Note: This article was originally posted on the Lyceum boards on 3 March 2005.
As I'm finishing up some of the last of my initial reflections on Bahssikava, the process of making it, and the reaction that it received in the community, I thought I might share some of my thought processes with everyone.
------------------The storyline behind Bahs is old. I came up with the idea for a scenario about a journey to the slith homeland almost as soon as I found out that BoE existed. I never made that scenario in BoE for reasons that I forget now -- NK0P seemed more promising at the time.
Anyway, after I found out that BoA was going to come out, I went back over my old ideas for scenarios, and the slith homeland idea stuck out to me. I liked it for BoA in particular because it is a very Avernite plot: Lost Bahssikava was an addition for A1 that wasn't there in E1, so this scenario is one of the few that only makes sense in Avernum, not in Exile. It seemed appropriate to start out on that one first.
Originally the scenario was called The Slith Homeland (which is why the file is still called slithhome.bas -- I never changed it), until I realized that it didn't have anything to do with the homeland itself at all -- it was about Bahssikava, and the ruins of that civilization.
I was intrigued by the unanswered questions in Bahssikava Deeps in A1: the steel doors that would not open, the slith Legare who had such a strange name and who decided to stay in the tunnels below Bahssikava because of some sort of enlightenment he had found, the strange ruins in the southwest that appeared to be from a different civilization altogether. I wanted to develop some sort of explanation for this, so I began investigating slith history in the Avernum Trilogy. The notes that I took are posted on my web site -- mostly, I interviewed the sliths of Gnass in A1 and A2 and of Lost Bahssikava in A1 in order to get some idea of the source material.
With that in hand, I started to design. The oldest parts of the scenario are Legare's poems, which I wrote shortly before BoA came out. Legare was to be an epic hero, which is why he had to speak in verse.
------------------I designed the scenario chronologically, from the Temple of the Goddess to Mount Galthrax. I began as soon as BoA came out and had finished virtually all of the N-K sidequest by the end of last summer. Then school hit, and it took me more than four months to finish Mount Galthrax and the final cut scene, and an extra load of time alpha testing.
A good chunk of this time I spent learning how to script. I didn't know any programming at that time, so getting accustomed to BoA's syntax and peculiarities took some effort. Most of the towns exist as experiments of one kind or another: the first two extended cut scenes were, more than anything else, attempts to learn how cut scenes work. The North River town is an experiment (inspired by the first town in EM) with heights.
But I did much more than that. Each of the fights has some gimmick or trick to make them slightly different from any other fight. For instance, the demons in Bahssikava weren't just a whole load of demons: the one in the southwest of Western Bahssikava was a Flamer, the bar in the south of that city had Hostile A and Hostile B that started fighting each other as soon as you walked in, the winged demons in Khar-Grav used Fly-Retreat to get close to you, and so on.
I assumed that since every single fight was subtlely different, every fight would be interesting. I found out that I was wrong in a simple, seemingly obvious way: Blades players define interesting fights by how different their experience is, not how different the designer's experience is. That means that slightly modified behavior is nothing (even if it makes the fight different from a designer's standpoint), and forcing different tactics is everything, because that's what a player thinks about while playing: how do I beat this fight? (I think this will be the basis of an article that I will write at some point.) It was this realization -- stemming from a conversation with Thuryl -- that led to the altar fight in Tunnels, which many people say is the best combat in the scenario.
------------------Another thing I tried to do was make everything huge: huge cut scenes, huge dungeons, huge fights, huge stakes in the plot, huge puzzles. The scenario consists entirely of medium and large towns, mostly large. The town scripts contain on average about two or three times as much code as any other's scenario's.
This became something of problem for some, however. The narrative was described as "bloated" -- some people hate the cut scenes because they are so long, and I haven't heard anyone argue the contrary, but simply say that we tolerate so much worse that this is okay. I think the problem is that scenarios are made up of many different elements, and by blowing each of the elements so out of proportion, I interrupted the flow: a gigantic, five-minute cut scene following a gigantic, five-minute battle destroys the player's involvement, and three sizable beam puzzles makes the player completely forget about the monsters on the level above or even the reason that those puzzles are there.
The next serious scenario that I make will attempt to mix the elements much more closely together: a short cut scene, followed by a short puzzle, followed by a couple of combats, followed by some dialog, followed by another combat, and so on. I like the way that the first half of Emulations kept the pace quick by mingling scenario elements like this, and I'll try to emulate (ha ha) that for the next scenario.
------------------Another thing that I will try to do is tie in the plot of the scenario with the action of the scenario. I am now, as Bahssikava is complete, acutely aware that very little of the plot of the scenario really matters for what the player must accomplish in the scenario. This is a lesser form of Za-Khazi disease: in ZKR, the premise of a new slith war and a hurried rafting ride to get supplies to a fort is totally disconnected from the experience of the scenario and rafting down the Run.
To a lesser degree, the fact that Legare is a prophet who is leading a crew of sliths (and a couple of humans) through the steel doors doesn't actually make much difference to the action in Bahs: Mount Galthrax would be much the same with any other interchangeable justification. I have always felt that the N-K sidequest was the best part of the scenario, because the action and the plot are intimately related: freeing the sliths and defeating the demons is exactly what you have to do, and that's what all the plot circles around. Mount Galthrax really doesn't have anything to do with the slith expedition or Legare or anything else in the scenario, except in minor ways; it's just another obstacle.
I will also make a much greater effort to tie the action and the plot closer together in the next scenario. (The Creator's article "Don't Draw Focus!" has much to do with what I'm talking about.)
------------------Another thing I learned in the final stages of this scenario was that different people have such wildly varying tastes with regard to RPGs that some people's comments simply will not make sense to me no matter how much we discuss them. After a few fruitless conversations with a couple of beta testers, and then some e-mails with "Notregged," I decided that there's just a fundamental difference of opinion between me and some others that cannot be reconciled to anyone's satisfaction: I just like different things than they do.
This was an interesting realization for me, that I simply have to make the sort of scenario that I would want to play and can only go so far to support those who want to play a different kind of scenario.
I'm still sort of grappling with this last issue, so if my thoughts sound half-digested, it's because they are.
------------------Anyway, I've learned a lot from the experience. I'm just trying to track down the last few bugs (some bizarre Unhandled Exceptions in Windows) and then I'll release another version, and I'll be done with Bahs for the time being. (I may give it a touch-up sometime in May for the Scenario Contest.) And then I'll take a break from BoA, I think, for a short time anyway.
Thank you all for your help in various ways in making Bahs. It's essentially in a three-way tie for the top-ranked scenario on CSR (with ASR and Canopy), and I'm pleased with that.
Thanks again.