Skald is a tool that was originally intended for writing quest design and branching dialogs, but it eventually expanded to handle a lot of things.
- Organizing most pieces of text in the game
- Writing quests, events, activities and situations
- Writing branching and linear dialogs
- Writing quest design
- Writing quest journal and objectives
- Writing cutscenes
- Viewing, creating and managing translations
- Setting dialog animations and moods
- Managing and setting voiceovers
- Parts of game logic scripting
- Dialog conditioning, incl. Skill checks
- Exit scripts
- Setting states of Flow Graph Objectives
- Defining dialog roles
- Defining characters
- Viewing souls and
- setting their stats and skills
- setting their inventories, clothing and weapons
- Managing content density on the map
- Managing locations
- Viewing, naming, describing and translating items
Skald is only capable of working with the Database data. If you’ve set up your database properly (Before You Start) you have access to all the original content that was created by Warhorse. The basis for all textual content is a language called WHS, and almost all of it was written in the native language of the designers – Czech. In order to alleviate the difficulties of working with the Czech source, we replaced the original texts with English translations wherever they existed. However, not all content is translated, since we only flag essential texts for translation to speed up the translation process.
You should use Skald for these purposes:
- Writing new quest content
- Writing new descriptions for new items
- Setting voice-overs, moods, dialog animations for new content
- Scripting new content
- Localizing new content
- Reviewing all game strings
- Creating new roles
- Creating new characters
- Setting stats and skills for new souls
- Searching for solutions to similar problems in the original content