A review on Kalevipoeg!

Kalevipoeg campaign is an Estonian Wesnoth campaign that its first scenario is complete and ready to play. It attempts to build its scenarios based on an interesting story which begins with: “Kalevipoeg, was obsessed with the idea of traveling to the end of the world, where the earth and the sea collide and no mortal has ever walked before in the eternal twilight of the north.” Kalevipoeg is the king of Estonians in story. So far creators of the game succeeded to make the first scenario, which the aim is for Kalevipoeg to “Find Olevipoeg, Alevipoeg and recruit the necessary forces. Find shipyard at river Narva.” Several features of the game can be reviewed:

Story:

The story outline is attractive; conversations are clear and helpful to understand the game objectives although there is a vague objective can be seen at the beginning of the game: “and recruit the necessary forces”. During the game, it is clear out of the conversations which units should be recruited but the game is not limiting the amount of recruitment. There are three recruitment points on the map and enough gold to recruit an army of more than 20 members which is far more than what is needed to kill the enemies. However, I like the idea of giving hints to the hero during the conversations what he needs to recruit. The creators included Estonian language in storytelling because they wanted to give an exotic Estonian flavor to the story which made it nice.

Map:

The map is quite linear and quite easy to get around and explore. I like the fact the map is Estonia’s map which makes it familiar and interesting for the player to go on. The features have been considered for the map could be more in balance with the story (as I said before, to make it more challenging to play). For instance, The map could be designed in the way that there is just one centre to recruit or the amount of gold given to the hero or the number of village houses could be fewer that they couldn’t get a lot of gold so as to make the game more challenging.

Paintings and pictures:

Personally, I liked this part of the game the best. The pictures are creative and paradoxical to the style of the game. These pictures can be seen at the beginning and between the scenarios which attract attention and make this campaign unique. They have been painted freely and simply give flavor to the game and story.

Coding:

As the first scenario works well, I had a look at varbamine.cfg file, which looks neat. I discovered the usage of [label] on the map by looking at the code; it can make the map more matched with the story and grabs the attention of player. As the creator said adopting the function of [if]/ [else] was challenging, I agree with him since I had the same challenge and could not, so I tried to use other ways. In general, I’d say the work is done well and one can find all the elements of campaign design in various parts of the game.

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Battle for Wesnoth community and campaign building!

When I was trying to learn about WML and how implement it into design our game campaign on Wesnoth, many times I needed to search on Google to find out about particular coding, the interesting point was that when I searched for it, usually the first result was from Wesnoth community rather than Wiki guidelines provided by the Wesnoth. Accordingly, this community is firstly very active and secondly has a relatively good coverage over the issues of Wesnoth game.

The Wesnoth forum is the place where people interact from playing the game to design and so on; they gather there to share ideas and solve the problems. As Guidelines of the forum describes, the common motivation for creation of the community is : “The Wesnoth.org forum board was created for the purpose of improving and developing Wesnoth based on users’ feedback, problem reports, contributions and user-made content development. “

There are some rules has been considered for users of the community but its extent is not limiting the coverage and cooperation of the members, instead, it would help the virtual community stay well-respected from various threads.

Some main points of the community can be mentioned as follows:

Many users of the community are the ones who develop scenarios and campaigns as well, so users of the service cannot be very demanding. They should be respectful to the community to get what they want as the guidelines suggest: “Ask, don’t demand”; shows that developers are volunteers and there is no hierarchy between them and any other users.

The communication happening in the community is straightforward; there is no formality and procedures in the way of communication. Chatting or messaging system of the forums makes the flow of communication go fast although; the way of communication must follow the guidelines which maybe limit the informality in a way. For example: “If you must use smilies, use them sparingly — excessive smilies will get deleted or your whole post deleted, and posts that contain nothing but smilies are generally frowned upon.”

The supporting system inside the community is very active, one can find almost all the subjects of problems by searching in the community or asking the questions right away, one of the negative points is that there are posts which are outdated and they are not compatible with the current version of the game however they still exist there and one might read a lot of comments to conclude that it is not the case anymore.

Some suggestions over a better campaign building:

To reach an efficient campaign buiding, if there are several people working together on different issues of a campaign; for example if one is in charge of story, one for map and so on…. there should be awareness about the whole process for all team members. The person who manages the codes should be aware of the available features on the map, and the the person who writes the story must be aware of the possibilities of units and coding, and so on. For example if the map is too big or too small for the existing story, the result at the end might turn out boring or not managable from the player pont of view. The problems might ocure at the time of testing which could be ommitted via a better communication in the community.  A better and informal cooperation among the members of the project make them aware of difficulties on the way of each level and help them understand the barriers to solve them.

Each and every level of campaign bulding should improve at the same time together. For instance, story, map design, units, coding and so on for the second scenario should be done after finishing and testing of the first scenario. If story of all the scenarios or maps are done before coding, many refinemnets and corrections will be required after revealing of problems in coding level. In each level of the work everyone would be more experienced of what can be done and what can be changed to make the game more interesting in the next levels.

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