Goooooooooooooood Morning, TrekBBS! It's back. The Foundry is online again, at least on Tribble server. Reason enough for me to dedicate a thread to our own mission content. Every fleet member and everyone whishing to make his self created missions known here can post them, give descriptions and get direct feedback. if you want to keep us updated on your progress you might do so as well (including screenshots). Also Discuss problems you run into, maybe someone here has already solved them or knows a workaround. Go, ahead, show the STO community that the most creative authors belong to THIS board.
I took a peak yesterday and while it probably isn't difficult to throw together half an hour of a mission with presets, boy it is a lot of work to make an immersive story. might take quite a while to finish my story idea which I know settled on a title for: Errand of Despair
I'm not a member of the TrekBBS Fleet (as there's a Guild I've been playing MMOs with for the past 10 years with, and we do have an STO branch now.) But, I've made a mission on the Tribble Test server that I'd love feedback on (good or bad). It's called: A Relic's Return (link) Description: Kintara Prime, a newly discovered UFP applicant world that mines and supplies dilithium for the Federation war effort, has requested diplomatic assistance. The Orion Syndicate have taken a 150 year old relic of great cultural signifigance, and the Kintarans want it returned. (This is part one of a larger story. I wanted to see how far I could push the Foundry to make an interesting and entertaining mission; and combine it with the story I want to tell. I am more of an Original Star Trek series (1966-1969) fan; so the dialog will probbably have more of that era’s feel to it.)
The Foundry is as of yesterday live. And I'm already having fun with it. Here are some first impressions from my first mission attempt: Errand of Despair The battlescene is from the openeing sequence and the Admiral in the chair (notice our fleet leader uniform )is about to give you the actual objective during the After-Battle-Talk.
Excellent scenes Timelord !! I have a couple of ideas that I want to incorporate into a mission, but they include sickbay and engineering. To my understanding, there aren't any pre-fab rooms that we can use, and I don't think we have the tools to make them ourselves. We have generic warp cores, but no sick bay items that I can find. Also had an idea to transport back to your ship and end up in a transporter, but we don't have a transporter room set pieces.
How does everyone feel about the Foundry missions? Maybe I'm just a bit of a snob, but I find that persistent grammatical and spelling errors really detract from the fun and immersion of the missions. I tend to knock at least one star off for that alone.
I like it so much, I wrote one called "A Relic's Return" (link); and honestly, I used a spell checker, and proofread what I wrote, so I doubt you'll find any spelling errors (as of this posting it has 3 plays/reviews, and you need 5 to get a mission out of 'Review for Inappropriate Content' status, so if anyone's interested in trying it, and doesn't see it, you might have to "Become a Reviewer" to see it if it hasn't gotten past 5 plays on the Live server.
I had looked at that mission, and held off on playing it until now. It definitely sounds intriguing. One thing that definitely makes me give you a positive viewing so far is the amount of specificity and detail in the initial mission briefing and the first step. I find that very helpful and gets me off onto the right foot, so to speak.
Oh god! I nearly had a heart attack. I had spent hours in the foundry creating a dialog that takes about a minute to click through and then I had a diconnect. Naturally I forgot to save my progress. But the foundry gods have been with me. The autosave kept me from redoing it all!! Anyway... A new screenshot from Errand of Despair
Got some real progress in today. I think it's coming together really well and will play like a real Trek episode with a 5 act structure. Here some more "behind-the-scenes" shots.
Please make certian that your respawn points work such that a continuation of the mission(ie from a crash) takes you to the last one, not throught all of them previously set.
If that is a problem I haven't encoutered it yet. But then my mission is rather story driven and I doubt there will be many opportunities to die. And while it feels extremely big and vast for me building it, it will hardly be a long mission when you skip all the dialogs on replay. I guess it will offer about 15-20 minutes playtime on first run with actual reading of the dialog.
Hey, played your mission today. But I was disappointed... Why did it end so suddenly? Surely there was room for more content in this mission? It stopped right when it was getting interesting. Can't judge it fairly before I play the rest of the missions as this was just the opening act clearly. If the conclusion is as good as the setup it will get a good review by me though. In other news, I can only recommend the Raptor trilogy. That is an outstanding mission on feature episode level. Play it, rate it. That guy deserves being spotlighted.
Been playing through Admiral Murphy's set - "Deep Space 11" and "The Jem'Hadar Alliance". It's extremely good, if you can get past the blatant Mary Sue character...
The reason was a current Foundry authoring/design limitation. As an author you can't return a player to Sector Space, and then set a second 'door' to another star system in the same mission; (there are Dev made missions in STO that allow that and I wanted thbe same 'functuionality' for my story), thus I figured, once you've discovered a possible system to check for the Orion Syndicate base; I'd end the first mission at that point; and start the second mission at the system you need to go check, in effect making you travel through sector space like you would normally for a STO Dev made mission encompassing more than one system. (Also, I was part of the Foundry closed beta, and while I did compleetely plot out the overall story; I also figured this was enough to give the basic Foundry tools a good test. The only real pain is, since they don't have any export or import utility; I had to copy this mission over from Redshit to Tribble manually when the beta went Open on Tribble; and then transfer is YET AGAIN manually on to the Holodeck/Live server after the Foundry Beta finally went Live there. It's also the reason I waite dto start work on the next mission in the series as I didn't wamntop to have to do another manual export/import of a second mission.) Also, originally, I had the story plotted and planned out over three Foundry missions total; but due to feedback (public and private while it was on Tribble), and the fact (and I do understand why) many players hate multi-part missions; I have adjusted things so I can finish the rest of the story (without sacrificing anything) in the next mission, which currently has the working title: "A Relic's Return (Conclusion)" Its definiately going to be longer than "A Relic's Return"; and I do hope when I have it up and available (and I will post when it's up and ready for STO players to run); you'll come back and give it a go. (And I hope of course you like the whole story once you've played thorough and experienced it; but as I said at the end of the first part - "Any feedback, positive or negative, is welcome and appreciated.") I am also happy that you liked the story's setup so far. Overall, I feel it's been very well received by the STO community, and I was concerned that maybe I had too much exposition in a lot of areas, or that a lot of players might not like some of the stuff I had 'their character' say; but I tried to stick with a neutral/compotent tone for any7 Player's character dialogue, and most commentors have responded favorably to that aspect so far.) But, in the end, thanks again for giving it a playthrough, and I hope you like the conclusion once I have it up amd available.
Ok, that's understandable. But maybe (if constructive criticism is alright) you can do something about the mid mission ending? Right now it feels like the mission stops dead without even beginning. Maybe you can built in a mini climax or something to give it an actual chapter feeling instead of stopping in midsentence. There needs to be an "emotional" end to it. I am the last one to say don't use the biggest WTF cliffhanger ever, but give us a cliffhanger or a teaser to the next part. Also I know you can't get back to sector space, that's why so many authors build missions like: ESD, get mission, talk to some guy, call ship, whooosh I am on the other side of the galaxy. That feels stupid, I agree. I'm gonna tease you with my solution which of course isn't the same as what you describe as your intention: