A Thief II Fan Mission Update: Part I

United Bank of Auldale (UBA)

It's been 17 years since I released my second fan mission (FM) for the video game Thief II: The Metal Age. The FM was posted on thiefmissions.com (Cheap Thief Missions) first on Christmas Eve, then mirrored elsewhere, like The Keep of Metal and Gold (KOMAG). There were a lot of things I didn't like about the mission, but everything worked as it should have, with the exception of two items, so that's not bad. One item was a key that should have appeared on a guard's belt but was invisible in the game. That didn't stop anyone from completing the mission, though. The other issue is a set of doors on the third floor of the cafe that disappear when opened. I don't remember them doing that during the final game test, but strange things happen when you zip a file and upload it to a server.

When I started building UBA, it wasn't supposed to be Christmas-themed but ended up that way. I don't even recall what I was thinking exactly when the mission was sketched out, but it was loosely based on the business neighborhood where I had been working at a bicycle shop. There is an actual round-shaped bank and a Starbucks coffee shop across the street from the bank. All the other structures and walls are completely made up and don't have anything to do with the actual neighborhood. I was obsessed with holiday-themed FMs back then and still am to some degree, so I switched gears and borrowed ideas from Yandros's A Thief's Holiday missions. Sluggs helped by making a wreath and a Santa hat. I don't recall where the mistletoe object was from, though, and I’m too lazy to open the readme file to look.

Playing through the mission these days is a bit funny to me because I forgot where some of the keys and loot are hidden. I spent just over an hour playing through the mission this last weekend and wrote down fifty changes that I want to make. The items that need updating range from technical glitches to cringy readables to ideas that just don't work well and should be eliminated. I also want to add more objects and update it to work with NewDark. There's so much to do that I don't quite know where to start after making the list. I did fix the key about four years ago, though, so I guess I can cross that off the list.

Sometimes I think it would be best to start a fresh mission, but all too often over the years, I have opened DromEd and started to build a new mission, only to find that my skills have languished. So I sometimes go into one of the two old missions I've built and play around a bit with fixes. This time, I have a solid plan and a long list. The list of must-fixes is fairly short, thankfully. The list of nice-to-haves is much longer and will require some relearning of things. Getting through this update over the next few months should help me rebuild my skillset so I can then move on to building a new mission. Any new mission I build going forward will avoid complex ideas, though, because those don't always pan out like you think they will.

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