new to modding

[FeMaiden]

hello, i've played the original LoG 1, and i have about 250 hours in LoG 2. i played through the main campaign 3 times, earned every steam achievement and played almost all the mods on steam workshop and the nexus. (only *won* 2 of them...)

I've decided to try my hand at making one of my own dungeons. my dungeon won't be as complex as some of you guys. i'm only just learning how to use the dungeon editor and the lua scripting.
I know how to do a hudPrint, and how to script a boss fight.


i've still got tons of questions about things that are driving me nuts.
is making a mod supposed to take this long?
i've spent 20 hours just making 2/32 of the maps I have planned for my mod...

granted, most of that was me fumbling around learning the interface and i suspect it will go quicker once i know how to use the tools.

I found lots of answers here, hardly any on the steam forums
but i still have things i can't figure out.

[AndakRainor]

Welcome !

Making a mod is time consuming ! If your goals are higher than making a simpler version of Isle of Nex, it will be very time consuming ! Your life will be tile-based soon !

[FeMaiden]

Welcome !

Making a mod is time consuming ! If your goals are higher than making a simpler version of Isle of Nex, it will be very time consuming ! Your life will be tile-based soon !

I know one thing...my mod is not going to be anywhere near the complexity of the Isle of Nex...


I'm going to try to sidestep that issue by leaving lots of readable notes with atmospheric backstory. lots of boss fights. a large open world to explore. and multiple endings.


veterans that have beaten like...The Mountain (unofficial expansion), and the lost dwarven mines of kharrakkulwhatever.. without a walkthrough probably won't find my mod challenging at all.
i'm not that good at making complex puzzles like systems of teleporters that move around on timers with pressure plates scattered about that the player has to throw rocks through the teleporter at just the right time to land on the plates.
or mazes of walls that open and close on timers.
the philosopher stones are beyond my pay grade, I can solve the puzzles other people make but have no clue how do design one.

I know how to use secret buttons but I don't like those when they are overused. I feel like secret buttons are essential for variety but I don't want to rely on them to hide things. I played a mod where the author hid ALL the healing crystals behind secret walls and put the buttons in random arbitrary places. and near the end I was still sitting there with like, 20 armor rating because almost all the armors were hidden behind secret walls. another mod had secret buttons peppered all over the place and the player couldn't progress without finding the buttons so it was just one long wall grunter session and i quit.
I could probably make a teleporter maze but I get the impression that people don't like those...

[minmay]

i've still got tons of questions about things that are driving me nuts.
is making a mod supposed to take this long?
i've spent 20 hours just making 2/32 of the maps I have planned for my mod...

I guarantee that Grimrock 2's development time was a lot longer than 320 hours. Engine programming and testing is already done for you, of course, but game and level design, 3d modeling, drawing, animating, sound design and composition, music composition, writing, and testing are not especially fast processes, and that's normal. If you don't already know basic programming concepts and Lua then you can add a few extra weeks for those, otherwise programming is, in my experience, faster than any of the other things I listed if managed properly*.

*In the AAA video game industry programming and testing are literally never managed properly, but that doesn't need to be the case for you.

[FeMaiden]

i've still got tons of questions about things that are driving me nuts.
is making a mod supposed to take this long?
i've spent 20 hours just making 2/32 of the maps I have planned for my mod...

I guarantee that Grimrock 2's development time was a lot longer than 320 hours. Engine programming and testing is already done for you, of course, but game and level design, 3d modeling, drawing, animating, sound design and composition, music composition, writing, and testing are not especially fast processes, and that's normal. If you don't already know basic programming concepts and Lua then you can add a few extra weeks for those, otherwise programming is, in my experience, faster than any of the other things I listed if managed properly*.

*In the AAA video game industry programming and testing are literally never managed properly, but that doesn't need to be the case for you.

well, I do know basic programming concepts, like if then else structure and stuff...

I'm a bit rusty but I learned BASIC and something called hypertext or hypercard (it was for macintosh computers) when i was in high school.

lua seems very similar to the hypertext but yeah, it's slow going, having to learn the language.
I'm sort of familiar with the scripting because i attempted to make a mod a couple of years ago back when iplayed LoG 1 but then i decided it wasn't worth it to spend 200 hours one something that people are gonna play through in 3 hours and people might not even play it...


but I want to have another shot at it, since theres so much more i can do in this editor as opposed to the LoG 1 editor.

even if I never finish it, or publish it, I suppose it will be a learning experience

[Drakkan]

welcome on the forum.

Steam showing me I have spent 2000 hours with Log2, which is not real of course, but still I suppose it could take about 500 hours for my mod at least. Unfortunately so far I have seen only one mod without scripting which was good to play, therefore I suppose you have lots to learn
And there is quite a lots of thing you can try to learn. from basic lua scripting, graphical changes, 3d modeling etc etc... do not expect you will learn everything just in one month.

fortunately lots of things could be learned either from basic campaign or some custom mods around and if you know basics you can just re-use lots of things. Also I am sure browsing the forum will help you greatly as majority of questions was already answered.

[cromcrom]

Nice to see you here, I wish you good luck with your mod

[FeMaiden]

nice sig...thats what this feels like...a trip of 1000 leagues, 1 step at a time

[JohnWordsworth]

Good luck with your modding endeavours! My advice is to start small. I am much more likely to download and try out a really well-crafted 6-level dungeon than play a 32-level dungeon padded with repetitive puzzles and too any fights!

Have fun

[FeMaiden]

Good luck with your modding endeavours! My advice is to start small. I am much more likely to download and try out a really well-crafted 6-level dungeon than play a 32-level dungeon padded with repetitive puzzles and too any fights!

Have fun

I suspected as much. I figured a lot of you guys would rather be stumped by tons of puzzles than swarmed by enemies...

I played several mods and I recently played isle of the deranged the author used the available space so efficiently, he has like 15 puzzles and 8 secrets just on the first map...it took me 2 hours to to play through the first map and the mod has 21 maps, and i didn't even find everything on the first map yet because apparently, i'm supposed to backtrack to it later....it's very challenging and somewhat frustrating at times because every lever i pull and every pressure plate i touch always manipulates something outside my visual and hearing radius so I never know what it triggered.
some of the stuff looks totally random...not in a bad way it's just like "why was I supposed to put a power gem in this particular alcove and there wasn't even a hint?"
I have not found myself *stuck* in it yet though, as i managed to keep making progress.




but I digressed
I might not ever finish my mod anyway.

I would love to finish something in my life but perhaps, a LoG 2 custom dungeon that maybe 10 people might play and half of them might hate it...might not be the right choice for my Magnum Opus...

i'm considering taking my mod into a different direction, and instead of having the overworld be the whole mod, having the overworld area more like transitional zones in between the dungeons and that will mean i finish the overworld much quicker and then I can devote my time to try to make logical classic dungeons with multiple secrets and puzzles .


but I dunno.

the way I have it right now is i have a huge sprawling overworld and lots of loot scattered about, and lots of monsters. but all the monsters are in logical places.
I put some thought into the encounters and what types of enemies i'll have. i'm not gonna throw dark acolytes at the player in the middle of a beach...
i'm not just painting mobs of enemies across the landscape.
i'm spending a lot of time working on the height maps so everything doesn't just look flat, i plan to have mountains to climb, bogs to swim through, even a romp through the elemental plane of air full of invisible walls and floors(i discovered if you put the forest_sky asset without a forest_heightmap, it looks like the party is walking on air. so I could simulate the party going to the elemental plane of air)

I will not have that many puzzles, but I do have some and I do my best to make each puzzle different, i made it a goal to make sure every overworld map has at least 1 puzzle, 1 secret and 1 or more boss fights, and every map has notes scattered about, giving insight into the back story. explaining why some loot is in certain spots.
one of my favorite parts of the game was the boss fights, i'm planning out boss arenas in each level, sometimes in unexpected places.

one reason it's taking so long is that I am putting a lot of thought into making each puzzle unique and different; they are not difficult, but i don't want the puzzles to be boring.

I know 1 secret per map does not sound like much...a 32 map level mod with only 32 secrets? but 20 of those maps are the overworld. with a minimum of 1 secret, 1 puzzle ,1 boss per map but the overworld maps are meant to be finished quickly so the player can get to the dungeons

my map might end up with 50 or more secrets, but I don't want to just have secrets for the sake of having a secret where the player pushes a button and the secret sound plays and theres just like 3 rocks in there...

I do plan to have dungeons and those will have more secrets and traps and stuff but i'm not even attempting the dungeons until I complete my overworld.

i'm learning how to work with all 3 dimensions of the map by placing tiles at different heights.
I'm learning how to make philosopher stone puzzles and combination locks.
one dungeon will have a system of magic bridges that the player will have to activate to escape from the area.

I worry that my overworld is too big. I considered making it smaller but i'm not sure how it will alter the story. I wanted there to be logic with how my zones are laid out, with the themes of what terrain each one has. it's not random.

so far
some of my monsters create unpredictable results when you kill them, others behave in odd ways.
i have buried treasures and hints to help find them.
i have 3 different endings planned and amostly implemented, and a "secret" area that can only be completed with an item you get from defeating the final boss.
the mod does not end after the end boss, there is still one more puzzle to solve.
I also tried to add a lot of meta humor and references in the form of notes and party dialogue/banter to my mod.

if I ever finish it, i'll upload it to steam workshop and perhaps the nexus and you can judge for yourself if you hate it, i'll accept that