New Tactics SP Campaign

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pogostickpirate

First time out of the vault
Ahoy,

Thanks largely to all the excellent info and tutorials around here and over on Duck & Cover, I'm working on a new SP campaign and I thought I'd share that joyful news with you guys. ;)

The campaign is tenatively titled "The Reconquest", and I'm planning it to be around ten missions long. Relatively short, but achievable. I'm still working on the story details, but gameplay-wise, I don't want to stray from what made Tactics so much fun (for me, at least). Namely, shooting. Story and thematically, I want to create a more military, "part of a larger struggle" feeling, rather than the lone adventurers feel of Tactics.

As a teaser, here's the campaign map:

vanmap.gif


It's significantly smaller than the original campaign map, but the missions will be much more densely arranged.

I'll post more info as it's ready. I want to have the first level ready as a download in a week or two, provided I can put enough time into it.


Cheers,

pogostickpirate
 
Finished up a few portraits tonight, here's a sample:

MAL_Peter.gif
MAL_Moffat.gif
MAL_McGregor.gif
MAL_Jong.gif
MAL_Dayna.gif
MAL_Chayne.gif



These will likely be for recruits, maybe one or two for Prefab characters.I have a couple more to make for story characters, etc.


Story-wise, the basic synopsis is that before the bombs, the US annexed Canada in a search for more resources and in response to the Chinese invasion of Alaska. A group of resistance cells and survivalist camps banded together to create the Northern Liberation League, vowing to fight the 'invaders'. After the apocalypse, the League remained largely intact, most of their assests and personel scattered through the Canadian wilderness, while the occupying armies fell apart, many becoming little more than reavers and bandit camps. On the west coast, Vancouver has now become a ruin inhabited by the tribal descendants of the citizens, and fought over by rival bandits and ex-Army warlords. The League makes efforts to onto the northern parts of the city, but recently the bandits and warlords have begun banding together and moving north in great strength across the former US-Canada border, displaced by the advancing supermutants fleeing the Brotherhood of Steel. Vowing to liberate their city and begin rebuilding, the League begins The Reconquest.


I'm taking a lot of inspiration from movies like Saving Private Ryan, Enemy at the Gates, the Warhammer "Gaunt's Ghosts" book series, games like Company of Heroes, and battlefields like Stalingrad. The idea is to make the player a member of a larger army fighting to reclaim a city block by bloody block. As such, the missions will be more combat- and military-oriented, rather than commando raids.


Cheers,

pogostickpirate
 
I don't plan on making any new weapons or assests at the moment, simply because I want to keep the scope of the mod achievable, but there's certainly possibilites to add in new weapons to later versions of the mod, once the campaign is done.
 
Fallout weapons aren't very difficult to implement into FT (IMO implementing all Fallout weapons would take 1 day, if you are working efficiently.) and are an essential part of the Fallout canon.
Converted graphics are avaible to download and sounds can be easily extracted from Fallout (also, it's possible that the F1 sounds are in FT demo).

On the other hand, replacing non-canon FT weapons in later versions of the mod would require a lot more work.
 
I would be more then happy to help you make maps or help modding in general. I have MSN YIM and AIM as well as any form of VOIP. (Teamspeak Ventrillo etc.)
 
looks like your portraits could use some work, as it is the ones you show don't look convincingly manipulated (#2 looks like you just took a paintbrush tool to a photo, #3 and #5 look like you just copied and pasted things onto their faces, and the last one looks like you just used a paintbrush tool and cropped most of his head out of the photo).

it's nothing critical, just thought it was worth mentioning. Shouldn't be too hard to find photos that would work without being manipulated, or concealing your manipulation a bit better.

the map looks good, except the torn edges look really pixilated. I'd smooth them out a bit. If you had a scanner, I would suggest weathering (tearing, crumpling, folding, sitting on, leaving in the sun, etc) a printed copy of the map and scanning it back in, or using a sheet of paper like from a brown paper bag and using it for the texture. Also, I'd do something more convincing for the red marker on the map, right now it looks like a paintbrush tool.

good luck, sounds like a cool project. Heh, sorry if it's all critical, I intend them to be constructive suggestions.
 
Ahoy,

After a bit of a hiatus while I moved, work has resumed. A lot of what I've done so far has been on paper (level layouts, campaign flow, dialog, etc), so I don't have much I can show right now, except for some stuff from the first level.

The minimap:

Mission01_minimap.jpg



And the level so far (it's still quite rough):

MAL_mission01-0000.jpg



RedFez~ Thanks for the feedback on the photoshop work. I'll see what I can do to improve the portraits, and the pixellation on the map.

Darkgale~ Thank you for the offer. Is there anything in particular you'd be interested in doing? The mapping is the most time consuming part, and thus where'd I'd be looking to share the workload...



Cheers,

pogostickpirate
 
Ah jeez since you made the front page I thought you had something more done so I let you slide on the double posting earlier but now, belatedly.

edityourpost

With a project in such early stages people are going to want input on all aspects of the campaign, people have been burned too often before by someone who has an idea and wants to spread the workload. Mapping is nine tenths of a project, without maps all you've got is a fan fic, so if you've already done all the planning then people are going to expect you to do most of the mapping.

Very few good mappers are going to want to do just the donkey work of tiling. So you need to layout exactly what's done and what you want doing? Is this a new project where while you've presented the background idea, people joining the project are going to have a say in the story, characters and mission design? Or is that all set and all you want is for people to do the tiling, graphics and entities?

As for the updates, look very few people are going to be interested in watching a map evolve so why not wait until you have something more tangible to show before posting?
 
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