While working on the Ka'Felon project, I happened to meet a guy by the name of Marc Charlot. Marc always had an idea for an Ultima game and was in the early stages of developing it. He asked me if I would like to come on board and help develop the game and I agreed. I worked primarily as a Systems Programmer.

Systems Programmer

• Death & Injury System
• Theft & Detection System

Death & Injury System

Obviously the first thing we needed to do was re-work the death system that was in NWN2. We wanted a somewhat new approach to death (like you would find in Dragon Age Origins) while also sticking to the Ultima feel. The system's most notable features were:

• Two death scenarios:
• One revives the player and party at a nearby specified resurrection location when the entire team is killed
• Another tackles some party members dying during combat. When this happens the player has a certain amount of time to revive the party members. If that is not done the fallen party members will awake with an injury level after the fight is over.
• Player and Party death resurrection at a specified location and activated through an NPC (location may change)
• Two Injury Levels: Light Injury and Heavy Injury
• Remove Injury Potions
• Remove Injury Spell
• Healer NPC that could heal you and your party of a single injury or multiple injuries

Theft & Detection System

I had to implement a theft and detection system into NWN2. NPCs could alert guards if they catch you stealing, guards will spawn and try to take you to jail (you can resist arrest) and I also had to build a prison and handle those scenarios... This system was really well received by the community and has a ranking of 10. Most notable features:

• Protecting items against theft
• Protecting chests and their contents against theft
• NPC behavior if they catch the player stealing an item
• City Guards and Guard Posts that will attempt to arrest the player and party
• Prison Cell with varying trap doors
• Prison Guards
• Bribing functionality
• Wanted level and functionalities

Dr.Dobbs once held a competition and Greed was my entry. Greed played on the player's "greed" and won a best level award in the competition.

A Prelude to Ka'Felon

Back in 2008, having had a wonderful summer working on Blue the Dog, I knew that when I graduated I wanted to work on a much larger mod (Ka'Felon). I knew what the basic concept of Ka'Felon was going to be and that allowed me to develop a small prelude. The mod was a small success and was downloaded nearly 400 times on planet elder scrolls.

Design

Like Blue the Dog, this project was also designed to make an archer's life easier. Using these stones, a player can drop them around the enemy and then teleport from one to another. These stones can be used in a variety of ways from setting up ambushes to making backtracking in dungeons a little easier.

The Story of Blue

Fresh out of my sophomore year I was eager to start making games. I sat down for the longest while and pondered what aspect of gaming I enjoy most, the answer was simple: content.

I had taken a couple of programming courses in university but I had no idea how games were made and so I began my long journey. At the time I was playing Oblivion heavily and I learnt that players can develop Mods for the game, so I decided to start there.

I decided to address some of the things that bothered me while playing Oblivion, on the top of that list was archery. I was heavily influenced by Guild Wars and their take on the Ranger class and so I found it hard to believe that archers didn't have any specific tools to kite their prey for very long.

After watching an anime called Wolf's Rain the answer came to me, I'll spend the summer developing a highly intelligent player companion, and so Blue was born.

Development & Design

The learning curve was brutal but my tenacity saw it through. I started by first implementing the interaction layer, then I moved to path-finding, combat, the learning system, and finally onto the interface and the progression trees.

Blue had twenty levels, and you could level up part of his stats by taking him on walks. Blue also had a seperate progression scheme that can be developed through combat. Eventually, you were able to teach Blue certain spells. Blue could also inspect the area for treasure.

I really wanted to build a relationship between the player and the dog and to do this, I created another progression tree which was based only on how close the player is to Blue. The player could gain Blue's favor through a series of events and, as a reward, unlock really powerful spells. The player also unlocked different commands for Blue using this system.

The mod's most notable features were:

• Highly intelligent player companion
• Leveling progression track for Blue
• Bond progression track allowing you to unlock unique abilities and spells
• 40+ new spells and skills
• Treasure hunting
• Command Interface for: follow, lead, sit, stay, guard, hunt, search... and so on