Campaign Design How-To

[esr]

This is a HOWTO on writing campaigns that I'm developing by writing The Hammer Of Thursagan. Though THoT is my first all-original campaign, this draws on my experience co-authoring one, editing five other campaigns for mainline, and co-maintaining a sixth.

Feedback and suggestions welcome. It's in asciidoc format.

[Aethaeryn]

I just read through all of it, I like it.

[turin]

I basically agree.

Oh, and s/warriers/warriors/.

[esr]

Thanks, Turin. As it happens, I studied your campaigns with particular care.

[wsultzbach]

I like this, it's very helpful.

[Aethaeryn]

I think this should be stickied (or at least linked to in a sticky) because it's a helpful guide but doesn't prompt much discussion and thus will remain buried.

I myself am reading it through one more time before making my own campaign.

[Blarumyrran]

When in doubt, remember what your goal as a scenario and campaign designer is: to give your players pleasure and a sense of acciomplishment.

no. i want to see them suffer. khm, that is,

SUFFER!

[esr]

There's a new version, 1.1, now available at http://www.catb.org/~esr/wesnoth/campai ... howto.html.

[Blarumyrran]

1 more thing i think is very important, but often forgotten, is to have small maps. large maps, while giving more options for grand strategy or sumthing, get frustrating shortly. small maps have better feel to them. hope you add something like that. its very tempting to overextend the size sometimes.

[tsr]

Small annoyance: Under 'Army building' you refer to Equal-Cost-Equal-Power as ECEPR when you define the abbreviation, but later when you use it again (2 paragraphs down or something) you refer to ECEP.

This made me need to use my brain so that spelling it out would have been quicker anyway.

/tsr - nitpicking on an otherwise great howto

[esr]

1 more thing i think is very important, but often forgotten, is to have small maps. large maps, while giving more options for grand strategy or sumthing, get frustrating shortly. small maps have better feel to them

Excellent idea. I'm working on a whole new section on this topic.

[esr]

A new version, 1.2, is now available at http://www.catb.org/~esr/wesnoth/campai ... howto.html. It adds substantial material on the challenges of map size.

[Deodand]

Thanks for writing this, it makes writing a campaign for the first time, or re-writing an older one much easier.

[Boucman]

esr, this would probably fit nicely in the wiki... maybe replacing the old campaign writing tutorial...

[esr]

esr, this would probably fit nicely in the wiki... maybe replacing the old campaign writing tutorial...

That thought has already occurred to me. What I'll probably do when I get time is merge the best bits from the existing campaign tutorial (like, the developer quotes) into mine, then replace the old one,

But right now I think bug-stomping and getting my campaign in shape for 1.4 are more important.