New Storyline Quest Mod- looking for feedback

[work22]

NEW STORY QUEST IDEA— 98% of the coding and testing done, just need some feedback

Like many of you, I love this game and have enjoyed coming back to it time and time again, with new mods and POI’s to spice things up.  But I’m still missing a story, a reason to survive and keep going, especially for Single Player.  To remedy that problem, I’ve written up a working questline to both share and play myself.  But before I release it to the 7 Days community I am looking for some feedback and constructive criticism on the idea and the quest goals.   And maybe some wisdom on possible features. 
As of now, Green Zone is a simple modlet set of 12 quests to give the player a story, the story of a scout sent to start re-building civilization for a group of desperate survivors coming to the area from Santa Fe.  The quests are mostly about accumulating the needed resources and “creating alliances with the locals” by finding all 6 traders and completing a large amount of trader missions.  In between the quests the player is also required to kill differing amounts of zombies, all the while trying to build up a base safe and strong enough for the community to live and flourish in.  These quests will take a lot of time and hopefully immerse the player in the entirety of the map.  

So here some of my questions for you all, please if you will comment on them and any other thoughts you might have: 

1.     Is a story line of 12 quests interesting to you at all for single player?  Multiplayer? 
2.    What are reasonable expectations on the amount of resources for players to accumulate?  The quests involve building up a base area, gathering anywhere from like 200 cobblestone shapes to 2 jack o’ lanterns (for the kids!) to 1,000 7.62 mm ammo bullets.  There’s also some similarity to the starting stock game quests, like craft a campfire, then get a forge, workbench, chemistry station, that sort of thing.  But are these numbers below reasonable for people to accumulate—too low, too high?  About right?
 
Some samples:



For the base Emergency Room quest—find/craft 10 antibiotics, 10 first aid kits, 10 vitamins, 10 medical splints, 10 medical bandages.   

For the Arsenal quest—find/craft 1,000 7.62 mm ammo, 1,000 9 mm bullets, 1,000 shotgun shells, 50 Molotov Cocktails. 

For the Alliances quest—find all 6 traders and earn 20,000 Duke coins doing missions for the traders.   

Some of the construction quests include things like: 
Build 10 king size beds 
Find/craft 4 generator banks, 4 engines, 4 batteries, make and place 10 lightbulbs
Build an electric fence system

There’s a lot more than that, but those are some broad strokes to share.  What do you think?

The modlet is very simple, does not require any other mods or changes from the player, and should hopefully be compatible with just about everything.  But the Green Zone mod sure would be better with some extra features.   Some bells & whistles I’d like to add are listed below, but so far have not found the answer anywhere, so if you can steer me in the right direction please do: 

1.    Can you create your own voiceover sound effects?  I could create radio messages that give the quests a better feel than just the Pop-up mission descriptions. The traders can talk, can you create similar files and conjure them up at certain points during the questline? 
2.    Can you summon a horde night within say, 15-60 minutes?  Like say the player completes part of the fortifications quest, can you then have the player’s new base tested soon after with an unexpected horde night? 
3.    Can you pop up a JPEG picture in the game, say after a quest is completed?   
4.    Can you summon the re-supply plane that appears overheard, like after the player completes a quest?  I’ve seen mods that change what’s in the supply drops but nothing about summoning the plane itself with some kind of coding command.   
5.    Does a main quest line mod interfere with overhaul mods like War of the Walkers or Ravenhearst etc?  Or can it be integrated as a subquest line? 
6.    I’ve seen a Jokes mod that changes the Loading Screens info at the bottom, I’ve thought about changing those to various quotes from famous authors like Cormac McCarthy (The Road having fitting quotes for a game like this) and aspects of the Green Zone story.  Would people object to the modlet changing the Loading Screens?  

Special thanks to devon752 for the Main Quest mod he made to also add story to the game.  (that coding was very helpful to me): https://www.nexusmods.com/7daystodie/mods/1816
And ZZTong for https://7daystodiemods.com/loading-screen-jokes/ which is funny and also useful to unpack and learn how to change the Loading Screens quotes.  

Thanks all for the feedback and the many great mod creators, tutorial makers, game developers, the works!  

 

[work22]

Some more quest screenshots.  I've tested it out, and the mod is good to go, just want to add some finishing touches as mentioned above to make it that much better.  

 

[BFT2020]

FYI any craft quests requiring workstations need the user to be in the crafting menu when the object is completed.  I had several of mine set the same way, but ended up changing them to just fetch / keep objectives.  Another thing I did was create unique items that you can only craft and made the quest objective fetch / keep.  
 

The reason I mentioned this is because of the 20 king size beds you have as an objective in one of your as.

 

[work22]

Thanks BFT2020 for pointing that out, much appreciated.   The rest of the story's goals are all "Fetchkeep", so you just have to get the items into your inventory somehow.  Here's another screenshot:

 

[Ganeshakw]

Can we get a little more idea about :

What kind of Zs are there ?

Will there be actual survivors in the game along with the player ?

etc.

 

[work22]

Good questions.  The idea behind this mod is to give the player a long, thorough questline but without changing anything else-- so you don't have to install any extra mods or juggle any other changes.   Very simple coding wise, and would hopefully not "break" during an A21, A22 update etc.  My experience has been that most people have a set of mods they like to play with that change say, the number and behavior of zombies, but most of those mods still don't give much of a story.   I'm trying to fill in the story/quest gap, but not affect anything else. That's up to the individual player's preferences.   So the Z's are vanilla or whatever mod you install to change the Z's.  

And given the state of NPC's in the game development now, I don't have other survivors, you are basically preparing a base for them when they arrive.  I guess I could add them in, like a few survivors from Santa Fe trickle in over time to join you, that's a good idea.  My wishlist of features to add include:

1) radio message voiceovers

2) JPEG's in messages in game

3) airplane on call

4) ability to activate a horde night

5) other NPC survivors (could add a few in as discussed above)

Trying to figure out how to code all those things, if anybody has any advice or can steer me in the right direction, please do!

 

[BFT2020]

3) airplane on call

War of the Walkers has supply flares that cause a supply crate to spawn (simulating an air drop) when used.  You could reach out to the mod author (Dwallorde who may be able to give advice).

 

[work22]

thanks BFT2020 will do that next

 

[Laz Man]

2.    Can you summon a horde night within say, 15-60 minutes?  Like say the player completes part of the fortifications quest, can you then have the player’s new base tested soon after with an unexpected horde night? 

You can spawn zombies after completing some build objectives.  There are ways of self containing it within a POI as well but you will need to get familiar with creating your own blocks, items, loot containers and POIs.

Here is a working example I created a while back.  You can download the mod if your interested but it is possibly outdated since I haven't touched it for a while.

 

[Ganeshakw]

For any NPC related question, you may reach  @khzmusik

 

[work22]

thanks Laz Man and Ganeshakw, you've given me some good stuff to work on to improve the mod, much appreciated.  Got family coming into town so hopefully make more progress on this in a week or so.  NPC's running around in various ways could add a lot to the story!  

 

[Ganeshakw]

@work22

Glad you liked the suggestions.

Keep up the good work.

 

[work22]

After some real life busyness, I'm back to making serious progress.  The 12 "Green Zone" story quests have been tested multiple times, now trying out khzmusik's NPC civilians mod for some extra features.

Anyone else having trouble with the popular NPC Mod (this one specifically: https://7daystodiemods.com/npcmod-a-community-project/) lately?  EDIT: THIS PROBLEM SOLVED, thanks either to a better link or reinstall of 7 Days, so your's should work too.  I'm getting the "streaming red lines of death" error messages, Null this and that and I tried even after removing all mods and doublechecking the folder paths.   Installed on a clean 7 Days and it still isn't working.  Appears I'm not the only one, maybe a change in the base game happened?  Seems like this NPC mod would be AWESOME to include into a quest like mine where the Player is trying to rebuild civilization with some fellow refugees.  If i could get that to work too, then I think I'd have a really good story quest combined with the excellent NPC Mod.  So please stay tuned, hopefully my quest chain will soon be 

Lastly, though I'd like to create a much more "souped up" version of this Green Zone Story quest for the future, here is a Dropbox link to the "Unplugged" version. This is just the bare bones Quests, no extras, mods or anything required.  The Green Zone quest starts after you finish the initial 8 game quests, right after you build the campfire.  So in theory this should not interfere with any other mods or anything else you got going on, since its just appended on to the stock Game's questline.  As you can see from the screenshot below, the game's White River Trader Quests are also still active while you are playing Green Zone.

If you want to add the questline into an ongoing game, just hit the Console command and type in "Givequest quest_GreenzoneQuest1" and that should get the ball rolling.

Here is the Dropbox link, just simply unzip and insert the Green Zone mod folder into your Mods folder:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/3hck87zm5axz9ng/Green Zone Quest Unplugged January 28th.zip?dl=0

Many thanks to moddlers like khzmusic, LazMan, RDGMods, without whom I could not have made this.  

 

[khzmusik]

Anyone else having trouble with the popular NPC Mod (this one specifically: https://7daystodiemods.com/npcmod-a-community-project/) lately?  I'm getting the "streaming red lines of death" error messages, Null this and that and I tried even after removing all mods and doublechecking the folder paths. 

Just to get the basics out of the way - that mod is dependent upon SCore. You installed that too, correct?

Also, I personally get mods from these forums. I'm pretty sure the 7daystodiemods site is run by one person who updates everything by hand, so it's often out of date. Here is the forum topic for the NPC Core mod:

 

[work22]

thanks @khzmusik, that link worked.  I reinstalled 7 Days, so it could also have been a mistake on my end.  Either way, hallelujah.  I'm very grateful because I REALLY wanted to get this NPC Mod you guys have created running alongside this Mod's storyline.  I'm sure all of you modders know that great feeling when you are loading up a test game and it says "Creating player... building environment" and no red lines of death errors appear at the top of the screen and everything seems to be working ok.  That just happened, so now I can get back to the good stuff, creating.  Great feeling .  

Anyway,  Stay tuned as I try to sort out now how to add in the NPC mod features properly to the Green Zone story line....

 

[Mad]

I am really liking the idea of this mod. What I hope to see is a good working mod package. Like your mod and a pick of other mods you suggest. Like darkness falls and how they have a lot of mods from other creators packaged in, known to be working. 

 

[work22]

Yes, so far I picked only the NPC Mod as a requirement, which makes the map come more alive and give you some great moments.  Last night while testing I walked into a burnt out neighborhood and a rocket soared across the screen and an orange clad Moto Raider went flying and landed right in front of me, dead.  Just out of nowhere as I was going to a White River Trader "Clear Area" quest.  That is thanks to the NPC Mod.  It creates more memorable moments and underlying tension, coupled with occasional relief as human raiders run about and US Army soldiers sometimes fight them.  

But further to your point @Mad, I have tested my mod with FuriousRamsay's Rebirth running, and that worked.  I haven't with Darkness Falls, but in theory it should work fine as the Green Zone quests are just added in to the XML files.  There is nothing modified, removed, buffed, debuffed, etc.  (I do need to check that Darkness Falls doesn't remove the section of the game where my Greenzone quests are added, then that could be a problem, but one i can work around).  Basically I'm trying to overlay a story that gives the player some more meaning and goals as they progress from survival to building their "perfect" Green Zone base.  The player is trying to scout out and build a new base for a group of survivors in Santa Fe that must move on.   Since the TFM developers seem to be angling for a final release story about "The Duke", I did not include anything about him.  There's still some features I'd like to add, and work and family is slowing it down, but 97% of the hard work is done and tested.   

But to manage expectations, my modlet is mostly a story through quests and tutorial tips, with daunting challenges and goals for survival and building.  But I leave the extra special features to mods like NPC Mod or Darkness Falls.  



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[Ganeshakw]

@work22

Please check this mod too.

It has some things very unique.

 

[work22]

Almost done with this mod, tested it for a few hours and came up with some minor tweaks and improvements.  The NPC Mod really brings the world to life and my quests mod just adds some story to that world.  Real life busyness so probably won't have it out till mid March though.  

 

[Ganeshakw]

Once it is complete and you do a test run, please record the gameplay and post a video link. As you will test all the features of your mod, we will also come to know what this mod actually is.