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Post by echocdelta on Feb 2, 2016 7:58:27 GMT
Apologies for my absence everyone reading this!
We haven't been absent or inactive, instead just life/work business and Global Game Jam got the better of my communications. Probably tomorrow or the next day at latest we'll have a new person involved here who'll be tasked with constant communication and community management here. I've found that I'm unable to both keep up with production, overseeing art/design and also being as present as I'd like with community. I'll be updating our dev-log each week and I know it might seem like it's a bit dry, but for anyone playing at home I wanted you to see how preproduction/the start of a 'project' actually kicks off. Really boring stuff, like Source control and writing up tasks with work delegation/expected hours etc.
Moving forward we'll be developing a good way of having a good communication pipeline as well as seeing what people would like from us, showing off progress or at least communicating things happening as well as constantly responding to suggestions. Most of the groundwork in preproduction in 'how' this is all moving together is now in place, so I'm a bit more comfortable in systematically not just listening to but testing feedback/suggestions.
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Post by echocdelta on Feb 2, 2016 8:10:45 GMT
Also for anyone wondering who the hell I actually am, there is an hour long interview on Twitch I did during GGJ so you can actually put a face to a forum person.
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Post by Aynen on Feb 2, 2016 8:19:10 GMT
Welcome back! Glad to see things are still moving along  |
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Post by echocdelta on Feb 2, 2016 10:22:20 GMT
Welcome back! Glad to things are still moving along Thanks man! Yeah, things are moving, I'll keep updating things and hopefully soon we can kick off more structured stuff too for community involvement. Also, if anyone has questions, just post them in this sub-section. If I don't answer something due to not being around, someone else from our office will (99% the actual CM). BIIIIIG shout out to Lord Ba'al as well for getting this all together. |
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Post by echocdelta on Feb 2, 2016 10:29:40 GMT
Also, I wanted to add a clearer explanation of where people's concepts and ideas went. I churn them through 'design matrix' cards that make up entire pages of concepts refined into user stories, logic and rules for use by tech/design and generate asset lists. For example, we have wood gathering, thus animation requirements are generated, our 'paper' prototyping starts testing the 'idea' of NPC can gather wood, the tick of how that is generated, if Forests are treated as volumes etc. That then creates further tech team stuff, for example, we now have a volume that generates different variations of trees in a volume and is always height-dependent and driven by blue-prints. But, Echo, why would we care?! Well, like a foliage brush, it places trees, but driven by blueprints or C++ (whatever the tech guys used to make it) it works by defining a volume in run-time and placing trees that conform to landscape/mesh height. I attached an example of the matrix, where we basically shove high level 'concepts' or ideas through the fire of design pillars and player experience expectations. Attachments:
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Post by Aynen on Feb 2, 2016 11:45:26 GMT
Those matrices are very nice to see! Can you post all of them?
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Post by echocdelta on Feb 2, 2016 12:06:58 GMT
Sure! I'm thinking that I might actually get CM/PR person to do 'design card break-down' stuff that will one day turn into weekly dev-blog stuff. Like, the cards alone aren't everything; they generate a use cases and mechanical outcomes, functions, user stories etc. I think it'd be important for people to see, criticize or even just understand those cards so that they can see the way we approach our design.
For example, just the wood gathering alone, generates:
NPC Manager sends NPC Pawn to collect wood from 'Forest' at volume in gameplay area
NPC Pawn arrives at volume
NPC Pawn aligns to tree asset
NPC Pawn plays animation
X amount of tick before tree state change
Tree 'falls'
Tree despawns
X amount of 'wood' is considered 'carried' by NPC Pawn
NPC Pawn pathfinds back to stockpile
NPC Pawn interacts with stockpile
NPC Manager adds value of X amount of 'wood' equal to 'carry' to overall wood resource amount
NPC Manager checks NPC Pawn count of Town and decides to/not build new house
NPC Manager (if) building new house will deduct value from wood resource amount
A big principle of game design I subscribe to, and am pushing onto other design people (and my junior designer) is that mechanical driven design is super important because it becomes flexible. For example, we can take the concept of 'wood' out of that use case and replace it with food, or stone, or metal, but the core stories remain similar. Everything we do is very deliberate and whilst I can, and will, never promise that a design is 'fun' until it is tested/consumed, I can say that it is well considered to attempt to facilitate an experience. Content driven design, like a system just for wood, can lead to paralysis when a tester turns around and says 'this is shit'. So the idea is that we treat design agnostic of the content, but considerate of testing feedback, so that as far as design goes we have a system for carrying resources, Pawn's collecting them and stuff happening around that system, with the content being 'wood' and 'gathering wood'. If I can nail down, in testing, that mechanic as being 'fun' or 'engaging', it becomes a bit more confident to apply it to 'food' or 'metal' or 'marble' etc.
But for it to even become that, it is diluted into a User Story and an Expanded Annotation/Example of that User Story, so a programmer can see the logic description (as best as we can explain it) and the context of how it is applied for this specific use.
For example, NPC carries wood to the village;
User Story (that goes to tech)
NPC can 'carry' resource from resource location to stockpile
User Story Example (in context of content)
Villager can transport wood to stockpile
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Post by Aynen on Feb 2, 2016 12:14:31 GMT
Do you reckon this way of documenting the design is compatible with interlocking mechanisms? I mean, if we say that faction proximity alters what NPCs do with wood collecting, and so does proximity of conflict, recent history of the faction, commandment changes, etc, at some point if it all interlocks, you end up with one giant matrix, instead of multiple small ones, right?
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Post by Deth on Feb 2, 2016 12:49:21 GMT
I like that chart as well. Makes it very easy to understand your ideas and how they work together. I look forward to seeing more of those if you do post them. Also I wanted to just say do not worry about breaks in communication your competition has set the bar really low around here. So you are already a rock star around here, just do not let the Godus curse suck your will to post.
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Post by echocdelta on Feb 3, 2016 9:34:24 GMT
Do you reckon this way of documenting the design is compatible with interlocking mechanisms? I mean, if we say that faction proximity alters what NPCs do with wood collecting, and so does proximity of conflict, recent history of the faction, commandment changes, etc, at some point if it all interlocks, you end up with one giant matrix, instead of multiple small ones, right? This is a fantastic question, and for one I'm actually a bit less capable of answering it fully as the AI programmers (from what I have seen) are moving into a direction that considers all of this. I know that the AI programmers are taking into account the idea of conflict, war and how NPC managers resolve these things very early on in preproduction - because they know that Phase 2 is essentially two, or more, of the village ecology being side by side and in overlapping areas of control. I can say this - we've already scoped this out. The first mechanisms, or loops, are essentially to set the base preconditions to create the ecology and respond to additions or subtractions to resources or logic. So, in Phase 1, we establish that 'wood' as a resource is a dependency and that the NPC manager has systems devoted to collecting it, acting on its presence, sending NPC pawns to pathfind to it and to treat boundaries/volumes/radials as 'this is mine'. The idea is, and we won't know until testing, overlapping villages will give us the next staging ground for testing 'how' the conflict occurs and how it is resolved. The points you mentioned, like conflict, behavior, faction relations, are all scoped in and part of the AI design. We, as design, are currently agnostic or actively ignorant of these things because we define user stories as 'I want to collect wood' or 'I want to build houses with wood' - but more detailed/low level too, such as 'I want to assign an NPC to a house asset' or 'I want a house asset to add emissive/add particle emitter socket'. This, to me, seems like the natural basic start to having houses on fire, houses with smoke, houses that can be lit, NPC's that have 'homes'. I'll actually make sure to poke at this question further with the actual people working on AI and get a better response on this. And, to answer your last question - yes, they interlock. This occurs in our 'loops' when we look at core gameplay. You can deconstruct all this logic to three simple elements; NPC wants, NPC collects, NPC grows. Even this early on, we've established that having two of these 'loops' (or villages) next to each other immediately creates points of interaction between two NPC Managers or NPC controller entities (whatever they're calling it now, our examples call them Towns as a distinguishing name-sake over villagers). This design process happened super early on and it was pretty organic; Town and Town intersect - Town and Town can wage conflict, can trade, can gift, can share, can convert - which then spawns off things like 'can crusade (if)'. The basic, Phase 1, idea is that we create that initial 'town', one that you as a player can sit back and watch grow organically (or burn, you crazy God). Foundations of reactions, wants, needs, actions etc. Does that make sense? Unfortunately I can discuss the design process for literally hours, but the AI programming is outside my expertise. |
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Post by echocdelta on Feb 3, 2016 9:43:29 GMT
I like that chart as well. Makes it very easy to understand your ideas and how they work together. I look forward to seeing more of those if you do post them. Also I wanted to just say do not worry about breaks in communication your competition has set the bar really low around here. So you are already a rock star around here, just do not let the Godus curse suck your will to post. I know the bar is set low and I really appreciate how supportive everyone here is. For the record, you can always feel free to poke/contact me through Twitter or FB (it really doesn't take much effort to find me) and I'm always happy to respond there too. Honestly, I'm always a bit sad that the blackout even happened with 22Cans, like sincerely I think that they have very rigid internal mechanisms that prohibit them from discussing things and it is definitely a point of sympathy I hold for their rank & file developers. |
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Lord Ba'al
Supreme Deity
Posts: 6,260
Pledge level: Half a Partner
I like: Cats; single malt Scotch; Stargate; Amiga; fried potatoes; retro gaming; cheese; snickers; sticky tape.
I don't like: Dimples in the bottom of scotch bottles; Facebook games masquerading as godgames.
Steam: stonelesscutter
GOG: stonelesscutter
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Post by Lord Ba'al on Feb 3, 2016 11:08:37 GMT
It would be cool if one of your AI programmers could swing by sometime to explain how they implement some specific aspect, like what you mentioned above. |
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Post by 13thGeneral on Feb 3, 2016 14:09:42 GMT
This all looks fantastic and super informative. Thanks for sharing.
One if these nights I need to grab me a big cup of coffee, get cozy at my desk, put on my headset (with chiptunes, of course) and read through all the threads on this board. I'm really behind, despite a deep interest in the topic, due to life and work; I didn't want to attempt participating unless I could give my full creative attention. This weekend I'm designating a timeslot.
Have you looked at that Teslasuit* on Kickstarter? Very ambitious plans for a VR bodysuit. Fantastical really, but its exactly the kind of innovation I love to see attempted. Unfortunately, I think they might have got hit with a Trademark claim( from Tesla Motors?) or something, because they cancelled the project.
*Not affiliated with Tesla Motors, Elon Musk, SpaceX, nor any associates or incorporated companies.
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