The idea of continuing and developing the Invasion from the Unknown storyline further was in my mind from the beginning, and I apparently started to work on a sequel on May 2008, if the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev registry is anything to go by.
After the Storm’s development has been repeatedly impacted and put at risk by various “real life” issues.
Earlier this year, I decided to go back to work on the campaign after a long hiatus — so long I don’t remember how long anymore — but my attempt ultimately failed anyway. I promised a delivery, but the delivery did not happen.
Until I rediscovered the fun in video games. Then, magic ensued.
I said I would try to finish the first episode of the campaign before December. I am glad to say that mission has just been accomplished. After the Storm 0.5.0 is out in the Wesnoth 1.9.x add-ons server, with the first episode (that’s 13 scenarios) complete!
For those who’d rather read a terse piece of text with no emotive speech in it, the changelog for this version follows:
Version 0.5.0:
--------------
* Scenarios:
* 09 - The Triad (part 3):
* Fixed problems with the final cutscene on Wesnoth 1.9.8 and earlier.
* 11 - Return to Wesmere (part 2):
* New scenario.
* Completed episode I.
* Units:
* Removed Skirmisher ability from Elynia.
* Spawners have a small chance of deactivating themselves after spawning a
unit.
I have tried to make sure AtS remains playable on Wesnoth 1.9.8, but my primary development target is still 1.9.9 and support for 1.9.5, 1.9.6 and 1.9.7 is mainly theoretical at the moment. If you encounter any “Invalid WML errors” or such, and you are using Wesnoth 1.9.7 or earlier, try with Wesnoth 1.9.8 or 1.9.9 instead if you can, and give me some feedback in the forum thread so I can address any such issues as soon as I may.
I take this opportunity to remind you that you can also find and follow me on Twitter as @irydacea or join my personal channel ##shadowm in the freenode IRC network.
After a record break of 6 months I got back to work on scenario 9 of After the Storm and completed it, in a fairly different fashion than I originally planed. Still, it’s another step towards completion of Episode I. Version 0.4.0 is available for download now in the 1.9.x add-ons server and SourceForge.net.
I think I have avoided to spread many spoilers about AtS’ plot since day zero; there were, of course, some early storyboards circulating around the forums and IRC at the beginning, but as I’ve been saying for quite a while, they are no longer canon and I am departing from the original plan on purpose.
I am fully aware that some people will not like my choices in 0.4.0, and they may even seem blasphemous, but the truth is I scattered enough foreshadowing everywhere to prepare them for the time being. What are these choices I speak of, anyway? Too bad, you’ll have to play the campaign to find out!
Today, after Wesnoth-UMC-Dev reached its most important milestone, I have decided to step down from the project administrator position to leave the decision making and user support tasks to Espreon and AI0867, who have done an undeniably good job in my absence the last year while I was busy working on other projects.
This does not mean that I’m completely breaking my ties with this exciting platform for add-on development which ESR and I founded. I’ll continue to take care of infrastructure matters such as the website design, content and coding, the Registry tools and miscellaneous utilities whenever I have time; I’m not going to abandon After the Storm either, since I continue to be a user of the project either way.
I mentioned that I’d be following up the official r10000 announcement with the history of the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project. Most of the content below is taken from an interview I recently had with BfWEthnographer which eventually touched this subject.
As I resolved to do last New Year, I’ve been progressing with After the Storm slowly at irregular intervals of time. During these last three days I’ve given it a bit of thought in regards to the future development plans and the road to 1.0.
I have settled for the following milestones:
0.3.0 — Ep. I, first act completed (scenarios 1 to 5)
0.4.0 — Ep. I, second act completed (scenarios 6 to 9)
0.5.0 — Ep. I, third act completed (scenarios 10 and 11)
1.0.0 — Ep. II completed
Right now AtS is about to hit the last set of changes needed for the 0.4.0 release. The first part of the ninth scenario is already finished in SVN trunk, and the second part is a work in progress. There are two art issues pending, but I plan to proceed with placeholders for now if it’s needed to have a release before the end of April.
I have been thinking about some stuff to do during this year for a while, actually. It’s really hard to decide because I’m a person who runs into all sort of trouble while trying to get projects accomplished (including procrastination).
One thing I’m already doing is learning some Japanese, for no particular reason at all — although you’ve got to admit that having multiple languages in your curriculum is worth a bunch of coolness points. 😛 Espreon is helping me along the way with his own recently gained knowledge. It seems quite fun to learn a language in a non-Latin alphabet, if not a tad overwhelming at times, especially with kanji.
It’d be a good idea to lose some weight this year, too. My addiction to sugary stuff isn’t quite compatible with my heart condition! (Nor is coffee, but… meh.)
Then there’s Wesnoth. I intend to finish the Second Act™ of After the Storm Episode I as soon as I may, even through the means of placeholders — I’m willing to do anything to rescue AtS out of Development Hell before the end of 2011.
Wesnoth RCX’s development is halted right now due to lack of interest on my part to invest energy on writing the rest of the new functionality (i.e. definition of custom ranges and palettes), but I know that once I touch Qt Creator’s awesome interface I can’t stop working for a while — so I may eventually get some inspiration to redesign the main window, which should inevitably lead me to tinker around with the rest of the code.
C# was the first “major” programming language I learned, not counting Visual Basic. I have some fond memories of my first experiments with C#, but after I embarked upon learning and using C++ I kind of forgot about it. I have been considering the possibility of writing an IRC client of sorts using C# just for kicks, and to not forget this language in case I ever need it again. Why IRC? Because clients for this protocol are simple and challenging to implement, both at the same time!
I’ve already started to learn a bit of Lua for my work on the aforementioned Wesnoth campaign — in fact, there’s already some released code within it written in this language, particularly in scenario 5! I have plans to rewrite parts of Invasion from the Unknown in Lua to clean it up a little, thus paving the road for future maintenance work by me or other people (don’t forget that IftU is still abandoned!).
Another software project I intend to tackle in the short term is Rei 2. Sure, she’s doing well and her main command handlers are many and useful enough for channels such as ##shadowm and #wesnoth-umc-dev, but her dependence on Irssi’s core might well be a curse for one of our use cases: Shikadibot (the Second), which runs on a resource-limited VPS where every drop of RAM has got gold value. I’m already brainstorming a possible abstraction layer (codenamed “API 3”) which could allow the Irssi core to be swappable with a custom, native IRC client core (codenamed “Anya”). There’s really not much in the current Irssi-based implementation of the internal interfaces (“API 2”) that make a dependency switch unfeasible.
Finally, I’m not going to stop producing useless updates for my website! Dorset5 0001 is already a reality, although there’s still much I want to do before replacing the current layout. This time I have placed an emphasis on readability and elegance that I don’t think the previous revisions have lived up to so far.
• • •
All in all, I always have so many ideas floating in my mind that I rarely carry to realization, so this can’t be considered a definitive list. There are other possibilities I’m contemplating for the long term regarding my personal life, but that’s a much more volatile subject to discuss so I’m avoiding it for now.
Frequent visitors of the Scenario & Campaign Development Forum at Wesnoth.org’s board may have noticed that there’s a release announcement for After the Storm version 0.3, which is available at the official 1.9.x add-ons server and at SourceForge.net thanks to the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev Project.
I’m certain at this point that I can’t promise regular updates, but I’m trying to resurrect this project after a long period of inactivity that unfortunately followed the ceasing of development on its predecessor Invasion from the Unknown.
The truth is, I have been busy with all sorts of stuff this year — as a result, AtS has had to endure some parental abandonment. Although things aren’t becoming much easier for me in the following weeks, I hope to be able to finish episode I by next February, if not earlier.
As for IftU, I may resurrect it for 1.9.x if my time and creativity allows. Some convenient conversions of WML code to Lua are already done in SVN trunk, and at least the first scenario works, but more testing is required. In any case it’s unlikely to see the sunlight again until some more drastic (non-technical) changes I have planned become possible.
My own software projects tend to be very much like pets to me. I take care of them, carry them with me anywhere if it's possible, I feel horribly sad when something bad happens to them and, even when I go mad at them for something, in a few hours we are together like a neat happy family again.
Invasion from the Unknown has been theWesnoth add-on project of mine since around September 10th 2007 and it has evolved throughout time and endured 3 mainline development cycles introducing drastic game engine changes, receiving little automated help from the likes of wmllint. Instead, it has been kept on shape by me and a few people who have helped with the huge maintenance burden that this epic-length campaign is.
With an initial goal of 30 playable scenarios, 29 of them were made at first and I later shrank the campaign to approx. 26 stages per suggestions from various people including ESR, and split it into two halves of roughly 13 scenarios each. IftU outlasted two other projects of mine which finally rotted among my hard disk backups for good — one after 5 years of development and little progress, and the other after three months of development and decent progress. It also directly or indirectly created or inspired the following Wesnoth-related projects:
For a few years since ESR established the new mainline conventions in Wesnoth for tagging and adding new contributed music tracks, I've been in charge of helping with the process of importing tracks since ESR doesn't seem to be available for this anymore, and our “Lords” of Music never get familiarized with SVN to do it themselves. Normally I'm asked to do this whenever I'm available, but for some reason, another developer did it this time on March 13th — that is, two days ago — and I didn't find it out until today.
This minor thing reminded me of a substantial problem with campaign music in Wesnoth in regards to originality, which I've been perceiving for a few months already.
After some weeks of inactivity, I have finally completed the first arc (not the first episode, though) of After the Storm in the Wesnoth-UMC-Dev SVN repository, comprising 7 scenarios out of planned 11; this means that a 0.3.0 release is coming soon. It was about time!
With this new arc completed, I have introduced new background story elements that could be considered controversial if any mainline purist is actually paying attention to the campaign — that's okay, I never intended IftU or any sequels to be mainlined. I still struggle to keep everything as fuzzy as possible to give a certain degree of flexibility to any content authors who decide to take what is said in IftU and AtS as “canon”. It's harder than it sounds, particularly because it must still be clear enough to allow the plot to progress; so I cannot just throw a bunch of nonsense into the campaign and say “hey, look at this, this is our vague excuse for this pathetic plotline!”.
Now that the characters have a decidedly vague excuse for the plot of the next arc, I face a problem that I knew I'd have to handle sooner or later: artwork.
I am not a good pixel artist, but I don't have any loyal slav- pixel artist that could help me either. And even if I could get one, I'm not completely sure I could describe the concepts I have in mind in plain words to tell them what unit sprites I require. There's also the spoileriffic factor; there's a reason that I removed the original (clumsy) storyboard from the SVN repository and departed from the original plans, most notably by removing a main character and introducing two new sidekicks instead. So, it's up to me to create any pixel art needed to make the campaign work; baseframes are enough for this purpose, although I still wish IftU and AtS' original units had animations.
At least I don't need to write a game engine from scratch too, thanks to Wesnoth's scripting flexibility.
[...] Some days before Xmas, my creativity returned from its long, chaotic journey and my Wesnoth add-on, After the Storm (sequel to Invasion from the Unknown has seen steady progress and two new releases were published in less than two weeks. Keep in mind that this add-on had not seen any public releases for almost a year. [...]
Two days afterwards, my creativity disappeared like a drop of water in the sea, again — which means that After the Storm has seen relatively no progress since then. I hope I get better next week, because this work needs to be completed as soon as it's possible.
