 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
 |
|
|
|
 |
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
A Hero's Death by Thad Boyd Interview by Jay Watamaniuk Go to (Previous - Introduction, Myranni's Magic, Walking with a Ghost, A Hero's Death, Firestarter, The Realm Below, A Moonless Night, Aspects, The Badger, the Cat and the Book, Grains of Truth, Find the Fish!, Ghosts of the Past, To Hell and Back - Next ) Where can I grab your module A Hero's Death?It's in the Vault. There's also a mirror at my personal website. What experience in writing did you bring to the contest?
And while I spent college writing a lot of essays, I never took a fiction course. I took a creative writing course one summer, but it turned out, to my surprise and that of most of my classmates, to be a poetry course taught by a professor who didn't like it when we used adverbs or abstractions. I'm just a guy who loves words and loves putting them together to tell a story. When I was a kid, Mom read me The Chronicles of Narnia and The Lord of the Rings, and Dad took me to the video arcade. Writing video games in a fantasy setting seems like a logical progression. What are you currently working on - NWN related or not?I'm putting some thought into A Hero's Death 2.0. I received some legitimate criticism on the mod, most notably from people who didn't like starting the game in the role of a character who has abandoned his mercenary troupe in battle. I'd like to respond by adding that battle into the game and giving the player a choice in its outcome. This is all just talk right now, though. I haven't made any firm decision to modify the module yet. I welcome feedback from the community; many of the comments I've received have been very constructive. I also may do some freelance work for a new startup game developer, but it's too early for me to say anything more about that project at this point. What do you think of using NWN as a story-telling medium?I've been a gamer since I was 6 or 7 years old, and have always seen the medium's potential for storytelling. While I grant that video games have yet to produce the kind of rich story of a novel like The Great Gatsby or a film like Citizen Kane, they give us elements that books and movies can't: exploration, choice, and freedom. My module gives the player a situation and then allows her to choose her character's motives and decisions. One reviewer commented that in three plays through my module, he played three very different characters. I had actually never played NWN prior to this contest. That I could pick it up and put together a winning module in two months' time says a lot about the toolset's ease-of-use. All in all I'm very impressed with Aurora; it has a few wonky bits (I have to close out of my scripts to save the module?) but is a very powerful tool that's also easy to learn, especially if you have some experience coding in a C-style language. It's an incredibly versatile program and absolutely ideal for telling stories like A Hero's Death. Go to (Previous - Introduction, Myranni's Magic, Walking with a Ghost, A Hero's Death, Firestarter, The Realm Below, A Moonless Night, Aspects, The Badger, the Cat and the Book, Grains of Truth, Find the Fish!, Ghosts of the Past, To Hell and Back - Next ) Related Links |
|
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Honestly, not a lot. I've never written professionally and never been published. While I'd love to make a career of it, up to this point writing's just been a hobby for me.
