The Invasion from the Unknown never ends

IftU is already completed in terms of storyline and scenarios, although there are still many things to polish: balancing, bug-fixes, pixel art and prose. Thanks to Kitty, the Portrait Director of the Wesnoth Project, IftU also has a complete set of original mainline-quality portraits. And thanks to ESR, SouthernOracle and Espreon (in chronological order), the prose for the whole set of 25 scenarios (composed by more than 40 code units including actual playable scenarios, cutscenes and sparse WML files) has significantly improved since June 2009. The revised prose is not mainline-quality yet, and the custom unit types' descriptions are still lacking; but all this is much better than the job I originally did for this campaign.

IftU's development began as a one-man project on August 2007 based on ideas I had collected since I first played Wesnoth 0.9.6 by the end of year 2005. The campaign was finally completed by the end of 2007 with 30 playable scenarios, before I removed some "fillers" from it. I've maintained it since its very first release (0.0.1) and I have learned not only WML while producing it, but also learned to draw pixel art sprites in the Wesnothian style, and I also learned more English in the process. Unexpectedly, I also learned some Bash scripting and Perl in the way. And finally, I learned to maintain a large project (Wesnoth-UMC-Dev) which could not only gain a small group of add-on authors and maintainers who work on a SVN repository with unofficial add-ons; as it turns, three content authors (one being a forum administrator) joined Wesnoth-UMC-Dev and later also became mainline developers and Wesnoth-UMC-Dev repository admins. I never expected a "little" campaign add-on for Wesnoth to trigger such a chain of events!

IftU reached two more major milestones after its initial completion, with the release of the first 1.5.x/1.6.x compatible release on December 24th 2008 close to midnight, and the first 1.7.x/1.8.x compatible release on October 5th 2009 during the evening.

Storm clouds looming over the landscape, yet the storm never begins

Around the time I was finishing the last scenarios for IftU I started to nail down the concepts for a sequel. However, it didn't see the light during the whole of 2008 because of a major creative breakdown that lasted almost the entire year, a (somewhat literally) broken laptop, and a series of real life issues that made me think I had come to a dead end (part I).

Finally, AtS had a short-lived public testing period with barely four scenarios complete around January 2009. I had resumed the developmet of AtS based on my earlier ideas. However, then I noticed that I was committing certain mistakes from IftU again. When Ivanovic (mainline release manager) cleared the add-ons server in preparation for the 1.6 release that we hoped would be ready on February 2009, I decided to not re-upload AtS and let its topic in the Wesnoth.org forums die by itself.

Invasion of the Templates

An important, known problem with IftU is that it is pretty much unbalanced for difficulties other than the Normal/Medium one, because I have never had the time and interest to play in all three difficulties. The lack of interest is not only because I just find playing a long campaign boring, but because I can't stand my own creation anymore.

The main problem with IftU from my perspective (and from other people's perspective too, who obviously do not know I have been aware of such issues for a long time) is that the story has implications and consequences which do not seem to affect the main cast of generic heroes. It is both a cause and a result of this that IftU lacks character development for both the protagonists and the enemies.

The protagonists are all a generic bunch: Galas lost his father, he never knew his mother, and he is following his father's steps before dying by becoming a great elvish chieftain or something; Mal Keshar is a lich with a weird sense of humor (sounds familiar!?) and who really wishes he'd not have been forced to join the gang by Anlindë; the elvish sorceress Anlindë has lived for millenia and nobody has asked her how she manages to do that (answer: she worked for a big demon boss before, some elves know her backstory, other elves don't, yet everyone accepts her as a member of the family centuries after she helped start A BIG DAMN HOLOCAUST IN WESMERE!!!); Elynia comes later in the story, with a mysterious past, Great Mysterious Powers™, and very little care for Anlindë's existence in the present times until the later sacrifices her life for the rest.

Galas' backstory is almost word-by-word the same as Kaleh's, and this guy is the protagonist of UtBS. And IftU is a sequel to UtBS. At least the elves' lord in IftU does not die before being ever seen like the UtBS desert elves' lord... in fact, IftU's counterpart fights with the player for the whole second scenario and later reappears after being thought dead (guess what happens next).

Mal Keshar is barely recognizable to those who have played DiD to the end, although I consider his age to be a plausible explanation, although his age is not plausible (!), mainly because when I introduced him in IftU, I missed a little hint to the historic period of Wesnoth in which Malin Keshar was born. That's, as far as I am concerned, the only thing I overlooked about his character; the rest is pretty deliberate. The elves accepting him with ease - that's not a problem with his character design, but with the elves'. He still engages is many questionable activities after joining them.

If you think Anlindë was actually killed by Elynia (rather than Elyssa), then you are mostly right. Elynia's appearance marked the end of the journey for Anlindë because of gameplay (balancing) and character development purposes. I could not figure a good way to avoid overpowering the player for the (back then) following 19 scenarios, and to avoid turning IftU's dialogue into a constant ego clash between her and Elynia. Additionally, with Elynia's entrance the amount of essential (e.g. must not die) characters in the campaign had raised to 4. I do not like campaigns with too many characters whose death may cause the player to lose.

So what did I do to solve the problem with Anlindë? I almost literally Dropped A Bridge On Her* in scenario 13 (!) because she was an obstacle for my goals; it doesn't help that my original idea for the scene in which she dies involved some... explictly violent and disturbing dialog, including the villain for that scenario (Elyssa) tearing her body apart limb by limb. It's really sad, now that I think of it, that I killed a character just because it got in my way.

Elynia did not receive all the character development I had intended for her in IftU, and which she deserved and needed for other reasons. The death of Anlindë has very little effect on her at first, and later it is completely forgotten by everyone until they get to fight Elyssa around the end of the campaign. If one reads the CHARACTERS text file that is included with IftU in SVN then one may figure that she has seen too much suffering already to be affected by the death of a former evil cultist (again, why Elynia has lived for so long - maybe she is Cursed With Awesome and can't die until Irdya as whole dies for real?).

The demons are all a generic band of blood-thirsty unstoppable killer monsters with no feelings - wait, WHAT?! Although they have humanoid appearances and most of them are nowhere near the classical definition of monster (except for the annoying Imps, which come in different sizes as the plot demands), this description (used since 2007 when IftU was started) does not do justice from them IMO now as of year 2009. It is pretty unidimensional and generic around the Western world.

The last issue is now starting to be addressed as I am reusing ideas from 2003-2005 (before I even played Wesnoth!) to provide more backstory for IftU and the upcoming AtS. The demons that play the villains in IftU are just a selection of Legions of Hell™ working for Uria, but the latter wasn't always an evil demoness/guardian/goddess and even by the time of IftU, Inferno is populated by many more demons, with the Evil alignment not being more common than Neutral or Good. And no, Inferno was never supposed to be some sort of Hell in the IftU setting, I just reused the name.

The shaxthals, the biomechanical creatures, are the direct consequence of a series of ideas I have had for a bit more than a decade already. Although the concept is not explored in much depth in IftU due to constraints of the narrative device (too many scenarios already, and these creatures become a prominent threat only around the end), they are seen by some people as "cool" and "awesome". The true nature of these creatures is built upon certain nightmarish ideas I have been considering for a while. The fact that many of them float and have shiny exteriors seems to conceal that they are, in fact, artificial beings that have been created by pushing the laws of nature beyond its limits. My ultimate fear (as stupid as that may sound) is not losing one or more of my body parts, but having them replaced with something that does not belong to me, be it donated, natural parts, or artificial replacements that are very different in composition and structure to my own body.

And so, by the end of IftU the player meets the fake Final Boss villain, the Shadow Master, who is not only being controlled by a very powerful force (Uria), but is also enslaved by his own mostly artificial body, made with the few remains of his body that the demons could salvage. With all of the other flaws of the production, it seems fitting that this enemy proves to be more incompentent than a certain other enemy who even manages to survive to the events of the epilogue. And so, the Shadow Master is easily defeated at last by two powerful sorcerers who have summoned some maybe-not-so-generic god-like powers.

Forthcoming storm

Around July 2009, that is, three months ago, I seemingly came into another dead end for my life. However, I quickly realized several things and invested a lot of time into analyzing some of the things I do and have done; IftU being one of these things, the little analysis above is the summary of a series of flaws that can be resumed in one sentence: IftU is not what it could have been because of a extremely rushed and barely planned development and the lack of experience to write such a large campaign with such a vast amount of writing being too young at the beginning.

After reading again a preliminary storyboard for AtS I published on January 2009 I am considering several changes in many aspects of the plot that should hopefully make AtS a lot different from IftU in terms of structure, depth and narrative flow. Whether these changes will be for the better or for the worse will not be possible to tell until its development is resumed for real. This time, I am considering postponing any activity in mainline Wesnoth for real (besides forum administration and the occassional fixing of a bug that interfers with the development of AtS or IftU) and taking full advantage of the extra spare time that I'll have until the end of this year.

With some luck, this two-episode sequel to IftU will be at least halfway complete by Christmas and I will have another lame announcement to make in the forums close to midnight. If that doesn't happen, then it'll be a shame, as IftU does not deserve, but needs a sequel that breaks the template and becomes better than the original.