So I’m having a blast making quests. I had forgotten how powerful the system had gotten over the past couple of years of development.

I am going to make a claim here that I hope modders will back me up on: You could, with the current beta, make a Baldur’s Gate style RPG with the quest system.

You’d be insane to try though. Until there’s a real editor, working with XML is a kind of torture once the quests start to get complicated. A typo here or there can really wreck things. It’s very very tedious. Plus, you’d want to have more controls over your “campaign” to disable units and things to make it an RPG and not an empire builder. 

I just want to emphasize that what I’m doing is all being done with Notepad.  If I had some .NET developers handy, I’d ask them to make a proper editor (and in fact, if anyone wants to make some money on the side, I’d be glad to arrange something to someone interested in making a proper quest editor).

Here’s a simple one I made today:

I bring the little man to me.

I answer…a duck.

So in this case, I give units items, name those items, and their descriptions right from the same XML.

…

Ok, let’s try that again..

Guy comes to visit…yada yada yada.  Picking a different answer…

Got the location for the Gauntlets of power. But Mimbly also gave me…dancing shoes.

Those are some pretty…boots.

Reason #503 as to why you don’t let software developers make art requirements:

Every single unit in the game can be dressed and have it show up on the map. This requirement was added by me after Demigod (a great game btw).  In that game, the armor and weapons you equipped didn’t show up on your unit in the map. They said it would be extremely expensive and difficult to do that. The “bang for the buck” wasn’t there.

But I insisted that the Kumquat engine support it for WOM/FE. 

GPG was right and I was wrong. It was tremendously difficult to do this.  Especially when there are thousands of units running around.

But now that it’s done, it is nice to see it in action.

Anyway…Getting on with our quest…

The quest can supply a tactical battle map too.  Unfortunately, I don’t have any right now that look like a tomb yet. I could make one with the built in map editor but I’m a dangerously lazy guy and Paul says he’ll make me one next week.

So here I got to put the units in and name them whatever I’d like.

And again, I took a piece of equipment someone else made, renamed it and gave it its own description.

The description is inherited by the object (the gauntlets). It’s not just some pop up description. That initiated game object has the description tied to it now forever.

And there they are.

Learn more on Elemental: Fallen Enchantress at www.fallenenchantress.com.