Ealdorlight's Kickstarter is live at 4pm today

The sixth of June is a significant day for me personally. In 2004, I spent the entire of the day in hospital. I remember the 60th anniversary commemorations of D-day on the TV in the background, as I sat beside my wife, in labour with our first child. I became a father an hour after midnight on the 7th June; my son becomes a teenager tomorrow.

Twelve years later, in 2016, I spent the entire of 6th June glued to Steam watching and waiting whilst my first game Sol Trader was released to the world. This was a career dream come true: since I started programming at six years old I’d always wanted to create and ship my own games. Sol Trader’s release was ultimately a painfully formative experience for me, which I wrote about at the time and was interviewed about recently in GamesIndustry.biz.

Over the last year, I’ve been keeping busy doing two things. One is to support Sol Trader as much as I can with countless updates and patches. I’ve also been very busy working on a new game, Ealdorlight, a medieval RPG-style take on Sol Trader’s mechanics, with turn-based combat, realistic damage and great graphics. I announced Ealdorlight in March and demonstrated it at Rezzed, strengthening my hope that the idea was a good one.

I decided fairly early on that I wanted to take Ealdorlight to Kickstarter. Sol Trader’s successful Kickstarter was a brilliant experience. The Kickstarter community is one of the kindest, most positive on the Internet. I also needed funding for this game: Sol Trader was self-funded through many long evenings and contracting work, and for Ealdorlight I need a bigger team to realise the vision. It’s built in Unreal Engine 4, which simultaneously saves me loads of development time and means I need a bigger team to pull off the realistic art style I’ve gone for.

As time came near to launch, the first anniversary of Sol Trader’s released seemed an appropriate day to launch the campaign. So today, 6th June 2017, I will spend the entire day glued to Kickstarter as my campaign goes live at 4pm today.

Visit Ealdorlight’s Kickstarter Campaign

There’s plenty more about Ealdorlight on the campaign - head over there and read all about it! A huge amount of work has gone into it, and I’m very grateful for all the support and help I’ve received from the team I’ve put together, and for friends and family who have given me endless encouragements and feedback.

This post is a little earlier than 4pm so that you can watch it go live if you want. Earlier backers get lower edition numberings on some of the rewards, so you might want to be there from the start!

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How Ealdorlight's story stands out

As we head towards the Kickstarter campaign launch on June 6th, I want to talk a little about the story behind Ealdorlight works.

The basic story stays the same for each game: you are discovered wandering through a remote village at a young age, and realise your destiny is to overthrow the King. However, like in Sol Trader, every person you meet is randomly generated. This means that your real identity will be different every time, and you’ll have to discover it all over again every time you generate a new game.

Handcrafted story in a random world

The trick is layering a great story on top of a generated world with random characters. Building empathy with the main character and his family when all characters are generated is hard, and hinges around being able to hook the story in at the right moments.

My plan is to write plenty of tightly connected story arcs that are triggered on events that happen during history generation. These will in turn trigger future quests the player can undertake. Not all story-arcs will appear in every game: it will depend on how the history generation goes. I will constrain things such that there is always a route through the game, and that players always have a way to overthrow the King, even if that might be easier or harder depending on the starting setup. These story-arcs then should interact with each other, hopefully producing a unique path through the game.

Identity

Ealdorlight is set within a low fantasy world, and there’s no traditional magic. The player gets more powerful through discovering key pieces of knowledge about their past. These insights into of your real past feed directly into your character’s stats, skills and abilities.

I’ve long been fascinated with identity: knowledge of who we truly are affects many areas of our lives for the better. In Ealdorlight I wanted to tell a story which takes this to an almost supernatural level. By removing the player from their birth family, they start as an entirely normal person within the world. It’s only after their early game encounter with the Ealdorlight and the discovery of their past that things begin to change.

Much more on this to come, but in the meantime, here’s a glimpse of our story’s beginning.

Ealdorlight: backstory teaser (updated)

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Ealdorlight Kickstarter on 6th June, Sol Trader 1.3 released

I am now back from some extended time away after Rezzed, both on holiday with the family and training some clients away from home. I’ve released Sol Trader 1.3 today, and set the Kickstarter for Ealdorlight to 6th June.

Rezzed was fantastic: it was great to see lots and lots of people wearing our Ealdorlight crowns. We ran out of crowns on both days, with some creative head displays on offer:

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Ealdorlight Kickstarter launch date: 6th June

Yes, I know I said May :) I’ve decided to go for a 31-day campaign, starting on the 6th June, for a few reasons:

• It doesn’t clash with any major US holidays, like Memorial Day. The 48-hour reminder email should go out on the day after 4th July.
• I want to give myself the best chance of success by polishing the combat demo hard. It was great to get such good feedback at Rezzed and I think it’ll be a great hook. I need more time to do that well.
• 6th June is the first anniversary of Sol Trader’s launch, so it ties in nicely with the ongoing Revelation Games story.

I’m excited and nervous about this Kickstarter campaign: my third one to date. After succeeding last time I’m really trying to take my time and get it right.

Sol Trader 1.3 released!

Now that I’m back, I’m able to support a new release of Sol Trader: 1.3 is now finally released after a length beta period.

Here are the highlights:

• You can now chat to characters directly on the right if they’re in the same location as you
• Pirate Chief and criminals are now more likely to try to destroy you
• Fix a bug where you’re not paid enough for a mission
• Dignitaries now fly around a little less than before to make it easier to pin them down
• Inter-faction missions now pay slightly less
• Business trips now pay slightly less
• Taxi missions now pay slightly more
• Talking to your criminal parents will no longer cause them to forget who you are
• Fix crash where a character develops an opinion of the player mid-conversation
• Fix crash when showing GUI for a ship the AI is driving
• Fix crash where a character would attempt to sell a good on a ship they’ve lent to the player
• Can now initiate conversations when paused - will restart the game but at realtime speed
• Fixed the Tiger II achievement

Your steam copy should automatically update. I’ll be releasing an updated downloadable version to SendOwl in the next few days.

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Sol Trader 1.3 out soon: get a sneak peak

• You can now chat to characters directly on the right if they’re in the same location as you
• Pirate Chief and criminals are now more likely to try to destroy you
• Fix a bug where you’re not paid enough for a mission
• Dignitaries now fly around a little less than before to make it easier to pin them down
• Inter-faction missions now pay slightly less
• Business trips now pay slightly less
• Taxi missions now pay slightly more
• Talking to your criminal parents will no longer cause them to forget who you are
• Fix crash where a character develops an opinion of the player mid-conversation
• Fix crash when showing GUI for a ship the AI is driving
• Fix crash where a character would attempt to sell a good on a ship they’ve lent to the player
• Can now initiate conversations when paused - will restart the game but at realtime speed
• Fixed the Tiger II achievement

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What's next for Sol Trader and me

I’ve been rather too silent in the last couple of months about what I’ve been working on. Here’s the low-down:

Sol Trader 1.3: enhanced gameplay, balance & UI improvements

I’ve been thinking about how to further improve Sol Trader, my first indie game released last year. The game hasn’t sold that well - you can check the numbers on Steam Spy for yourself. I’ve written about this before: in summary I’ve put the lack of sales down to a crowded space-sim genre and a lack of focused playtesting which gave rise to gameplay and UI that was hard to learn.

Encouragingly, people who do get past the UI tend to love the gameplay, and I’d love to continue to support players by releasing free updates. In particular there are some balance and UI improvements coming, I’m going to bump the number of characters to ensure jobs are filled, and I’d love to sneak in a surprise new gameplay feature…

I’m showing Sol Trader again at Rezzed at the end of March, so if you want to see a preview of the improvements, stop by and come and play the game! The new major update should be ready in April. You can also buy Sol Trader on Steam right now.

The next game :)

Eventually, I’m best served by moving on to a new project, so I’ve also been prototyping an exciting new game idea this year. It’s based on some of the best ideas in Sol Trader, combining a lot of the innovations with a streamlined gameplay experience that will be easier to get into. I’ve already got together a name, backstory and setting (it’s not a space game) and test gameplay. I’m not quite ready to talk about it publicly yet - I will be soon!

I’m in the process of figuring out funding for the new game, and I’m thinking of running another Kickstarter in March as part of this journey. I loved being on Kickstarter last year - the people I met through that community are amazingly supportive and it would be great to ensure that I’m making the game that people want to play.

I’d love to hear from you if you have thoughts about funding. I’ll also be at GDC next week if you want to chat there.

Introducing: Revelation Games

I’ve finally pulled my games development work into my own label: Revelation Games. You can follow on Twitter to get the latest updates, or sign up to the mailing list.

In summary: I’m excited about what’s next and what the next couple of years will bring! What’s new with you?

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New build: 1.2.2

• Show the working hours on the GUI so you can see when you are supposed to work.
• Made ship components the same cost across all ships
• Closed exploit: Can only now eject people from your own ship
• Can no longer eject whilst paused
• Fixed smuggling GUI crashes
• Disallow introductions to existing family members
• Luring people for an eject is now only possible if you are a at the 'blue' level or higher with them
• Prevent repeatable delivery of special gifts from powerful people
• Fix crash where ship blows up whilst in mid-jump transition
• Fix typo in missions file
• Fix crash where ship blows up the same frame it overlaps a jump gate
• Fix incorrect relationship labels on GUI

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New build: 1.2.1 with rare crash fixes

• Prevent players hiring a ship twice
• Prevent players buying a ship they've already hired without returning it first
• Guard against weird situation when character is alive without an AI
• Prevent crash when clicking on conversation options very quickly
• Prevent crash when hiring a room after other character has left chat
• Prevent saving after death
• Prevent close chat crash when GUI hasn't caught up
• Prevent corrupt opinions crashing game
• Fixed data for opinions and added better validation
• Stopped an endless positive loop exploit when ordering drinks or asking about another's story
• Prevent ejection of character whilst still in base
• Show how to quit a mission on the "Launch Ship" tooltip to aid the player with too many passengers

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5 ways I screwed up Sol Trader's launch: a post-mortem

So the Sol Trader launch (Website, Steam) didn’t quite go according to plan. Here’s my take on what happened, and what I’m doing about it for a 1.1 release in July.

1. Last minute tweaks gave rise to bugs at launch

I tweaked space flight on the weekend before launch in order to make it quicker to travel between planets. This revealed a very nasty and previously hidden bug that I had unknowingly introduced several weeks earlier. The bug seriously affected space flight, causing ships to over-accelerate and become difficult to control. Because the change was made the day before launch, I didn’t have time to spot and fix this bug until 24 hours after launch. At this point, it had already caused a number of players to quit the game in frustration.

Games are different from business software: there are many more unexpected side effects and combinations of features coming together to affect the gameplay in unexpected ways. Since I’ve been much more careful with releases, testing them on several platforms with a number of beta testers before pushing them out to the world, and ensuring that key areas of the gameplay are thoroughly checked.

2. I launched too soon to avoid big press deadlines

The initial launch was timed to avoid E3 and the launch of No Man’s Sky. In hindsight, I don’t think this mattered at all. People still played Sol Trader in any case and I believe they would have anyway. Plenty of sites have already reviewed it - the reviews were mostly positive thankfully - and No Man’s Sky was delayed last minute by a few months.

I should have finished the game, then planned the launch, not the other way around. By pushing myself to hit a deadline, I missed some of the gameplay flaws that I mentioned earlier.

Going forward, any other game or update that I launch will be out when it’s done! 1.1 is provisionally scheduled for July, but I’m not feeling pressured to release it by then if I feel it’s not ready yet.

3. I was too “close” to the game

A system map… an obvious feature that I should have put in from the start! Turns out I was way too “close” to the game. As I have been playing Sol Trader for years, I knew exactly where everything was, and so did my beta-testers, so we felt there was no need to put a map in. I should have to given Sol Trader to some fresh players to spot these issues - just hiring some gamers from Gumtree to see how they found the game would have been so useful.

As it was, the first time I heard calls for a map was from Twitch and YouTube streamers who had early press copies of the game. This is not the ideal audience you want spotting bugs and missing features on your behalf.

Next time I launch a game, I will definitely get some fresh players in at the polish stage. In the meantime, there will be a fully interactive map in 1.1, clearly showing areas you can and cannot travel - it’s already done:

4. The core gameplay loop needed work

It is very hard to see design flaws when you’re so focussed on getting a finished game out. I was throwing in lots of interesting features which were exciting on their own, but weren’t coming together as a whole. My response should have been to pare back the design to the core gameplay loop and then to work hard at refining that, rather than adding yet more features in to the mix.

One example of an area that needed more “fun factor” is the core conversation mechanic. I’ve already improved this part of the game since launch, and I’m in the process of making it more of a mini-game in its own right. I’ve released updates to the UI which make it much more intuitive to work with:

This is just the beginning: making friends with people is going to become much more of a skill. You won’t be able to earn friendship events quite so easily, which means you’ll have to pick and choose your friends very carefully, and rely more on having complementary stats. Endlessly boasting about your accomplishments is now going to seriously annoy people, so you’ll need to try more indirect methods to get people to like you…

5. I misread the expectations of the Steam audience

The audience on Steam turned out to be different to my expectations. I’m used to launching business web applications, where you “release early and often”, making lots of changes in response to feedback. It turns out that the Steam community seem more used to developers cutting and running after release if they don’t release in Early Access. Therefore, when Sol Trader was less than perfect at launch, many were unsurprisingly vocal about the issues, assuming the game would never get better.

In hindsight, a Early Access period might have been wise, so my expectations would have better matched up to those of the Steam community. After launch it’s too late for this though, so I worked very hard to bust people’s assumptions about my intentions. Even though Sol Trader is released, I still plan to continue working on it and respond to feedback as much as I can. I am very active and responsive on the Steam community forums to assure people that I’m not going anywhere. This has resulted in a lot of much needed positivity and support from the community. I’ve also made friends with a couple of active people on the forums who can beta test 1.1 for me, which is enormously helpful.

Nothing can prepare you for a release

Self-publishing your own game is like nothing else. It’s incredibly hard to get right. I can understand why people only work with publishers! I’m sorry that some people had a poor first impression of the game. Even though the launch could have gone better, I’m determined to make Sol Trader the best game it can be. I have a clear vision in my head for how I want Sol Trader to end up, and we’re not there yet. I will continue to improve it until I’m happy with it.

Roll on 1.1 in July! Join the Steam community to hear more detailed updates.

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Gossip: the best new Sol Trader feature for ages

I’m very excited about the new feature I’ve just added to Sol Trader - when you visit a location you can now listen in to all the conversations that are going on whilst you’re there.

This is how it works: characters will chat away about their lives and their friends to anyone in the room. The chance of chatting varies depending on what they’re doing, and if they have low wisdom they’ll chat more. They’ll stick to existing conversation subjects if they can, and the things they bring up are entirely random. This means that big revelations are definitely possible. It’s possible for lots of info to come out by accident, including work incompetence, embarrassing friends, and office romances.

The best thing is that these conversations are sharing real information that is recorded as you go along. You never know when an indiscretion will come in handy later for an information gathering mission.

The effect on gameplay

It’s now great fun to simply sit in a bar and listen to the characters chat away to each other. You pick up a lot of useful information about what characters have been up to and where others might be found. It’s also rather scary handing over sensitive information to another character now, especially a reckless one: you never know where it’ll end up.

Up to this point, communication in Sol Trader was almost entirely reactive. It was impossible to find anything out without going and asking someone. This meant that characters used to feel more like mindless vendors of information than like living and breathing individuals.

Now they actually talk to each other, characters feel very much more alive. Additionally, because characters remember the information that’s talked about, they can form new opinions of other characters, and change their behaviour accordingly.

This new build with gossip in will be out to Insider backers in the next few days. This brings to an end the cycle of work on the interactive world and gameplay progression through organisations and missions. Next, I’m moving back out into space with work on asteroids, ship customisation and advancement, and polishing off combat.

Game design is luck that you can influence

Game design can be such an enigma. Some features that you work away on for ages never seem to be that fun, whereas a small thing that only took a few hours, and that I debated including at all, has proven to add a huge amount to the feel of the game.

I posted this a while back:

After quite a lot of soul searching, this is still true. I now know that I don’t know how to make a great game, but I do know how to go about being lucky enough to discover one.

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Sol Trader at EGX Rezzed: 7-9 April 2016

Sol Trader’s release date is set for late April 2016 so we’re gearing up for two big shows this year to put the game in the hands of gamers.

We had a great time at EGX in September last year, and are looking forward to returning to EGX Rezzed on 7-9 April.

We have a big double stand and there will be lots of opportunity to get your hands dirty with a preview build of the final game. You’ll be able to create whole new procedural societies to interact with, flying missions, trade goods, shoot down pirates and avoid the wrath of their family members…

If you’ve got your tickets, we’ll see you there. If you haven’t there are still some available.

Can’t wait until April?

If you haven’t backed the game yet, you can buy beta access and play today. If you’ve already backed it, you’ll have access to the latest beta over at our forums.

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The cunning plans of Sol Trader

I’ve just finished reworking the old state-machine based AI system that I threw in to the game last year just to get something working. Sol Trader now boasts a full STRIPS-based planning AI. This works by starting a character off with some basic needs to fulfil: the need to socialise, rest, work, self-improve, etc. It then uses pathfinding techniques to work out a series of steps to get those needs fulfilled, such as buying a cheap good and selling it for more somewhere else, hitting the bar after work, or hanging around a jumpgate looking for easy prey. Here’s how it works.

The new planning system at work: a few of your relatives sleep at a tiny motel

Making a plan

Let’s say Anthony, an AI character, is tired and has a strong need to rest. To fulfil that need, the game allows the character to rest at home, but also to stay a night at a friend’s house. Here are some rules from the actual planner in the game written in a semi-formalised manner:

• in order to REST we can RELAX_AT_HOME if we are IN_LOCATION(MY_HOME) at cost of 0
• in order to REST we can STAY_A_NIGHT if we are AT_HOME_OF(CLOSE FRIEND) at cost of 50

To stay the night at a friend’s house, Anthony would need to move to their house, so we need some more rules to cover this:

• we are AT_HOME_OF(PERSON) if we are IN_LOCATION(PERSON)
• in order to be IN_LOCATION(LOCATION) we can MOVE_TO(LOCATION) if we are IN_CITY(CONTAINING LOCATION) at cost of 10

Let’s assume that we are already in the city in question. The planner starts off at the need (REST) and works backwards until it find this IN_CITY state. It then forms a chain of actions to complete to get the need fulfilled:

ANTHONY'S PLAN: MOVE_TO(HOME) -> RELAX_AT_HOME -> FULFIL_NEED(REST)

The game will always chose the lowest cost option. If Anthony is in his home already, or in the same city, then he would just go home to rest, rather than to a friend’s house. However, let’s assume he is in a different city. It’s too far for Anthony to head home to his house, so the lowest cost option would then be to trespass on the hospitality of a friend who lives in that city.

Planning works extremely well for Sol Trader

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to good game AI. The effectiveness of AI techniques varies dramatically depending on the type of game being designed. However, planning is a great fit for Sol Trader: it’s had a dramatic effect of the feel of the game.

Now the AI is now intelligently making decision based on relative needs, the game has the following new features, all of which were easily added:

• Characters now visit friends and colleagues, hiring ships if they don’t have their own transport
• Traders buy and sell goods intelligently, by buying cheap, travelling to another planet and selling high. It’s great fun watching the ships take off and land, knowing they have a cargo full of cheap goods bound for some far-flung planet, which will actually be more expensive in their destination.

Plenty of characters making travel enquiries at a Martian spaceport

• Navy ships now take off and escort famous characters.
• Unwise navy characters might take the law into their own hands, destroying ships close to them that contain characters they know to be immoral.
• All ships defend themselves when attacked, depending on their piloting skills and their wisdom
• Characters will run to a planet for repairs should their ship get too damaged.
• I’ve also got the bare bones of the Pirate AI in, so you need to watch out when travelling around the various systems now: I’ve already been attacked once whilst trying to test something else. They’re not that smart yet, and will attack even in major population centres, but I’ll fix that in an upcoming release.

Watch that trigger finger: ships will now attack and defend themselves

It was also very easy to put in a conversation option which asks what a character is thinking about. This returns some text detailing the character’s top need, which shows what they’re most likely to do next:

Pretty forward thinking of Alysa to want to improve her life... at the age of 1

I’ve posted the start of a reference guide to the forums for modders.

This new build is now available from the forum if you have purchased insider access (if you haven’t there’s still time!) If you are already a Kickstarter backer and you haven’t received your copy, or you’re a member of the press, do get in touch.

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Full disclosure: Sol Trader conversation upgrades

Since getting the new mission code into Sol Trader before Christmas, I’ve been working on upgrading the conversation mode. Now it’s possible to have much more detailed conversations with players about your events and theirs:

Conversations get ‘deeper’ the more you share, so you can feed a character lots of interesting (and potentially damaging) information about your life, and in return you’ll get equally sensitive information back about the character you’re talking to.

If you’re talking about a different character, then you can share what you know about them and get information back in return. This way you can build up pictures of characters you know about by gradually discovering information about their past.

The flipside is that you’re sharing sensitive information about yourself, which could potentially be used against you by other characters in the future. It’ll soon be possible for characters to blackmail you by forcing you to undertake a mission by a certain time, or they’ll release damaging information about you. Be careful who you give your sensitive information to!

This build is now available on the forums should you have access (there’s still time if you don’t.)

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The Sol Trader Christmas Eve update: moddable missions

The relative radio silence from Sol Trader Towers is for a reason: I’ve been working hard on a flexible and moddable mission structure, that allows players to take a variety of interesting quests in-game.

This build is now available on the forums should you have access (there’s still time if you don’t.)

I’ve built a few missions to start with, including delivering parcels for business or personal reasons, taking characters on business trips and making other characters disappear. It’s great fun to have a variety of things to do for characters now and adds yet more colour to the game. Because it’s completely moddable, I’m also excited to see what storylines other people come up with!

Under the hood

The full details of how to create your own missions are available as a lengthy forum post, which will be kept up to date with changes and clarifications. Here’s an overview:

The missions are organised into packs, which exists under the data/missions subfolder. If you have access to the beta builds, you’ll see there’s one pack there already: these are the missions that are built in to the game.

There are several csv files in each mission folder:

• requirements.csv: This file details the cases in which this mission might be triggered. Each character in the game has a chance of picking this mission (and becoming the ‘giver’ of the mission), based on the conditions imposed by this file.
• conversation_player.csv: The extra conversation options available to the player because of this mission.
• conversation_ai_response.csv: The extra options the AI can choose from as conversation responses.
• opinions.csv: The extra opinion triggers, used for reactions to the generation and completion of these missions.
• strings.csv: The new strings needed for the previous CSV files.

The possibilities for you to build your own missions are expanding all the time, as I add new missions triggers and possible goals for the AI.

What’s next?

At the moment it’s possible to take on any mission from any person, which isn’t very realistic. I need to allow players to gain other character’s trust, so that they will only give you sensitive missions in certain cases. Additionally it will soon be possible to start a career with an organisation, which will give you a rank, a certain amount of built in trust, and access to more senior characters.

I’m also going to be working on the in-space AI very soon. At the moment only freelance traders fly around between planets: it’s time we had passenger ships, military guards and pirates thrown into the mix.

Have a fantastic Christmas and I’ll see you all in the new year with some more updates.

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New Sol Trader beta: the science of blame and unforgiveness

Previously I wrote about how I’m modelling opinions and prejudice in Sol Trader. It’s time to put some of that information to use.

The opinions a character has of other people, based on the partial events that they know about them, will now directly affect the things that happen in the history generation. This creates new events, which will in turn feed more character opinions.

There’s a new beta available on the forums if you have insider access.

Dudley and Meredith

In the example on the left, we can see that an acrimonious divorce of Meredith’s parents has left an indelible mark on her childhood. She now has a very low opinion of her father, Dudley.

When characters are adults, they can then generate a series of ‘favours’ (or ‘missions’) that they want completed. This is a source of work for the players, although completing certain missions does have real consequences on your relationships with the target of the mission. If they find out you’ve taken a mission against them, then they won’t be happy with you.

To continue our example, Meredith, whom we are now married to, wants us to find out some potentially incriminating information about our own father-in-law, Dudley. It’s up to us whether we take it or not. If he finds out, we’ll make an enemy of him.

Is it worth getting involved in this feud?

As the game goes on, the player will get embroiled in these relationships between the various characters and be able to directly affect their stories. Choosing what to take on and who to ally yourself with forms a major part of Sol Trader’s gameplay.

Sarina’s spiral of doom

Another example: the sad tale of Sarina, our older half sister. I picked Dagny and Warren in history generation to be my character’s parents, knowing that Dagny was cheating on her husband Hayden, mostly to see what happened. Little did I know how much it would affect Sarina, Dagny and Hayden’s eight year old daughter. When she found out about my birth, she got very upset.

She didn’t blame me, thankfully, although she never thought much of me. However, she never really spoke to our mother again, especially since her beloved father Hayden died soon after we were born.

She left home at a young age, and became a political assistant, but she didn’t make too many friends. She was doing ok for a time, only to find out that the love of her life, Richard Ruhr, had been having an affair behind her back all along.

She divorced him, got depressed, quit her job and by the time I grew to adulthood at the start of the game, she was living in a hippie commune somewhere on Mercury, trying desperately to get some gossip on her ex-husband.

New beta out now

This new beta is now available from the forum if you have purchased insider access (if you haven’t there’s still time.) Let me know if you find any other interesting stories such as these!

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Modelling opinions and prejudices in Sol Trader

I’ve been working hard on the Sol Trader core gameplay mechanics in the last two weeks. High up on my list was a way of generating more interesting missions for the characters to complete.

In order to have a reason to gather dirt, find locations or desire an early end for an enemy, our characters need to feel strongly about other people they know. This is where their opinions and prejudices come in.

So why is he so interested in where Terrilyn is? What does he know about her?

Characters already keep track of the events they know about for each other character in the game. Now they can form an opinion of a character based on the partial set of info they know about someone else’s past.

The plan is to use these thoughts about each other to make decisions about who they’re friends with, deal with relationship breakdown, blame and prejudice.

Characters can hold a wide variety of opinions about each other

Here’s an example of how we configure this under the hood for an occasion where a character is caught and reported for taking bribes:

    event,         opinion,    impact, I caught them, I was caught
    PRISON_BRIBES, PITIABLE,    -0.4,   0,             0
    PRISON_BRIBES, MORAL,       -0.4,   0,             0
    PRISON_BRIBES, INFLUENTIAL, -0.4,   1,             0
    PRISON_BRIBES, MY_FRIEND,   -1.0,   0,             1

Anyone knowing about this event will think the character is less deserving of sympathy and assume the character is less moral. If we’re the one catching them take the bribes, then the briber becomes much less influential over us. If we’re the one being caught, then the one catching us is definitely no longer our friend. Depending on our profession, we will brief against them or possibly try to take them out.

Now characters have opinions about others, we can use these to guide their conversation choices, who they’re likely to target, give us gossip on, etc. It’s all game design fuel for other behaviours in the game, and will combine to form interesting unexpected effects and tell original stories each time.

Next time I’ll discuss about the new events that get created in the history generation because of these new opinions. Our stylised formulaic view of history is about to become, well, a lot more messed up. Rather like real history…

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