[davidthom1]

This mission is meant to be part of a trilogy of missions, for those of you who may look back in my post history, i had a 6 month "break" from fredding and so I lost some of the know-how, but im trying to piece together the missions i have made into a trilogy (as i suffered a hard drive failure).

This is meant to be the 2nd Mission in the trilogy, entitled "NTF Gambit". I apoligise for the file size but like i said, i'm trying to get my head round about how i did certain things.

NTF GAMBIT

"The 42nd Black Hawks have been charged with defending Serenity Station from a brutal NTF attack. You must defend the Station until the GTD Rommel arrives with fighter reinforcements."

• This mission DOES feature substantial voice acting (however not every line is filled).

This post may seem like i've done it in a rush, but i really would like feedback to the mission and also whether i should continue to make a trilogy. Hopefully you know where to put the files for the audio to work with mediavp's.

Download link: http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?y5outnd3j5h (Approx 11MB, kindly formattted by The E)

[Black Wolf]

OK, I Didn't do an exhaustive playtest, but I ran through it once and saw a few issues.
First off, I'm fairly sure you've got BoE syndrome here - lots of capships duking it out, and yet I get the distinct impression that if I'd just flown off and done nothing, the mission would still have played out more or less the way it did. So definitely check that out. I might be wrong though - as I said I didn't do an exhaustive playtest.

Secondly, it felt very chaotic. I had very little idea what I was supposed to be doing at any one time There were bombers that I wasn't told to prioritize, capships I wasn't told to disarm etc. etc. Plus the mission was over in five minutes, so it had a very "Short fast loud" feel to it. This can be good, but that's verydifficult to achieve, and you're better off going for more conventional approach early on when FREDding. So spread things out more, and make sure the player knows exactly what he should be doing from minute to minute.

The voice acting was a nice touch, but somewhat lifeless. A bit more emotion would be nice - anything but the monotone that we had

A few other less significant things. At the start, the very first thing you get is a message telling you the Portho is down. That felt like a bug to me, so I checked the event log and saw it had been self destructed, which was all very odd, especially when there was a cruiser getting beamed right in front of me.

In that situation, what I would suggest is to move the Porto in front of the player, where the, err... what's it called... bowstrike is now, and have it beamed by the Bowstrike, so it dies in front of you. Then send the message, so that everyone knows its not a bug.

Oh, and some very little things from the briefing:

 - Orient your grids with "Align object" in the misc menu so they're nice and flat.
 - The word "Porto" in the first stage wasn't green.
 - The icons were crowded on both screens, but particularly the second one.

Overall, it's an OK first mission - you'll learn about BoE's and stuff like that as you go along. It needs refinement though.

[davidthom1]

Thanks for the substantial feedback 

I will definately try and get these improvements done within 2 days, if not, within a week. (Excluding Voice Acting, that's gunna have to stay put for a while.)

[Spoon]

Bumpz0r
Spoke with davidthom1 on irc and gave his mission a try.

The voice acting was suprisingly decent and added to the atmosphere. My biggest gripe with this mission is that the ratio capship to fighter craft is too much in the favor of caps. At the end of the mission I found myself without a fighter/bomber target and was just watching our mighty destroyers wipe the floor with those poor cruisers and corvette. Then in the debriefing I received tons of praise for apparantly singlehandely taking down every ship in the area 

Overal it certainly felt like a decent mission, I was left with a feeling wanting for more at the end of the mission. I personally like "Short fast loud" (as Black wolf put it) kinda missions. So you should get back to fredding davidthom 

[davidthom1]

Hehe thanks, I'll see if i can get back into it.