On July 28, 2023, we held our first Community Meeting!
Introduction
At the beginning, we started by welcoming all the attendees and talked briefly about what our meeting would be like. Then we welcomed the team members and introduced what each of us is involved in the project:
GEEKeusz - project coordinator
Sebson - screenwriter
Awitus - screenwriter/graphic designer
Pingwin - screenwriter
Puchatek - screenwriter
Krychant - programmer
Emu - programmer
tehe - programmer
Anrez - graphic designer
Creazy - graphic designer
Thornwal - level designer
Night Raven - level designer
Adach - composer
Serwatus - screenwriter
Dialogues
Well-written dialogues are a strong pillar of an RPG game, and that's the kind of game we want to prepare for you. We aim to achieve the vividness of dialogues you encountered when playing the original game. We don't want to overdo the content to bombard you with walls of text. They are meant to engage you in various choices that are more or less meaningful. The player should not be a passive observer of two characters talking to each other, but an actual participant in the discussion. We are keen to emphasize the atmosphere of the original because since this is a modification to Gothic, the player must feel that it is the same game. We encountered some difficulties on our way because at first, we found it hard to keep the atmosphere and many dialogues were long, not involving the player. It happened to us that a couple of times what was written went to the trash, and now we are proud of what we managed to create. After the initial implementation of our dialogues, we saw that it looked fabulous in the game, so we achieved the desired effect.
Storyline
We emphasized presenting a story stronger than the one shown in the original game. We want the player to be able to get into the atmosphere of the dirty and brutal Penal Colony. So that he can look at it foremost from the perspective of a person who is not but just a simple, gray man. Of course, in addition to the main quests, there will be a lot of side quests, which will also present some stories that will sometimes be a nice break from the main storyline. New side quests will appear in every chapter. We want to avoid the situation that occurred in the first game volume, where at the beginning we received a solid amount of tasks, and then only the main plot remained. You will be able to get to know the characters you met in the original game more closely. It's also worth noting here that Nek is no chosen one of the gods, so for a person like him, freely walking through orc areas or fighting challenging enemies will be strongly marked and felt by the player.
Map
Gothic 1 was released in 2001, so as you probably guessed - the areas you could see didn’t have much detail. With greater capabilities, we can afford more to the detail level. If you go into the forest, you will feel like you are in a real forest. We want to use new objects that will be created for our modification. For example, the furnishings of houses where we want to show that someone lives in a particular hut. And by that, we mean adding some scattered shoes, makeshift furniture, or shelves. In the case of forests, for example, the previously mentioned plants in different color variations and the addition of new types of trees. All this will affect the diversity on the map, making it a pleasant experience for you to explore the Penal Colony again.
Scripts
In addition to sitting in the code, we also deal with the technical aspects. We look at a lot of mechanics that are present in Gothic, and we always try to touch something here. Mainly because the original installment is already years old and all these mechanics must be adapted to today's standards. The developers have provided modder tools to make huge, but somewhat limited projects. There isn't as much freedom to create new systems, and you often have to do everything according to a certain pattern. On the other hand, we had to reach for more powerful fan-made tools to develop this aspect. Here we mean, for example, Ikarus, which extends the capabilities of Daedalus, but also Union, in which we can do anything. We use both of these tools if necessary. Of such mechanics that we can boast about for the moment, we decided to introduce slowly, aiming to make shooting with ranged weapons enjoyable for players. You can always turn it off in the game options If you don't like it. In addition, we decided to introduce mini-games meant to be a nice break for players who want to take a break from constantly doing quests and, of course, if they need to earn some nuggets of magic ore. One of these games is dice poker, which will be strongly similar to the one from The Witcher 1 from 2007. In addition, we plan to introduce others, but we will talk about them on another occasion.
Graphics
We are planning to introduce a custom texturepack, the purpose of which is to upscale the environment textures from the first Gothic. Simply put, we want to improve their quality. Above all, we are keen to bring them at least close to the Gothic 2 standard. Of course, you can also count on even better quality in some cases.
In addition to textures, we want to introduce whole new models. For example, those mentioned at the time of the module dedicated to the map. At this point, we have made a lot of new melee weapons and probably won’t use all of them in the final part of the mod. In addition to creating completely new models, we want to refresh the old ones so we can meet on the occasion of the first game volume. One such group of items is amulets, which in Gothic 1 lacked much detail and some of them were partially displayed incorrectly.
Music
Soundtracks will be divided into two groups. The first group will be the soundtracks that we all know from Gothic. We just want to refresh them to give them a new sound, yet preserve the atmosphere. The second group will be completely new tracks related to new places or special events. Of course, in the case of the new ones, we want the atmosphere of Gothic to be preserved, so we won't do something that will differ significantly from the original. In addition to the music, we want to add a bit of new sounds to the world to enrich and enliven it. Listen to the Valley of Mines track yourself in the daytime version:
Completion of
Our Community Meeting was an important event for us. We wanted to show the community what we have managed to prepare over this period. The people who participated in our meeting had the opportunity to get to know us better, not only from the avatar side but also regarding our role in the project.