How To Complete A Scenario

Article written by Julius999
Published on 11-22-2008; updated on 10-16-2010
Tags:

In my opinion, one of the main reasons so few projects get completed is the way that people approach them. It’s all too easy to get bogged down and not feel like continuing, or skipping to another part of the scenario and ending up with a buggy mess of fragmented triggers that you can’t work with and would take days to fix.

The other major problem is being too ambitious in the planning stages and deciding that every unit must have twenty different lines of chat dialogue, there must be the most detailed food system ever devised by man, twenty levels of difficulty, three Hollywood quality .avi files, seventy three side quests and two dozen minigames, all spread over a twelve scenario epic on giant size maps.

This is fine if that’s what you enjoy about designing, but a lot of people get frustrated and would much rather complete something. For those people, here are some things to bear in mind.

Planning Stages

Impossible dreams have a very poor completion rate.

  • Have reasonable expectations, and attempt something you can actually do in an amount of time you can manage.
  • Don’t plan too much detail. It’s easy to put yourself in a strait jacket and then get bored. Leave room for new ideas.
  • Have a story idea, but keep it fairly simple. No one has successfully created a detailed story of novel or play length in AoK.
  • Be aware of the limits of the editor. Hyper-advanced systems are going to require huge amounts of tedious trigger-work.
  • AoK is set in a third person perspective and has a limited amount of units and props. Sticking religiously to a film script is right out.
  • Do you actually need a giant map, or seventeen scenarios? You’re setting yourself up for a vast amount of work. It takes a lot of time to fill that much space and you may well get bored.
  • Almost everyone tries a huge RPG scenario with complete freedom. If you want to do this, keep the scale small. The only one of these ever really completed was Life of a Mercenary, which had only a few quests and used only part of a small map. It still took a long time to make and has over one thousand triggers.
  • If you decide that modifications are necessary, be aware of the extra work they entail. New graphics are going to take a long, long time to get right if you do them from scratch. Don’t commit yourself to making one hundred completely new units unless you can employ a staff of full-time professionals. Decide whether the effect is worth the work.

Getting Started, What Not To Do First

Generally, you don’t want to start off doing all the bits you enjoy most, if you want to finish the whole thing. You’ll run out of inspiration very soon.

  • Prologues, Epilogues or any form of a teaser. Completing one of these won’t get much of the actual project out of the way. Making them the last thing you do gives them more significance.
  • Design a percentage completion bar. Calculating that you have now reached the 18.23% point is a waste of time, almost certainly inaccurate, and depressing.
  • Fancy bitmaps. This is also displacement activity. Making these when the project is actually finished is much sweeter, knowing the work is now behind you.
  • Unless you know that you have the commitment, doing all the map design. This can leave you with only trigger-work still to do, which most people find extremely boring. Always leave some of the more fun work to do so you can take breaks from triggers. The other things is that you may change your mind about what you want the map to be like, halfway through the story.

Good Practice

These things take barely any effort, but can save you a lot of grief later on.

  • Entertainment value takes priority over everything else. This can be through both gameplay and story. Also, if it’s fun for you to try out, you won’t get disenchanted so easily.
  • Name your triggers properly, or you’ll find debugging them or adding in a feature becomes a nightmare.
  • Roughly design in the order the scenario will go. You don’t want to have to return to half finished trigger systems that you no longer understand.
  • Start off with the most important triggers like name and stat changes and difficulty dynamics. These are not things you want to have to hunt through the list for all the time.

What Not To Include

  • Fancy trigger tricks for the sake of having them. Nothing should exist in your scenario unless it makes it more fun to play. Complicated food systems are normally something to avoid.
  • Every good idea you’ve ever had. Not all your tricks and clever concepts need to be in one file, there will be other opportunities to use them. If something can’t be made to fit in sensibly, leave it out.
  • Frustrating objectives. No part of your scenario should take dozens of reloads and an in-depth understanding of some arbitrary trigger system to get past. On hard difficulty, this is fair game, but on other levels give the player some margin for error (especially don’t make getting the first hit in one-on-one combat the only way to win – it’s pretty much random), and always make it obvious that the objective is actually possible.
  • Tricks for the player. These are rarely fun. If you make the player visit their ally for reinforcements, and when they do that the ally kills them instead, it’s a waste of time and the player will just reload and not do it next time. Or they will quit altogether. Obviously this doesn’t apply if an ally’s betrayal is an inevitable part of the story.
  • Hidden crucial aspects of the scenario. At no point should the player lose because you didn’t tell them something vital that they couldn’t reasonably figure out for themselves in a couple of tries.

Finishing Touches

There are some things that are very tempting to do early on, but will tend to lead to accumulating huge masses of triggers while the core gameplay has barely started. You will find it easier to complete a project if you get the backbone done first before adding in the optional extras. Often, these little touches can make the difference between a good scenario and a great one, but there’s no reason to waste effort on them until you’re sure that they won’t languish in an incomplete file. These are roughly in the order of importance, although there’s no real rules about that.

  • Unnecessary side quests, mini games and similar little features. These can be a lot of fun, but don’t forget that the main storyline is the focus.
  • Manicuring every single tile of map design to perfection. Map design is scenery, you can live with it not being totally perfect. Playable scenarios don’t have the same priorities as screenshots.
  • Detailed story, history, hints, walkthrough and scouts section. These are all better done once you know what the finished scenario is actually like.
  • Renaming every last unit on the map. People are more bothered about the scenario being fun rather than every Yurt having a new name.
  • Inventory systems. Spend time on arranging all the items in the game in a nice list once you know that the effort won’t be wasted on something unfinished.
  • Secrets, cheats and bonus features. No one cares if there are a dozen secret bonuses hidden in the scenario, if the scenario isn’t finished.
  • Idle chat dialogue like Villager: “Hello”. This is normally just a distraction early on.
  • Bitmaps, prologue scenarios, Blacksmith descriptions, advertising and other presentational stuff. Good presentation is a positive, but only when you have something to present.

One good example of how concentrating on the main idea works best for completing projects is Sabato Returns. For me at least, it was a lot of fun, but I could think of many ways in which I would make slight changes and additions. But the important thing is that it is entertaining as it is, and because it has been finished, little extra touches can now be thought about. Doing it the other way round is much, much harder. I’m as guilty as the next man, but it is still something to think about.

Do you want to comment on this article? Thank the author? Tribute resources for its improvement? Raze it to the ground?

Come by and visit its thread in the University Forum!