Also want to play SOA 3 as well. It’s been quite a while since I played NWN1 and would like an excuse to do so again

But the resulting pieces didn’t always “fit” together neatly, which led me to a lot of moving around of rooms and encounters, and in some cases adding new ones — especially at the borders — before I was finally satisfied. An example of that is what I’m working on now, which is re-designing the Earthen City. Before, there was a whole section to the east that led to a dead end cave, and the passage to the surface was tacked on to the south. While cutting up the area, I realized that I was missing an opportunity with the caves to the east. So right now I’m adding a couple of new areas and two new quests for the Earthen in that area, which I’m also using to present some more of the lore of the World of Glorn.

So a big change in v4 is that I’m reworking the area design in Sanctum 1 to an extent that I never have in any of the previous updates, and adding more new content along the way than I’d initially planned. You’ll find the general layout still familiar, but many of the details won’t be. The Lower ruins, for example, is now four separate areas, the upper ruins three, and Caverns Level 2, The North Forest, and The Secure Area are all two. And of course I had to add new portal rooms to make getting around in all of that a bit easier.

I’m hoping that I can get it ready for Beta testing by the end of May, more or less with what I’m expecting to be the release of Project Q v1.5 (which it will be using). A lot of that depends on getting some large enough blocks of time to work on it, though. The lore and quest design requires more focus and writing than most other building tasks, and that’s really what I need to finish right now.

I’m just finishing up the structural changes I had to make to accommodate the two new races: the Hellmen and the Earthen. It turned out to be a huge amount of work, and quite a bit more than I expected. All the new encounters, creature blueprints and items are done now, though, and just need to be tested and tweaked. Among other things, the battle against the (now Hellman) army at the end is going to look and play very differently as a result.

(One tidbit I’ll share: General Y’thra can now be either a male or female character, and will be set to the opposite of Robin’s gender. That’s to make it so that I can emphasize the threat of making Robin his/her personal slave consistently for all of the player’s RP choices.)

I’ve also just merged all of the Sanctum-specific custom content into a single hak in preparation for one final “2DA merge” with the new CEP 2.4 and Project Q 1.5 content. That’s my next major task. After that, I need to re-write a lot of the lore to be consistent with introduction of the new races, and continue adding new lore as well. (For example, The Legend of the Defender is already in as a new book.)

After that I need to finish tweaking the new treasure system, which (apart from giving out an awfully large number of Glittering Necklaces on my last playtest yesterday), is mostly in place now and seems to be working quite well. At that point I think Sanctum 1 will be ready for a beta test.

The update for Sanctum 2 will be easier in some respects, and harder in others. The easier part is that many of the changes needed in chapter 1 either don’t apply to chapter 2 (like the treasure system), or (like the Earthen) are already done now. The real (but fun!) challenge in chapter 2 will be re-building the flying areas to use the new “Sanctum Flying Skyscape” tileset.

How is it going with SOA update?

And a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you as well!

The new henchmen sounds so exciting, especially Captain Flynn! (Secretly hope there’s an option for a friendly flirt and maybe make Robin just a little teensy bit jealous )

It’s so awesome of you for posting this update, what with all you must have on your plate at the moment, so thank you so much!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!