Creation/New Player Development Guide
Welcome to the New Player Development Guide!
This guide is meant to assist new players of Graal in finding a fun development project to help with. Playing Graal is fun, but when you created part of the world it is much more rewarding. The goal of this guide is to help new and existing players enter the world of developing their own content on Graal.
The Basics
Graal is made up of three main development communities:
The script makers
The level makers
The graphic makers
A playerworld project generally consists of at least a few people from each category. Some highly skilled people will help on several projects.
Scripting
Staff of this type are generally referred to as NATs (NPC Administration Team). Skyld, part of the Global Scripting Team has written a decent introduction to scripting found at GScript for Dummies.
GScript is a function based language which has many pre-defined functions triggered by game events, such as a player touching an NPC or chatting a word/phrase. Users may also create their own functions, which allows extremely flexible creation using GScript.
If you excel in html, javascript, or logic in general, mastering Gscript will make you a highly sought after resource for many playerworld projects.
Leveling
Staff of this type are generally referred to as LATs (Level Administration Team)
Levelling is the process of placing tiles in a 64x64 grid which is saved as a .graal or .nw file using the Level Editor.
Some tiles allow a player to pass over them, while others do not. This is how we create the game-world and anything imaginable. A castle, for example, may have "wall" tiles which block the player, "chair" tiles for the throne which make the player sit, "water" tiles for the moat which make the player swim, etc.
Levelling is considered the easiest developmental skill to learn. Many new players find it easy to pick up level making since the level editor is WYSIWYG or "What You See Is What You Get". While levelling is easy to start out with, there are many techniques that a master leveller will use regularly to achieve amazing illusions of depth and detail.
A master leveller is valuable to a project not only for the feel of the world, but the speed at which it expands. A master leveller can build entire continents in a matter of days, rather than months. Strong levelling skills are the driving force behind any project.
Graphics Making
Staff of this type are generally referred to as GATs (Graphics Administration Team)
Making graphics is a very simple task for the artistically inclined player. Once you are familiar with how the game uses graphics it is only a matter of talent with digital illustration programs to produce content for Graal.
For instance, a tileset used by the LATs is a grid of tiles. Depending where the tiles are placed on the grid determines if they are blocking, swimming, chair, etc tiles, and a GAT must put the correct tile in the correct area on the image.
For a somebody who is a wiz with digital illustration, there will be unlimited opportunity to join exciting projects.
Notes
Very small start, not even a complete outline yet.
Players: If you seek what this guide may some day hold, check Creation as a good starting point.
--HoudiniMan 10:40, 5 July 2007 (CEST)