The Siege

Well I have just published my first mission by myself.

"The Siege"

The war along the Klingon front lines rages on. You and your crew have been tasked by Starfleet Command to aid an embattled Starfleet Marine Squad. The ultimate goal: to hold a vital system for the Federation.


please comment, rate, appreciate. Please answer the following questions to better help me do future missions.

Did you enjoy the mission?
Was it too short, too long or just right?
What would you like to see more of?
Which aspect of the mission did you like?
Was the dialogue of your crew too personal? Or was it objective enough not to distort your sense of your crew's personality?
What do you like?
What you don't like?
What could be done better? Foundry/technical wise or story wise


OFFICIAL FORUM THREAD

The first mission I wrote called "The Promise" has not yet been completed/published as I did that in conjunction with my friend -ONE-.

This will be the first of maybe a series of five for holodeck once the Foundry is live next year. In the mean time I will write the scripts etc.

These will be the only two I will publish for now. My blog details my main wishes for my missions and where I wish to see others go and some of the innovations I wish to see moving forward with the Foundry and missions in general.

All might not be prevalent in The Siege, and some will be included in The Promise, but The Promise isn't done yet.

The Siege will take about 15 minutes or less if you read dialogue fast. Also, among some things I wanted to stay away from was, objective a-b-c and kill random spawns inbetween. I more want to give the player a reason why he has to engage in combat, even if I have to give a reason for each 'spawn' of enemy you might come across.

Alot of Cryptic missions (yes I know they are getting way better), fill time by putting in mindless spawns inbetween objectives. It's like go here and do this, but nothing is mentioned about why enemy would be there or why you shouldn't possibly avoid them. So groups of 5 or 5/5 is the end result that you have to go through to fill time and make the mission longer.

You won't find such in my mission, and every spawn will have an 'objective' against you, and you will likewise have your own objective against it.

I will post the word file script I worked from later on, basically I wrote an idea out in like pseudo Foundry code, you go here you do this you interact with this guy, help this guy, etc, then I converted it to a script with the characters, the dialogue, the action, the set pieces. Script goes through alot of tweaking.

Also since it is my first creation myself, I had to work around the limitations of the Foundry as compared to how I had it in my script, but it will better enable me to adapt future scripts to the Foundry since I cannot do vice versa.

The script still have to serve as a main guideline and help things flow and be prepared instead of making up a mission as I use Foundry. Even though on the go you see things you have to add once you get into the tool.



The Foundry is still a very limited end user tool, it is not a 'developer tool' as such and we cannot do some things you might expect, so enjoy the missions for what they are and hopefully we the creators are telling compelling stories.

Foundry

I have teamed up with a cool guy who calls himself -ONE- to create missions for Star Trek Online using the beta release of Foundry.

Basically for joint missions created by us, I will write the script, and -ONE- will create it, and tweak it for release as a playable mission.

Our aim is to move STO missions to the next level, hopefully when you get to play these missions on holodeck or tribble before FOUNDRY is released to holodeck, that the majority of players will see and agree that we've set the bar high for others to live up to.


Our aim is to
1) Increase the perception of interactivity.
2) The perception of a more dynamic mission
3) The perceived immersion the player experiences
4) the Star Trek episode feel

Currently, just for example, you'll have all missions progress just by one of your bridge officers explaining something you need to do and then telling you that you did it, and giving you something else to do.
In keeping with the spirit of how star trek episodes progressed, we will seek to add a different spin on the established cryptic way, to make it flow more like an episode would, in terms of dialogue and who speaks it and when, and what they say and how it is said. Small things like this will help achieve our stated goals above.

Our first mission to be created together will be released on tribble before the Foundry goes live to holodeck, the mission is but a basic example of how we intend our future missions to be and the creativity we will be emphasizing. However, we may decide not to publish anymore until they can be played on Holodeck. Preliminary feedback to this mission will be very important, and we'll seek to have it given to us in a forum thread at the official sto website, the thread will link to our blog and our blog to the feedback thread.

The first mission is tentatively titled. "The Promise" It is currently being built and will be released soon.