I know a lot of you don't know me, I've been playing MOUL on and off for a while now but not often staying in the public D'ni for any period of time. You can find me on Uru as Fay. I've been a fan of the Myst series since the first one came out.
I've done game design before on other games but I've not done so in a while, I don't have a huge amount of experience with 3ds Max even though I went to Digital Design college and doing that game design as a hobby. I mostly got familiar with the game engine for the Jedi Knight series (GTK Radiant). So writing this age will be a true journey of learning (and already plenty of frustration).
I've mentioned on my other post at Mystonline's Spoiler-free Discussion that I've started to write a new age. I decided it would be best if I make another topic specifically for the creation of the age, Where I can keep you all up-to-date on the progress and get some feedback from the community.)
About the age:
After thinking about it, I've decided to name the age Gartenay and create it with the lore about it in mind.
From http://dni.wikia.com/wiki/Garternay:
Garternay (said to mean 'Root of the Great Tree' in D'ni language), was the old and possibly original home age of the people called the Ronay. Garternay was an ancient world that was orbiting a Red giant sun, and it was known to the Ronay that their world would relatively soon no longer be able to sustain life. Fortunately they had developed the Art: a way to write special Books which provides a Link to another Age.
Several Ages were written to house the Ronay exiles, and the majority Linked to Terahnee, an immense fertile world. A conservative minority, led by the Writer Ri'neref, instead decided to leave the host of the Ronay, as they felt that the Ronay had become too arrogant and had forgotten their humility. This splinter fraction instead linked to the Age of D'ni (Earth), an Age written by Ri'neref. Here they formed the D'ni empire.
Garternay is believed to have been destroyed by natural forces at some point after the exodus, and, officially, no Linking Books have been found. However, Garternay was listed as an Age under preparation by the D'ni Restoration Council, suggesting at least one Linking Book had been found.
The idea of the age I'm creating is that a book of the age was somehow/somewhere discovered (Any ideas on how that could've come about would be awesome), It turns out that the Age still exists, Abandoned by the Ronay so there are still buildings standing, Somehow the age survived it's demise (Any input on this would be great too).
As the first of the explorers to go in, You will explore the age to figure out more about the Ronay and their civilization, What really happened (Did it really nearly get destroyed or is there some dark secret the Ronay we're trying to cover up?). The idea is to have puzzles that are to be completed solo and in a group.
So far I've been doing tests just to get the test ages to work in Uru, So far I've been struggling with the terrain so that's why I've decided to start work on buildings first till I can learn more about texture blending.
I could use help from all of you to flesh out the story/lore behind Garternay the Ronay and the Puzzles as well as help with textures and getting the more complex puzzles to work. It'll be interesting to see what exciting stories you all come up with.