Introducing…

Shadowrun: New Orleans

Perceptive folks will note that my last post previous to this one was months ago, and I hadn’t touched the editor at all.

Well, apparently that all changed, as now I believe I’m far enough into this project to announce a title and begin releasing a devblog and really starting to ramp up production. It’s amazing, actually, despite even having taken a couple weeks off here or there, and not really having a direction to work in, that I’m at a place where I’m confident enough to say I have a Proof of Concept.

So, let’s talk about what I have and where I am.

At this moment, I have four scenes—two combat, two non-combat, at various stages of (in)completeness. I also have enough of an idea of the big “meta” plot that I feel like I have enough direction to start linking these scenes together.

THE BAR

What I began with was just a sort of vague idea. “Let’s build a bar and see what happens” became “Oh wouldn’t it be cool if there was a hallway lit by red chinese lanterns” to “Oh, this reminds me of the Hustler club that I went to, and wouldn’t it be cool if I…” and that became what I’m currently calling Le Chat Noir, or just, “the bar” for the time being.

There’s another back room of course with dancers and lights and stuff, and there’ll be even more back rooms beyond that where some dialogue will happen, but the dance room’s not done and the back rooms not started, so I’ll just leave that there.

HIGHTOWER

This map I’m calling “Hightower” for right now. It’s based off of an actual building in New Orleans, though I really just used the exterior as an inspiration and built my own interior. This map grew out of, 1) me liking the building, and 2) wanting to learn dialogue. I’ve already got a couple meaty dialogues here with branching paths and skill/etiquette checks, and I’m working on a couple more, and then I’ll fill it out with some ambient actors.

The other thing this map taught me is that I really need to go back to lighting class. I mean, I took one in college for stage lighting, so I’ve got basic concepts down, but I’ve been stealing camera region light settings from HBS’s scenes and they’re just so absurdly dark. Which, when you consider the nature of shadowruns, makes sense, but in this case, this tower is open during business hours. So I turned up the ambient lighting for this, and while it fixed the issue of the building looking totally unoccupied, now all my point lights are too bright, and it’s a white floor so that explains the glare you’re currently seeing.

I’m particularly proud of this corner, even though I’d be lying if I said I made the background from scratch. I did have to touch it up to get what I wanted from it. Stuff like this is ultimately why I decided to work in the Hong Kong engine—I wanted to do 3D stuff, big city stuff, and the Dragonfall and Seattle assets just didn’t allow for that really well, but the Kowloon Walled City and Repulse Bay 3D/background assets have been incredibly helpful in creating the illusions I’ve sought. It’s a subtle effect, but the way the tower itself moves at a different speed from the background just gives the coolest illusion of being in a skyscraper in the CBD. Unf.

THE RIG

The Oil Rig (or just “The Rig” as I call it) doesn’t need much introduction. I haven’t really touched it since I introduced it in its own Reddit post a month or so back, other than to go in and poke and adjust a few props here and there when I was totally not putting off other work. I do still need to build the upper deck and the Matrix nodes and build the combat encounters, but I’m happy with where I’m at with this scene for right now.

THE PROLOGUE

The prologue chapter will be set in the swamp, because you can’t have New Orleans without the swamp. This map I was working on before even the Rig, and I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, or that deep rural environments were an absolute god-awful pain in the ass to design. The SR:R assets were absolutely not designed with forests in mind. I mean, cemetaries, okay (and we’ll get into one of those I’m sure; New Orleans is kinda famous for those). But not forest, or in this case, swamp.

I still have to build an interior where the actual gunfight will occur, and then spice it up with some dialogue and finalize the NPCs in this level and figure out how we go from here to the Hightower scene, which is where we go next, chronologically.

So let’s talk schedules and planning

As a single person who’s never worked in any editor before (I was a console gamer almost all my life up until about 2010), I am by no means promising a speedy development process. Bear in mind, this is also just a hobby. While I’m optimistic that I’m going to finish what I’ve started here, if I took the time to do everything I’ve written down that I’d like to do, with all the big twists and turns and loops and flash, I estimate it’d take most of if not a full year. Even if I put 1-2 hours in it a day.

So instead, I think I’m going to do a more episodic release. Maybe get in the prologue and some exposition with a shadowrun or two to keep things interesting, and let folks give feedback on that while I work on the meat and bones of the mid-story plot and have more experience in level design and working in the SR:R editor under my belt. So with that intent, I feel like if I decide to just do The Rig and maybe one other Shadowrun for “Episode 1”, I feel like I could have this at a playable state by mid to late March. Maybe sooner, but I’m anticipating a wrench somewhere in playtesting given that I haven’t designed a single combat, but I’ve seen enough of how HBS did theirs in Hong Kong that I think I can figure it out relatively quickly.

From here on out, I’m going to try to do a weekly devblog, but it might become biweekly. Or monthly. It kind of depends on what life decides to throw at me. But given that I’ve been pretty solidly pumping an hour, sometimes two, into this thing, I feel like I’ve got enough of a pace to where I can come back on a weekly basis and say, “Here’s what I worked on. Here’s the plan.”

So then, hopefully I’ll see y’all in a week.