Recreating Adventure in NWN

I’ve been tinkering around in the Neverwinter Nights (NWN) toolset; always wanting to create a module, but never quite getting to the end for various reasons. My most recent project involves recreating a very early text-based computer game known as Adventure (or Colossal Caves) written by Willie Crowther (and expanded upon by Don Woods) in the graphical format of NWN. Thus far, it has proven to be an interesting endeavor, so I decided to add another element that I’ve always wanted to work with … a blog to document my progress and capture some of those little tidbits of useful information for future reference.

Right. So, just to give some idea of my experience level: I’ve completed the Bioware Aurora Neverwinter Nights Toolset Module Construction Tutorial provided by Bioware. If you are inteterested in using the toolset to create your own games, it is a very useful reference and includes everything you need to build your own module – in fact, you create a module as you work through the guide.

Another invaluable tool for the budding modder is the NWN Lexicon put together by a very dedicated group of skilled scripters who wanted to compile and share their knowledge with the NWN community. It is a “must have” reference and will save you countless hours of head scratching in getting your scripts to actually do what you intend them to do (or explain why they won’t do what you want).

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I chose as my “guide”, the 350 point version of Colossal Caves Adventure by Crowther and Woods. I grabbed a set of maps of the game showing how the various areas are inter-connected as well as a walk-thru to help me “get it right”. Admittedly, my original intention was to make it as close to the ‘original’ as the NWN toolset would allow me; however I quickly abandoned that idea when I realized that certain elements did not make much sense in the 3D world of NWN where the player has a compass so really can’t be fooled into wandering around the forest in circles thinking they are walking a straight line.

So, one of my early “changes” was to move the Hill located to the west of the End of the Road area in the original game to the north. This allowed me to have forest areas (where one could wander around in) both east and west of the road leading to the building. At this point it seemed more “practical” to start the player off from the northern most area of the road (assuming they are entering the park) rather than at the road’s end near the building (where you start in the original game) – I’d always found it a bit odd that I had gotten to the building with no idea of what the surrounding area was like in the original game. I did choose to keep the area number s the same as the original game – to the maximum extent possible. After these two changes gelled, the others became much easier.

What this means is that if the player is looking for a “true” reproduction of “Adventure” in a NWN format, they won’t find it here. However, any who have played the original game will certainly recognize most things as being largely unchanged (with the occasional change to a puzzle solution to let them scratch their heads a bit – just like the old days).