Wildermyth is, among other things, a game about storytelling. We want our players to be able to tell their own unique and unexpected stories through their heroes and their adventures. But in addition to that, we want modders to be able to tell their stories through custom campaigns and quests. As our comic and plot editors have grown, so has our excitement about getting our storytelling tools into the hands of players who want to tell stories. One of the main issues we've been facing so far is that our editors can be a little clunky. They can do a lot, but we're kind of half-documenting them as we go, and there can be a pretty steep learning curve.
In our latest patch, I took some time to add tooltips and descriptions to a lot of the campaign side of things to make it easier to understand the developer magic that makes our game tick. I also took a stab at making it easier for players who don't really care how the game ticks, but still want to tell stories.
This is the Create Campaign dialog! The basic idea is to have a simplified way to create all the parts of a basic story. There are some options for each chapter, but if you do nothing but open it up, name your scenario, choose a Main Enemy Type, and click Create, you'll have already created a full multi-chapter campaign with end-of-chapter missions. From there you can just go into the comic editor and do some artistic storytelling without ever touching the more complex plot creation tools.
Creating a Campaign
You'll need:
- Wildermyth!
Step 1: Create a New Mod
- Open the Editor from the main menu (Tools > Editor)
- Open the Content and Comics Editor. This is where most of the work on comics, events, and campaigns happens.
- Click the "Mods" button at the top-left, then click "Create New Mod". Create your mod, then click "Confirm".
As soon as you create your mod, you'll see the folder for it open in your file explorer. All the files for your mod should end up in this folder. When you're done creating your campaign or any other kind of mod, this is the folder that will be uploaded to Steam Workshop or elsewhere.
Step 2: Create a New Campaign
On the top left, switch from the "comics" tab to the "scenarios" tab. Click the "New Campaign" button, and you'll see the dialog shown above. Select your mod, give your campaign an id (for example, "myCoolCampaign", choose how many chapters you want it to be, the main enemy type, and the type of heroes to start with, and then make sure Auto-generate Chapter Sub-Plots is checked.
The right side is where you can define some of the specifics of your campaign. You can click Create without modifying any of this, but I'll go over the options in case you want to make something specific.
- Introduction Mission: Most campaigns start out with a mission that introduces the heroes and the threat. This will create that introductory mission, and promote your farmers to heroes if you started out with farmers. You can also make this and the Capstone Assault into custom missions, which there is more info on below. (Note: If you use a custom mission here, you'll need to add the promotion step yourself)
- Clear All Hostile Sites: For some chapters, you'll want the player to clear out the whole map before they can fight the final group of enemies. You can also choose to only require a certain enemy type to be cleared out (usually the main enemy type).
- Capstone Assault: Most of the time, you'll want a capstone assault mission for each chapter; the final battle before the chapter ends.
- Tiding: Sometimes, you might want to show a comic panel or two during the interval. This is something that happens during the "years of peace" between chapters.
- Omen: After chapter one, chapters should generally have an Omen comic that displays during the interval. This comic introduces the next chapter, i.e. why is the threat back? What are the hero goals?
- Custom Mission: This is a bit more complicated, so only do it if you're ready to get your feet wet with some other tools. If you want your intro or capstone missions to have custom maps, enemies, and goals, you can create a custom mission. Checking the "Custom Mission" box will show a Create button. Clicking the Create button will open up the New Fight dialog. This should already have the recommended ids and options selected, so just clicking Create is usually all you need to do to start.
The Id text field should automatically be filled with the id of the arrive event for the custom fight.
I'm not going to cover how to actually adjust the custom fight to your liking here, but you can read more about that in How To: Write your own Villain for Wildermyth - Part 2
Step 3: Name your Campaign
You should now see your campaign show up in the Campaigns list. Neat! You'll want to select it, expand the scenarioInfo, and give it a name and a blurb (which start out as **myCoolCampaign.name and **myCoolCampaign.blurb). This is the title and description that players will see when they go to start a new game. Don't forget to save!
Great, now you have a working campaign! If you go back the the main menu and start a new game, you'll see the campaign you created show up in the list of choices. You can play through it and it should work, though all of the comics will just be placeholders.
Step 4: Make Comics!
Now that you've got your campaign up and running, all that's left is to add the story! Switch over to the comics tab, and you should see all the comic events that were just created for your campaign.
If you click through these, you'll see they're mostly empty panels or only have a single hero in them. I'm not going to go into detail about how to use the comic editor here, but most of the time, you'll be clicking New Story Role to add specific heroes to the comic, and then adding more comic panels, text, and images.
You can find some basics on the wiki in the Comic Editor Reference. You might also find How to: Add an Event to Wildermyth to be helpful.
And that's it! You've got yourself a basic campaign! If you want to do more complicated things, you'll need to do a bit more digging into the tools, but you can use this as a starting place.
Plots: A More In-Depth Look
If the Create Campaign tool didn't give you quite what you wanted, no worries, you can always dig in and change things to be the way you want afterward! Under the hood, the Create Campaign window does several things that can all be done individually:
- Creates a Campaign Scenario: This is used to start the campaign from the main menu, and is hooked up to a campaign Plot
- Creates Several Campaign Plots: These execute the logic of the campaign chapters, add objectives, control win and lose conditions, etc.
- Creates Events for Missions, Tidings, and Omens: You saw all these events in the image above. These events are triggered via the campaign Plots.
Main Campaign Plot
If you go over to the plots tab, you can see all the plots that were generated for your campaign. This includes one main plot, and a sub-plot for each chapter of your campaign. (If you chose to create custom missions, you'll also see plots for those missions, starting with "M_" for "Mission")
Click on the main campaign plot (without the number at the end) to take a look at it.
You can expand and look at each of the steps individually to get more details on how things are working. All objectives and steps have descriptions and tooltips, but here's an overview of each of the steps.
- StepC_MapConfig: Configures the overland map. Sets up where the capstone sites are, where enemies and towns are, and other related things. This is called at the start of a campaign.
- Step_SubPlot: There's one of these for each chapter, mostly for organizational and clarity reasons.
- StepC_DoInterval: In between each chapter is an interval. This is when the years of peace occur, heroes can upgrade gear, etc.
- StepC_Victory: Once all the chapters are completed, the player wins!
Chapter Sub-Plot
Each chapter sub-plot will look pretty similar, depending on what options you chose for each chapter when you created the campaign. They'll look something like this:
Again, these all have in-editor descriptions and tooltips, but here's an overview of the objectives and steps.
- Objective_CampaignDefeat: Causes a game over if there are ever no living heroes or no living towns
- Objective_CampaignUpkeep: Manages certain overland things that happen over time, like relationship points, burying dead heroes, and starting hook quests
- Objective_ClearAllHostileSites: Succeeds when all hostile sites have been cleared, optionally only requiring a specific flavor of enemy to be defeated or ignoring certain sites (usually the capstone site)
- Objective_LocateAndUnlockSite: Locks the capstone mission until ClearAllHostileSites is completed
- Objective_AssaultJob: Creates an assault job on a given site
- StepC_BeginChapter: Starts a campaign chapter. Clears any stored roles from the previous chapter, adds in any defined roles for this chapter
- Step_Encounter: Starts a mission immediately. This specific Encounter is used to start the introduction mission, since there isn't a site or job to assault like there is for most missions.
- Step_AddObjectives: Adds the given objectives to the plot via the plot's objectives list. This is how the objectives are started.
And that's all!
This is same plot system that all the existing villain campaigns use, so if you're trying to accomplish something that another campaign like Age of Ulstryx or Enduring War does, you can always enable that mod via the top-left Mods button, and then look at how those plots are set up for reference.
Happy storytelling!