Why make custom content? An answer by The Amethyst Dragon

[The Amethyst Dragon]

Reposted from the old forum, with some minor changes.

Over the past couple of years, a handful of people have asked why I take so much time to make things that just change the look of NWN.

I created and currently run a little PW called the World of Aenea. It's based off my pen & paper D&D campaign world (not the Forgotten Realms), so I've got years of immersion in the setting, and I wanted to share that with the NWN community. I have had a lot of fun playing D&D over the years, and I wanted to bring that experience to NWN. The base NWN game is very good, but I try for a closer to PnP feel (since that's what I enjoy playing), so I make alterations as I see fit....gotta love NWScript (and lessons learned by starting with Lilac Soul's NWN Script Generator).

My first real addition to the game was a little set of potion bottles. I was bored with the standard ones and wanted something different. That was my introduction to parts-based icons and the wonder of alpha channels. These are in the CEP 2.1.

After making a couple of prefabs (Wizard's Familiar (a dagger) and the Hat of Disguise), I got back into the graphical side of things with the Spell Icons: Colorized. I had grown tired of having to carefully look at each spell icon to tell them apart, especially in my quick slots. I had originally wanted to try to make them more like pictures than icons (mixing colors to make them more "realistic"), but there were so many I decided to set some colors based on theme and apply those to all the spells.

I was pleased with the results, and had gotten great feedback on the Vault, so I felt a need to continue with other parts of the GUI (colorizing icons for Feats & Abilities, Classes, DM Icons, then the rest of the Radial menu icons). The non-spell icons had started to bore me after the spell icons got color.

Still, I was tired of the default NWN GUI, even with all the color I added. I started looking around the Vault for GUI improvements and changes, but didn't really care for the few that I found...they were either kind of annoying to look at or didn't make enough of a change for my taste. I felt I should at least experiment to see what I could do.

Lots of digging with NWN Explorer 1.1 yielded all the files I needed. Photoshop remained an incredible tool, since it can handle tga files just fine. Experimenting with alpha channels (adding and changing them, then testing the results in-game) proved fruitful. A few color changes and discoveries dealing with how the GUI overlaps elements led to a new HP bar. Then I realized what I was doing would lead to me having to add alpha channels to every icon I'd already redone. Eventually, I ended up with my Transparent GUI.

Lisa released a collection of cloaks right after the 1.68 patch came out that added several new visible cloak textures (and a way to make sections of them transparent). Inspired, I played around until I had come up with about 40 new cloak designs for my PW (some based on symbols for the deities, others I just thought of what I'd like my characters to wear). Some of those designs I released on the Vault. These are in the CEP 2.1.

While browsing the older material on the Vault, I stumbled across gaoneng's Flowing River Demo. After trying it out in a module, I couldn't get the thing out of my head until I did something with it to make it more functional. Playing around with the model in Notepad and the texture in Photoshop, I soon added some variety (variations on speed and color), resulting in the Flowing Liquids v1.1 hak. This is now in the CEP 2.2.

With the addition of the 1.69 patch, I felt an obligation to update things a little by adding the colorized 1.69 icons and updated 1.69 emote icons (since it was a couple of posts of mine on the BioWare boards that led to changing several emote icon files in the patch).

A situation in my game was still bugging me: mages not being able to carry much loot, which my PnP wizards never had to deal with due to a certain 1st level spell. That meant scripting a spell and modeling my first creature, the incredibly simple Tenser's Floating Disc.

Once again, boredom set in when making items for my PW when looking at one type of item (the wands). For an item tied so much to magic, the base icons are anything but magical in my eyes. A few days of work, and relearning how the parts of such icons layer over each other, led to my (originally badly numbered) 1,220,376 New Wands package. As I was doing that one, I also had in mind the boring rods, so soon after the wands came 1,243,304 New Rods.

There are many other graphical alterations, including some alternative visual effects and "magical" ammunition (that shows magical elements or glows while in inventory), that I've made over the last couple of years for my PW that haven't made it to the Vault. I also do a lot of scripting, much of which is so reliant on other scripts I've made that it won't be publicly released.

In addition to building and DMing my PW, I also like to play, so many of my changes and additions really come from what I'd like to see as I play. I'm not really a modeler (my two custom model shapes so far are a wall and a disc, about as basic as you can possibly get), but slowly manipulating pixels I can do just fine.

I guess my reasons for making custom content boil down to a few things:
1. wanting stuff I don't see already
2. boredom with what's already there
3. the desire to make things better for my PW's players

I've also grown fond of those votes on the Vault. At first I didn't really care if I got them (I just wanted to share with the community I've gotten so much from), but they've become very encouraging when releasing new content for the community. Now I go out of my way to vote on things I might be interested in, even if I don't have a use for it in my game, since I like how it feels to get feedback.