Born to Live - Campaign

[GreenScarab]

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STORY

417 YW

Gray clouds cast a shadow over the land...

Time marking the Dark Age of Wesnoth, when Garard I ascended the throne ending the rule of self lords.

Witness a story hitherto unknown to any prince or sage of Alduin, a story of great significance but forgotten: about the loss of loved ones, fear and desperation moving forward. Lend your ears to hear of heroes born to live in this sad times, chosen to move whells of their fate.

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WHAT IS IN THIS BAG?

- 4 BATTLE scenarios

- EXPERT difficulty

- DIFFERENT objectives

- ...and etc

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CAMPAIGN WAS FULLY TESTED
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In the campaign you can also find reference to the AOI Rework

[Tarcil]

I played it and found no bugs so far. I really liked it, esp. the twist at the end, which I never would have expected. Really a surprise. I would not even call it a campaign, but rather a sort of interactive book which guided me to the final spin. A uncommon, but yet pleasant surprise to play.

Rgearding the difficulty: It was simply luck, not expert playing which saved me nearly every scenario. When the hero hit everytime it was doable, if she didn´t: Reload time.

[GreenScarab]

Thanks for your kind words, in the future I will try to improve this campaign even more.

[Tarcil]

No need to reupload it every time. Just update it.

[holypaladin]

Would be a good campaning but the last things looks weird for me...

[Konrad2]

Light in the Fog
It's not explained where the elvish recruits suddenly come from. Up to that point it has been said a couple times that the Elvish Champion was on his own.
One of the Shamans guards spawns on a wall.

Light in the Fog & Truth
Please do not add a turn limit after time has gone by. D: In 'Truth' I waited dozens of turns for my units to recover before disturbing the meeting, so I lost instantly by turn run out: 28/16 turns. XD
Preferably show the turn limit from the first turn onwards.

The twist in 'Truth' is interesting for sure, sadly it contradicts mainline. :c

The Elvish Champion names his order and makes cryptic hints about not having managed to stop the Orcs in the past. Without another campaign or story about the events he refers to, it's sadly just words that don't make too much sense. :c

(I'll do a grammar/typo run at some point.)
(As always, the campaign is interesting and enjoyable.)

[GreenScarab]

Hi, nice to hear from you!

Light in the Fog
It's not explained where the elvish recruits suddenly come from. Up to that point it has been said a couple times that the Elvish Champion was on his own.

They are there more for gameplay purposes and to make scenario more fun, to be honest. The final reveal of Ondalrs branch is happening at the end.

One of the Shamans guards spawns on a wall.

Nice catch! I will fix that.

Light in the Fog & Truth
Please do not add a turn limit after time has gone by. D: In 'Truth' I waited dozens of turns for my units to recover before disturbing the meeting, so I lost instantly by turn run out: 28/16 turns. XD
Preferably show the turn limit from the first turn onwards.

Hymmm... I will need to think about it. For the Truth, I will probably change the turn limit to unlimited, and for Light in the Fog, I will make the turn limit visible for the player from the beginning.

The twist in 'Truth' is interesting for sure, sadly it contradicts mainline. :c

I am aware of that, and I'm fine with it. From the very beginning of the creation of this campaign, I wanted to tell this story this way and not another. I wanted to touch on some of the themes I cared about in it. The campaign finale serves to bring closure and greater impact to all the themes and threads raised earlier, which is why it's called the Truth.

The Elvish Champion names his order and makes cryptic hints about not having managed to stop the Orcs in the past. Without another campaign or story about the events he refers to, it's sadly just words that don't make too much sense. :c

I agree that this point in the plot can be for some players a little bit out of place, but this is clearly a reference to AOI Rework (I write it in the main post). Ondalrs, in the campaign, is the descendant of the Erlornas, which was banished and haven't managed to stop the Orcs, at the end being killed by them.

In very short:

Spoiler:

Killing the Orcish Warlords and ending their schemes cleans up the name of Erlornas line and brings back family pride, also ending the conflict inside the Ondalrs himself, who completed his inherited duty, letting him leave the past and move on.

(I'll do a grammar/typo run at some point.)
(As always, the campaign is interesting and enjoyable.)

Thank you, it's always nice to see someone's thoughts.

I am looking forward to your grammar/typos suggestions.

[Konrad2]

Light in the Fog
It's not explained where the elvish recruits suddenly come from. Up to that point it has been said a couple times that the Elvish Champion was on his own.

They are there more for gameplay purposes and to make scenario more fun, to be honest. The final reveal of Ondalrs branch is happening at the end.

I just think it would be better if they were mentioned somehow in the story. Maybe make him say that he'll seek some other Elves out to help.

I agree that this point in the plot can be for some players a little bit out of place, but this is clearly a reference to AOI Rework (I write it in the main post). Ondalrs, in the campaign, is the descendant of the Erlornas, which was banished and haven't managed to stop the Orcs, at the end being killed by them.

In very short:

Spoiler:

Killing the Orcish Warlords and ending their schemes cleans up the name of Erlornas line and brings back family pride, also ending the conflict inside the Ondalrs himself, who completed his inherited duty, letting him leave the past and move on.

I completly forgot about those.

The replays don't seem to work.

Tears of Vengeance
I'm guessing you use 'harm' to get the hitpoints of the units down. That sadly has the sideeffect that the player sees all those red number floating upwards. Maybe there is a better way to do this?

Achievements I can think of:
Getting all items, have one unit carry all items (Bone Talisman and Shield excluded), taking that bear down, winning the duel against the elvish champion (that one is doable but very very annoying (took me 138 turns ._.)), taking down the Drake leader, dealing the killings blows to the orcish chieftains with Ondalrs

[GreenScarab]

I just think it would be better if they were mentioned somehow in the story. Maybe make him say that he'll seek some other Elves out to help.

I think it's a good idea. I will add a line about it in the beggining dialog.

Tears of Vengeance
I'm guessing you use 'harm' to get the hitpoints of the units down. That sadly has the sideeffect that the player sees all those red number floating upwards. Maybe there is a better way to do this?

I guess there is another way to reduce the health of an unit without floating red numbers, I will need to think about it. ...but that is not my top priority for now.

Achievements I can think of:
Getting all items, have one unit carry all items (Bone Talisman and Shield excluded), taking that bear down, winning the duel against the elvish champion (that one is doable but very very annoying (took me 138 turns ._.)), taking down the Drake leader, dealing the killings blows to the orcish chieftains with Ondalrs

I like these ideas. Collecting all the items sounds like the perfect achievement to reward player for exploration. One unit holding all the items sounds interesting too. That bear is not easy to defeat either. Also I really like this idea of Ondalrs dealing the final blows to the orcisch leaders for a hidden achievement.

....and you really decided to win the duel with Ondalrs? It was ambitious on your part.... 138 turns!!! ...but this is actually an amazing achievement idea! Hard but gold.


I saw that you also wrote feedback for Rustling in the Wind. I will respond to it later today.

...and I look forward to reading your first impressions of Horn of Faith

[Konrad2]

....and you really decided to win the duel with Ondalrs? It was ambitious on your part.... 138 turns!!! ...but this is actually an amazing achievement idea! Hard but gold.

It's honestly only possible because Ondalrs isn't really willing to attack unless I'm low health & right next to him, or if don't have a ranged attack. So I can just attack, rest heal, attack... until I'm level two and can bait him onto cave. But yeah. That takes a while.

Glad I could be of help.

[GreenScarab]

A small patch 2.0.2a has been released for Born to Live!!!

I guess it will yet take me some time to create the achievements for BtL.


Changelog:

Spoiler:

• The guards of the shaman in the Light in the Fog scanario don't spawn anymore on cave wall.

• Turns in the Light in the Fog scenario have been changed that the turn limit is shown from the beginning of the scenario, in the Truth scenario the turn limit has been set to unlimited.

• I also added a message in the Light in the Fog scenario when recruit saying where the elves you recruit came from.

[GreenScarab]

Version 2.0.6 of Born to Live is on the 1.18 server!!!

Changelog:

Spoiler:

• Five new Achievements.

• Now Ondalrs when searching for Vilerel at the end of the campaign has refreshed HP and removed poison/slow status.

• Konrad2 has been added in the End Credits under the label - Achievement Ideas.

[Anekron]

Finally got to play both this and your newest creation, Waves of Distant Shore. I've enjoyed both of them quite a bit.

Spoiler:

I really like the final twist, namely that a group of orcs tries to bring back Jeyvan. To connect both fearsome liches this way makes a lot of sense to me and would go a long way to address my prevailing feeling that there's too many of them in Wesnoth.

I also like how the heroine's thirst for vengeance is stronger than even her friendships and loves.

Spoiler:

It makes the ending much more impactful when she just leaves Rev there to die.

I also love how you used the old Li'sar sprites, I'll always prefer them to the current ones and it's nice to them again. That being said, the starting one without the sword lacks the hand as well and it looks quite bad imo. Did a quick franken to see how she would look with the left hand mirrored, but I think a real artist would gladly fix it for you much better than I can.

frankenvilerel.png (5.98 KiB) Viewed 162 times

I've also noticed that this campaign is a bit less polished that your newer ones, which is of course understandable given its age and the rate of your improvement as a creator. There are two cases in the campaign of you killing an enemy with him disappearing, but still talking and even doing things, such as

Spoiler:

killing Rev in the cutscene near the end.

I think there's a die event there instead of last breath one that would me more suitable. Another neat improvement would be to properly animate killing and harming actions in the cutscenes with [harm_unit].

Spoiler:

The orc that mortally wounds Rev plays a melee animation, even if Rev doesn't stand next to him.

Also if you actually defeat Ondalrs in a fight (which is just barely possible if you get lucky), you get an achievement, but the elf still behaves as if he defeated you later in the dialogue (says something like "you can't even protect yourself").

In the scenario where Vilerel visits the garrison with her father, you can see the HP numbers hover above the harmed units on turn 1. I've actually dealt with the very same problem in the S1 of The Rootless and there is a solution. Basically the best way is to just store the spawned units and then lower the HP value in the variable, then unstore them again. See the XP_HP_UNIT TYPE XY FACING macro in The Rootless/utils/macros.cfg for reference if you're interested. It does some extra bits as well, such as randomly selecting the damage done to the units.

You clearly like using items a lot and I don't mind, it fits the RPG vibe of the campaign well. That being said, some items don't find much use, with the biggest offender being the flask of poison in the final scenario.

Spoiler:

(Goes double if you give it to Rev)

I've also noticed some spelling / grammar issues, will send these via DM so it doesn't take too much space here. The text would benefit a lot if a native speaker went through it, English isn't my first language either.

As a final point I should mention you're the master of map making and atmosphere. You can make maps both play great and look gorgeous and they just draw you in. I adore the orange - brown palette you've used in the Tears of Vengeance opening cutscene and I love how you bring attention to the turn limit just by changing the schedule and covering the map in fog. Extremely cool detail, wish more campaigns did that.

Overall I liked it a lot, especially story-wise. Will also write feedback for Waves of Distant Shore in the near future.

[GreenScarab]

Hi Anekron!

First of all, I'm glad you liked BtL and WoDS and that you decided to write such detailed feedback.

I also love how you used the old Li'sar sprites, I'll always prefer them to the current ones and it's nice to them again. That being said, the starting one without the sword lacks the hand as well and it looks quite bad imo. Did a quick franken to see how she would look with the left hand mirrored, but I think a real artist would gladly fix it for you much better than I can.

Thanks for the improved sprite. Also another of the problems with this sprite is the armor that Vilerel wouldn't have.

The unit sprites used for Vilerel are, as you can see, placeholders and are waiting to be replaced. Recently I haven't had time to make a unique portrait-based sprite for her. To be honest, lately I have very little motivation to do anything Wesnoth related. It would be nice if someone knowledgeable in pixel art would like to help and make unique sprites for her, because I won't be able to do it any time soon.

I think there's a die event there instead of last breath one that would me more suitable. Another neat improvement would be to properly animate killing and harming actions in the cutscenes with [harm_unit].

I'll add this to my roadmap for the future, thanks for bringing it to my attention. As for now, sadly, I can only make small updates to my campaigns with bug fixes and typos when reported. I'm feeling a bit burnt out.

Also if you actually defeat Ondalrs in a fight (which is just barely possible if you get lucky), you get an achievement, but the elf still behaves as if he defeated you later in the dialogue (says something like "you can't even protect yourself").

As the achievement name says: I will never give up!. The player can sort of defeat him, which shows how much the Rav doesn't want to give up, but in the end Ondalrs will always get up (heal up) and defeat Rav. This is on purpose. Sometimes no matter what we do we can't win, but we can't give up.

You clearly like using items a lot and I don't mind, it fits the RPG vibe of the campaign well. That being said, some items don't find much use, with the biggest offender being the flask of poison in the final scenario.

Yes, the poison, could be less usable for Rav, however it could be a bit useful for Vilerel. I guess I will just leave it for now.

I've also noticed some spelling / grammar issues, will send these via DM so it doesn't take too much space here. The text would benefit a lot if a native speaker went through it, English isn't my first language either.

Konrad2 already offered his help with proofreading in the future. Until then maybe someone else would give, like you have, some grammar suggestions.

As a final point I should mention you're the master of map making and atmosphere. You can make maps both play great and look gorgeous and they just draw you in. I adore the orange - brown palette you've used in the Tears of Vengeance opening cutscene and I love how you bring attention to the turn limit just by changing the schedule and covering the map in fog. Extremely cool detail, wish more campaigns did that.

Yes, that's true, I really like to build atmosphere in my campaigns through the different details that happen on the maps like the descend of the fog, different time scheldues and etc. There is a reason why the four seasons are shown at the beginning and why the campaign happens right at the turn of autumn and winter. This is to build a gloomy atmosphere to match the serious story.

I don't know if I deserve to be called a master of map making, I just try to do my best. You also create very nice maps, which can be seen in The Rootless. I think that Wesnoth has a lot of talented authors. However, I am happy that you appreciate my skills.

Overall I liked it a lot, especially story-wise. Will also write feedback for Waves of Distant Shore in the near future.

Again, I am glad you enjoyed the campaign and its story. I look forward to see your feedback for WoDS in the future.