- Designing for Experience Progression - Devlog #17 - 15 August 2023
The power of the Scrolls-like platform is that there can be many levels of gameplay in a single game, and they fit together because of the world simulation, character customization, and narrative aspects work together to create a lot of possible experiences. Because I’m building the game as a solo developer, I have the ability and responsibility to put all of the different experiences together into All Hail Temos. Here is how I am looking at the different kinds of experiences I want, and how I am going to introduce them into the game. Progression Levels First I will just list a sequence of progressions, as to how I design for the player experience to change throughout their playtime. Many of these will start simultaneously on a new game, but other come along later and are not immediately accessible to new players. My design stack for experience is: Explore and loot everything. Touch thi…
- Health, Potions & Food - Devlog #16 - 29 July 2023
In thinking about the different systems and the ways I want players to interact with them, I have decided that health should only be curable by potions, or in specific locations. Typing this now, it basically sounds like Dark Souls flasks and bonfires, although that is not how I got to this decision. I’ll talk a bit here about why I think this is the right decision for All Hail Temos, and how it can focus the gameplay. What is Health? To start with, let me just say that I think of Health as “the device that triggers a halt in the current play”. It is like a “Time Out” in a sport, where the teams stop playing until the timeout is over. Except in games, you often go back to a previous saved state. In All Hail Temos, running out of health doesn’t halt your progress, it moves you into a new narrative position. If you were in a cave exploring, you get knocked out. Now you wake up in a prison…
- Utility AI in an RPG - Devlog #15 - 1 June 2023
There are many types of AIs used in games. My two favorites are G.O.A.P. and Utility AI. In All Hail Temos, I use Utility AI as the primary decision maker. In this post I’ll explain why, as well as give some technical details on how I am implementing this. I will also include an improvement I made for scaling up to very large behavior sets. A simple Behavior Tree in Unreal Engine (NOTE: I use Unity) Popular AI Systems for Games Behavior Trees Behavior Trees were popularized by Halo, and are essentially visual scripting tools. They use a type of flow chart to decide which actions are taken at any given time. They took over in popularity from the previous favorite of Finite State Machines, which is a core programming pattern, but difficult to build large game AI with as they have too much structure and rigidity. Behavior Trees are great for making custom situations, and especially good fo…
- Open Branching Narrative - Devlog #14 - 11 May 2023
There have been games with branching narratives for a long time, such as Mass Effect which gave different endings, but also different details such as which of your companions survived, and would come back in sequels. So, it can be said that while branching narratives are not common, they have been used for a long time. I believe All Hail Temos is doing something newer in this area, which I am calling an “Open Branching Narrative”, which is much less common and you may not have seen before. Previous branching narratives were still a linear story, but had different endings or details, and sometimes they were cut into different chunks of linear story and branching endings, but could be played in any order. We can also say branching narratives have “side effects” such as some characters dying, and not being available later, because it changes the total experience of the story, but doesn’t c…
- AI Reactions - Devlog #13 - 2 April 2023
One important aspect of having a first-person open world RPG, like All Hail Temos, is to have a good coverage of cases for how your NPCs will react to the player, and to other NPCs (allies and enemies). In this post I am going to go over how I’m breaking down the work to cover a good set of cases for what an NPC needs to detect, and what they might do about it after they detected it. Some of these will be determined by skill and narrative checks, all of them will take the context of the NPC involved into question to determine the action taken. NPC Sense: Sight Anything the NPC could see I will group under sight. NPC sees the Player has their weapon drawn - Call guards - Run to safety - Attack NPC sees the Player attack a friendly NPC - Call guards - Run to safety - Attack NPC Sees Player Steal Item - Call guards - Attack - Dialogue: Demand goods be returned or payment NPC finds a droppe…
- An Enormous Scope - Devlog #12 - 1 March 2023
Due to how frequently games are hyped up, and fail to deliver, or even fail to release, I think it’s important not oversell my game. My goal is to keep the messaging very small, because as a solo developer I am limited in what I can create in a given time frame. I’ve been programming for 40 years now, and have made quite a lot of software, and a few games before, but every project has it’s own issues, and in All Hail Temos, that issue is having an enormous scope. This is part of the world I am building. A Small start to a Long Journey To me, to be a “Scrolls-like” game, you must have: A focus on world simulation. Areas are seamlessly connected directly or logically together. A focus on object simulation. The objects in this world are not scenery. A focus on character simulation. The people in the world have names, and their own behaviors. Most of them will have unique responses to you,…
- The Shape of Adventure - Devlog #11 - 20 February 2023
In a previous blog, I wrote about how All Hail Temos would have “Many Adventures vs a Main Quest”. Now I want to show what some of these adventure structures look like. All Hail Temos is a Scrolls-like first-person open world RPG that focuses on character and world-driven stories, versus a Chosen One or “Stop the End of the World” model used in many games. In this entry I’ll show some of the shapes of the adventures I’m using, if you were to turn the stories into decision points. The Simplest Example The simplest example of the adventures in my demo has a shape like this. which I am labelling as “Protection”: Your character enters the adventure, things happen, and ultimately there are 3 possible outcomes. The actual on-goings of the story may have several or many steps, but these are the decision points: Start, End 1, End 2, End 3. There may be more decisions during the adventure than t…
- Skills and Skill Groups - Devlog #10 - 23 January 2023
In a previous blog entry, I wrote about how to balance stats with skill groups, or how your stats map to groups of skills you can learn. In this entry I will describe an overview of the initial set of skills in All Hail Temos. Skill Groups Skill Groups are groups of skills that use specific stats, which can be seen in this chart, showing the stats that feed into the 5 orange colored skill groups. Skill Groups: Combat, Influence, Craft, Experiment and Seduce. Each skill group actually has 2 different skill sets, which comprise 2 aspects of that skill group, yielding 10 skill sets: Next I will go over each of the skill groups, and what skills are in the skill sets. The skills themselves have techniques which can be leveled up to get different results. Techniques are what you bind to keys or buttons to invoke the skill, or some could be invoked from a menu if they are can be triggered that…
- Actions Taken in an RPG - Devlog #9 - 6 January 2023
I previously wrote about how saving is actually rewinding time in All Hail Temos. When you play, the game is always keeping track of what you do, so that you can rewind it to any previous time, replay from there, and do not have to specifically make save points. You can even rewind back “into the future”, before you rewound time previously. The timeline is continuous no matter how much time rewinding and playing you do, you can go back to previous states. I described the Checkpoint and Journal system before, but this time I will look at the Journal Items that are being saved, which are almost like “turn actions” you take in the game, but triggered by real-time play. Actions Taken in an RPG All Hail Temos is an Action RPG, a Scrolls-Like, and as such is not a turn-based game. But when the game saves a journal of all the actions you are taken, it ends up looking a little like a turn-based…
- Many Adventures vs a Main Quest - Devlog #8 - 18 December 2022
In the last post I wrote about how adventures are entered into from different potential paths, and then you get different results, based on how you got into it, but I only touched on the different thing I want to do with All Hail Temos from the standard RPG’s main quest & side quests formula. The definitions I use below are my working definitions for doing game design on this game, and not meant to be universal. Is it wrong to not have a main quest? What is a Main quest? The main quest of a game is typically the ending condition, you finish the game when you complete it. Maybe you can continue playing, but the game world was created around the main quest, and will often feel fairly empty when the main quest is over. Games usually open with their main quest, so that you are given a reason to care about the world and your missions, and there are usually large stakes, often the fate of the…
- Anatomy of an Adventure - Devlog #7 - 3 December 2022
The standard model for RPGs is to have a main quest and side quests. The main quest is usually a big epic world-ending problem, that the player is taking the part as a Chosen One to solve for a unique reason. There is a big bad guy, and they need to be stopped, and you need to stop them. Along the way, you can farm, collect items, and help people out in various ways. It’s a good model, and it there are a lot of good games that use it. All Hail Temos is doing something different. All Hail Temos puts you in the position of a non-Chosen One, so you are not foretold to solve the world ending problem, and the world is not ending. Instead there are many problems and situations in the world that create adventures and opportunities, and you can live heroically solving or taking advantage of those situations. Side quests are usually very simple, and are also usually disconnected from other event…
- No Carry Weight Limit - Devlog #6 - 8 November 2022
In many RPGs, and specifically Scrolls-like games, carry weight is something that is there to add realism to the game. The items you pick up have a weight, and you have a limited amount of strength and endurance, so the more you carry, the slower you should go. Or, there should be a limit to what can be carried, because it is more realistic that way. After you have reached your maximum carrying weight, you either can’t move anymore, or you move very slowly. There could be a smooth transition to slowing down, or it could have a staged effect, where you move normally until you reach a threshold and then it changes. I think these are good hardcore features, and intend to offer them as difficulty options for players who want different sorts of limitations on their play, such as a later survival mode. But for the default case in All Hail Temos, I don’t want carry weight to impact the player…
- First Person Melee Combat - Devlog #5 - 22 October 2022
8 Directions & Combos Melee combat in All Hail Temos is based on two systems: An 8 Directional Swing system, based on the direction you are moving. A customizable combo system, the sequence of 8 directional swings you perform, while keeping a chain of hits. The purpose of these systems is to provide different methods of attacking your opponent, and each directional will have a different Rock, Paper, Scissor type effect with various armor and actions of your enemy. 8 Directions For the sake of this article, I will refer to your movement direction as compass directions, so pushing forward on the keyboard or gamepad means north. Pushing left means west, down is south, right is east. If you are moving west, then your attack will come from the east, travelling west. Matching the direction you are moving. If you are moving east, then you will swing from west to east, matching your movement. M…
- An Open World Branching Narrative System - Devlog #4 - 13 September 2022
In my Scrolls-like first person open world RPG All Hail Temos, one of the most important systems is the Narrative System, which handles conversations between the player and NPCs, or NPCs and NPCs, or NPCs speaking out loud in exclamations, and is also in charge of managing the quests and a good deal of the world logic. There are a lot of ways to approach this, and one popular way is to use the type of branching dialogue system that Skyrim or Fallout uses, in conjuncture with day-night job schedule system and a task based quest system. This is a popular method, and is used in a lot of RPG games with different kinds of setups. Some are more dynamic, and some are more statically scripted. One of my primary concerns was that I want to be able to make the narrative content inside All Hail Temos (AHT) to be absolutely gigantic as the game development progresses, so that years and years of wri…
- Balancing Skills From Stats - Devlog #3 - 28 August 2022
Continuing on the discussion from my last post I am now going to describe how I am balancing what skills you can use based on the stats you selected. Skills are things you can do, and I put them into skill groups named: Combat: Related to fighting Influence: Related changing peoples minds Craft: Related to building things, understanding things Experiment: Related to trying things out, testing things, understanding Seduce: Related to changing peoples behaviors These are used very loosely to map into all kinds of situations, so for example Seduce is used by Merchants and Bureaucrats to get things they want, and it’s used by military leaders to have people follow them. Seduce is related to Influence, but skills are separated so that the world of possibilities lies in only 1 of the skill groups, providing variety. Skill groups are also used as a way to do skill checks. Such as you have to h…
- Perfect vs Asymmetric Balancing - Devlog #2 - 20 August 2022
How to balance an RPG? There is no perfect answer, and instead I think it can be described as “What you do is what you get.” You are building a system, and from the functioning of that system, you will get the results that system produced. It seems redundant to type it out, but it is very much a cause and effect of how the system is designed, rewards and penalties will be assigned, and players will want to maximize rewards and minimalize penalties. If other aspects of the game are also very good, maybe they will tolerate less than perfect maximum rewards and perfect minimum penalties, to see a more interesting story, or make more personal choices, but the balance of statistics and skills should support all these things as a foundation, because the incentive structure will in large part dictate how many players play, because of how they are rewarded, thus defining what type of game this…
- How to Rewind Time - Devlog #1 - 19 August 2022
Kicking off the Devlog series for All Hail Temos, this is how I implement saving the game, but instead of normal save game files, I want full timeline Rewinding, so the player can travel back to any point in the past, at a certain granularity, and then play forward from there. It also means no worrying about saving, because everything is always being saved, and you can always go back and try something again. For UX reasons, I will still have a bookmark of save games, so you dont have to scrub through the timeline if you know you want to remember an area for rewinding to. This does make Save Scumming a first-class feature of All Hail Temos, so I make it easy to go back and try different options, and I introduce you to the reality of time travel into a story with many branching paths. But that is a design discussion, and this is a technical devlog. Introduction Every change in the game is…
- Interview on SWW Show Podcast - 14 July 2022
I did this interview a few weeks ago, and talk a bit about the development and goals of All Hail Temos: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sww-interviews-episode-90-all-hail-temos/id1435072446?i=1000565975916 Just to update the current basic roadmap: - A Prologue Demo in late August or early September - Steam NextFest in October - Launch in EA in late October or November - About 3 month in EA before launching 1.0 - More content releases regularly, with more story and more places to explore
