substituting for other peoples' work, most especially where scripting was concerned as I wrote 30 of the mod's 32 scripts.
• Technical Skill: This is mainly because the team wasn't terribly technically adept, either--the Neverwinter Nights editor and indeed the idea of developing content for a game in general being things they'd never touched on; therefore as one more acquainted with this stuff I usually had to supplement their work. Most especially I had to add sound effects as the team neglected these almost completely on the first pass.

What I Would Change

The open-ended problem at the heart of this game works quite well, but if I had this project to do over again I'd probably come up with more interesting means of investigation as this is still a fairly conventional quest; I'd use more crime scene investigation-style ideas, having the player piece together the means by which the goblins took the children and use that to deduce their probable locations and whatnot. I'd put more effort into developing the setting's history, in particular; explaining the presence of ancient ruins on top of which the town is built, and how they offer the goblins secret passages into the town.