John Bye won the NWN 2006 Golden Dragon Award for Best Multiplayer module with his innovative RTS style Good vs Evil II (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Modules.Detail&id=4976). I caught up with him to pose him some questions...
What made you start building modules for NWN?
I've always wanted to be a game designer, and first got involved in the online gaming community when I was at university back in the mid 90's. I started out making Doom mods, before forming an online team that developed two multiplayer add-on packs for Quake II.
Unfortunately we were a little ahead of our time. Publishers weren't interested in an online-focused game back then, and developers didn't nurture mod content for their games in the same way that companies like Bioware and Valve do today. In the end we got a really good deal on an online sales license from id Software, but digital distribution was in its infancy back then and we never made enough money to turn it into a full-time job. It was a great experience though, and a lot of our members went on to work at big name developers like Epic, EA, 3D Realms and Looking Glass.
During this time I got sidetracked into games journalism as a way of paying the bills, and that eventually turned into a career. I spent over four years running videogame websites for a living, until Neverwinter Nights came along...
When NWN was released in June 2002, I was working as Editor-in-Chief of EuroGamer. I'd been following the game's development for a long time, so when our review copy arrived I decided to handle it myself.
To be honest, I felt the original single player campaign was a bit weak compared to previous Bioware games like Baldur's Gate. But the toolset was a lot of fun and clearly had massive potential, and the game's online mod community was building up very quickly. I spent some time playing around with the toolset as part of the review, and even ran a work-in-progress persistent city module on a server for EuroGamer's readers for a while, but never had time to finish anything.
A couple of months later that changed when I was forced out of my job at EuroGamer. I'd been working flat-out on the site for three years without a break by that point, so I decided to take it easy for a while, and then look for a job in game development rather than taking another editorial position.
Once the novelty of lounging around the house in my pyjamas watching DVDs wore off, I went back to the Neverwinter Nights toolset to keep myself entertained. As well as being fun, I knew it would be a good way of polishing my design skills and showing potential employers what I was capable of. The NWN toolset is extremely flexible and easy to use, so the only real limitations would be time and imagination.
As it turns out, I had plenty of time. I spent almost a year working on Neverwinter Nights mods, and developed the Lord Of Blight (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Modules.Detail&id=3341) trilogy, the Gestalt Cutscene Scripting System (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Scripts.Detail&id=2570) and Good vs Evil (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Modules.Detail&id=3340) along the way. When I got an offer from Lionhead to work on the cinematics for Fable in October 2003, it was largely thanks to all the cutscene work I'd done in Neverwinter Nights.
What was the inspiration behind the Good vs Evil modules?
After I left EuroGamer I kept in touch with some of the regular readers there, and a few of us used to get together online to play NWN from time to time. One of the better mods we played was The Horde, which was a really original module that had you fighting orcs to capture outposts and eventually take out the enemy leader. We had a lot of fun playing it, but as a real-time strategy fan I wanted something that gave me more control over my army.
So, over a period of a few weeks, I developed Good vs Evil. Each time we got together online I'd have a new version of the mod ready to play and, thanks to the feedback the other players gave me, development was pretty rapid. Before long I had a version I was happy to release to the public.
Like The Horde, Good vs Evil has two armies fighting over spawn points on a big map, but the gameplay is a lot more strategic.
Each army gains mana from the shrines they control, players can use that mana to summon several different types of AI soldier to fight alongside them, and you can give orders to those soldiers, such as defend this spot, come with me, or attack the nearest enemy shrine. You can even buy catapults and ballistas which can be deployed around the map to provide your men with artillery support.
The ultimate goal of Good vs Evil is to smash through the gates of the enemy fort at the far end of the map and destroy the altar within. But the altar is healed by the mana flow from its army's shrines, so the more shrines you capture before attacking the enemy fort, the easier it is to destroy their altar. This opens up lots of tactical options, ranging from a full-scale assault to sneaking a stealthed rogue with an inventory full of catapults into the enemy base.
Best of all though, players aren't limited to being the good guys all the time - in Good vs Evil you can fight for either side. And that means that in multiplayer you can team up against the AI with your friends, as we'd done with The Horde, or have players fighting on both sides of the battle, which turned out to be an absolute riot.
It's much more of an RTS concept than the usual NWN modules. What was the biggest challenge you faced putting GvE2 together?
Although PvP multiplayer is a lot of fun, Good vs Evil also works really well as a single player or co-operative mod, thanks to the "tactical AI" script. This assigns each soldier to attack or defend key objectives based on the state of the battle, making sure that the enemy reacts to your actions, and that every battle is slightly different.
This is the most complex part of the mod, containing about 2400 lines of scripting. As you can imagine, balancing and bug testing it so that it worked consistently across several different maps took some time. And a lot of it was rewritten for Good vs Evil II to make the difficulty curve smoother, improve performance and allow for more varied map layouts.
Good vs Evil II also added a new "Hero" mode, which puts the tactical AI in control of both armies. This gives the mod more of a Dynasty Warriors feel, as you try to swing the course of the battle while it rages all around you. You can still give basic orders to nearby troops using a simple point-and-click interface, as in the original "General" mode, but in Hero mode your army can take care of itself if you want to focus more on hack-and-slash.
The AME team had great fun testing your module Good vs Evil II. Are there a lot of people out there playing it?
It's hard to say, as we don't have a dedicated server running the mod at the moment. But with six armies, six battlefields, two gameplay modes, full multiplayer support and a tough but fair AI, many of Good vs Evil's fans are still playing five years after the mod was first released, which I think is testament to its variety and replayability.
And people aren't just playing the mod. Good vs Evil was designed to be very modular and easy to extend, and I've always treated it as "open source". The mod even comes with a builder's manual explaining how to add your own armies, maps and troop types. So a lot of people have made their own versions of the mod - I've seen several versions floating around with extra armies, somebody translated an early version of the mod into Japanese (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Modules.Detail&id=1027), and Forrestwolf recently released a sci-fi themed D20 Modern version of Good vs Evil (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Modules.Detail&id=5700).
Any plans to do any other work on the NWN games?
I still work on Good vs Evil from time to time. In fact, I'm happy to announce that some time after the v1.69 NWN patch is released, a new version of Good vs Evil will be available, adding horses to the mod! I've always wanted cavalry to be part of Good vs Evil and now, thanks to BioWare and the DLA (http://www.dladventures.com/index.php) team, it's possible. Being able to rapidly ride around the battlefield on horseback makes battles more manageable, particularly for solo players, and the new AI cavalry units look great in action.
Aside from that, I don't have any plans for other NWN mods at this point. Between my job, the daily commute and my girlfriend, I don't have a lot of spare time for modding these days.
(http://ame-gda.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/cavalry_undead.jpg)
Ever considered switching to NWN2?
I took a quick look at the NWN2 toolset when the game first came out, but quite a lot seems to have changed and it wasn't as easy to pick up as I'd been hoping. I didn't have enough spare time to really get to grips with it or build anything new from scratch, so I decided to stick with NWN1.
You were involved in the HoF team. How was that? Have you worked with other teams?
I approached BioWare way back in 2003 with the idea of putting together a team of top mod designers from the Neverwinter Nights community to develop an expansion pack for the game. Having worked on team projects (both free and commercial) in the Doom and Quake communities, I knew that co-ordinating a team online with members working part time and scattered across several different time zones would be challenging, to say the least.
Putting together a single big, linear adventure like Shadows of Undrentide or Hordes of the Underdark wasn't really feasible, in my opinion. So I came up with the idea of going back to a classic pen and paper role-playing game style campaign - a series of stand-alone adventures designed by different authors, but all taking place in a common setting, with on-going story threads that could carry across multiple modules.
These adventures would be linked by a "hub" module, a town which would be loaded at the end of each module and act as a home base for the player. It would be somewhere to chat with your friends between adventures, sell your loot, stock up on equipment, hear the latest gossip, and get job offers and requests for help from the locals, which would then launch you into your next adventure when you were ready to leave town.
At first I was intending this to be a third retail expansion pack for NWN, but once BioWare told me about their plans for the Premium Modules scheme I reworked the concept as an on-going series that could be sold online, one chapter at a time. This actually made more sense, as the modules could be developed simultaneously and released once a month, with the hub module being patched with new content to hook into the new modules as they became available.
Sadly it wasn't to be. BioWare had to jump through a lot of legal hoops to get their digital distribution system off the ground. By the time they got the approval process for Premium Module design ideas up and running, my initial three month contract with Lionhead had turned into a permanent position, and I wasn't able to take the concept any further.
Several months later though, I was invited to join a BioBoards guild for Hall of Fame module designers. Originally it was just a place for us all to hang out, exchange tips, provide feedback on each others' work and so on. But one of the other members suggested getting together to develop a team project {edit - Ben thinks it was codepoetz}. So I dusted off my old community expansion pack concept and posted it in the thread, and some of the other designers picked it up and ran with it. The result was the Tales Of The Sundering (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Modules.Detail&id=5225) series.
I was still working full-time at Lionhead, so I wasn't heavily involved in the project and wasn't able to make a module of my own as part of the series. Aside from the initial concept of a hub system for linking the adventures, my only real contributions were a few ideas for the storyline and setting, a tileset for the hub city module, and playtesting early versions of some of the modules. All the real work was done by other members of the group.
Things seemed to be coming together by early 2005, and the team was producing some great work. I helped put them in touch with my contacts at BioWare to see if the project could be turned into a Premium Module series, but unfortunately things went off the rails at that point.
I'm not entirely sure what happened, but my understanding is BioWare expressed an interest in the project, but Hasbro wanted the whole thing to be transferred from its exotic original setting to the overly familiar Forgotten Realms. This would have made the series less compelling in my opinion, and also required a lot of content and dialogue changes. All of which wasted valuable time and sapped morale. By the time the idea of releasing the series as Premium Modules was abandoned, key members of the team had been hired to work on Wyvern Crown of Cormyr (http://store.bioware.com/products/wyverncrown.html) and Darkness Over Daggerford (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=Modules.Detail&id=5122). {edit - the Premium Module programme was cancelled a month later. Given the work needed, that was likely a large contributor}
In the end the whole project seemed to just fizzle out, which is a real shame. If the Premium Module service hadn't been killed off so quickly by Atari, and Hasbro had had the vision to allow the series to be released with its original setting, I think it would have been a big success. It was an exciting new concept, something that hadn't really been attempted before, and it had some very talented individuals working on it.
Luckily there is a (relatively) happy ending to this convoluted saga though. In late 2006 and early 2007, several modules from the series (restored to their original setting) were finally released for free, and are now available here on NWVault. Be sure to check them out for a glimpse of what could have been. I think you'll agree that codepoetz (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=User.Profile&id=4245), B G P Hughes (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=User.Profile&id=6021), Marc Price (http://nwvault.ign.com/View.php?view=User.Profile&id=47287) and the rest of the people that contributed to the series did a great job.
What did you think when you first heard about the Golden Dragon Awards?
I was very flattered to be invited to join the Academy for Modding Excellence committee that judged the awards. Unfortunately I was too busy with my day job at the time, and hadn't been able to play many NWN modules recently, so I had to decline.
I think they're a great idea though. While there's definitely a place for "people's choice" awards, all too often they turn into popularity contests, as naturally the mods that have been played by the most people get the most votes. The Golden Dragons are more like the Oscars, in that they're voted on by other mod makers and regular reviewers, so it's not unusual for less well known mods to get recognised and for there to be a few upsets by the end of the night.
That's why it was a particular honour when I heard that Good vs Evil II had been given the Golden Dragon for Best Multiplayer Module. Thanks guys!
What else are you up to?
Right now I'm working as a designer / level designer / scripter for a big independent development group here in the UK called Kuju. I work at their London studio, which is best known for developing the Battalion Wars games for Nintendo. I'm afraid the projects I've worked on there haven't been announced yet though, so I can't tell you any more than that right now.
Thanks to John Bye for the interview. I think you'll agree, one of the best yet - and not just because I got a mention! ;)
The Oscar's of NWN, you say? Wow thanks Gestalt. That's quite flattering.
Did you have to mention Ben, though? I think his ego is inflated enough. ;)
Excellent interview, it is always nice to know a little bit more about our NWN1 modders apart from their actual work. Good Vs Evil is a smashing fun game in SP or MP :)
Thanks AME for posting up these interviews!