November Retrospective
Welcome to another monthly update, only slightly delayed by the holidays!
In the previous post I mentioned what I am now calling “continuations events.” These are small story hooks that can trigger on previous events and give delayed consequences. At this point I think it might be helpful to back up a bit and discuss terms. There are many common patterns found in interactive narrative. The first, dating back to physical books like Choose Your Own Adventure books or gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf, is branching narrative. In its purest form it is known as the "Time Cave" pattern. It typically looks like this:
It's very intuitive. Unfortunately it has a big problem: combinatorial explosion. Imagine a game that presents an event with two choices, each leading to another event with two choices. At a depth of 10, there would be 1024 choices! Despite that amount of content, a player would only make 10 choices and have a very short game. This is not really tenable for a game of any length. A common solution to this, used by Telltale Games and others, is shallow branches. This is know as the "Branch and Bottleneck" pattern.
This is a much more reasonable approach for writing interactive narrative. Unfortunately, on replays, players tend to realize that the decisions that feel weighty the first time around are in fact usually not. The path is a little different, but it all collapses to the same set of bottlenecks.
A solution to this is to create “storylets.” There are many definitions for this, but the basic idea is a discreet, self-contained chunk of story. These can be Time Caves, Branch and Bottlenecks, Gauntlets, or any other pattern, but they must above all be brief. How do storylets solve anything? Using the power of simulation and random numbers, these storylets can be arranged in unpredictable, though plausible, ways. This is variously called the "Floating Modules" pattern, probabilistic-driven narrative, and probably other things as well; whatever it is called, this is the approach used in Dei Gratia Rex.
DGR is by no means the first game to arrange its narrative around simulation-driven storylets. King of Dragon Pass did this back in 1999, and even it had some forbears. Since then, different takes on the approach have been tried in such diverse places as Reigns and Crusader Kings 2, to say nothing of the recent KoDP spiritual successor Six Ages.
Circling back to continuation events: those are floating modules that may or may not be triggered by previous choices in events, though experienced at a delay. Much of the month's work went into writing these.
If you'd like to read more about these narrative patterns, I'd highly recommend Sam Kabo Ashwell's post on the subject. For an even deeper dive than that, Emily Short has written extensively on this and many related topics. Here is a recent post; read that and follow the links to previous material.
One of the bullet points for DGR is “hard historical fiction.” The reference there is of course hard sci-fi. By that I mean the game is a work of fiction and not a pure simulation, but at the same time I am making every effort to avoid the grossly ahistorical. Some research revealed that mass peasant levies — present in just about every medieval game I have played which has armies in it — are about as historically veracious as horned viking helmets, at least in 12th century England.
The Anglo-Saxon period did indeed have the fyrd. This isn't quite the pitchfork-wielding peasant horde of the popular imagination, but it was a large mobilization of commoners. It was however a fairly unique institution created to solve a specific problem, and in any case it withered under Norman rule. That's not to say that peasants didn't fight. The Assize of Arms, which historically appeared at the tail end of our time period, gives clues as to how things worked.
What I'm currently working on is turning the historical facts into a system that both fits the gameplay mechanics and is also fun.
There were also some other changes. Some stubborn bugs were squashed. Info windows were expanded and improved. There are also some experiments with larger coats of arms; this is still very much a work in progress, as the SVG I wrote for the randomized coats of arms assumed a much lower resolution.
That's probably about everything worthy of note from November. More next month!
Continuation Events
In the previous post I mentioned what I am now calling “continuations events.” These are small story hooks that can trigger on previous events and give delayed consequences. At this point I think it might be helpful to back up a bit and discuss terms. There are many common patterns found in interactive narrative. The first, dating back to physical books like Choose Your Own Adventure books or gamebooks like Fighting Fantasy and Lone Wolf, is branching narrative. In its purest form it is known as the "Time Cave" pattern. It typically looks like this:
It's very intuitive. Unfortunately it has a big problem: combinatorial explosion. Imagine a game that presents an event with two choices, each leading to another event with two choices. At a depth of 10, there would be 1024 choices! Despite that amount of content, a player would only make 10 choices and have a very short game. This is not really tenable for a game of any length. A common solution to this, used by Telltale Games and others, is shallow branches. This is know as the "Branch and Bottleneck" pattern.
This is a much more reasonable approach for writing interactive narrative. Unfortunately, on replays, players tend to realize that the decisions that feel weighty the first time around are in fact usually not. The path is a little different, but it all collapses to the same set of bottlenecks.
A solution to this is to create “storylets.” There are many definitions for this, but the basic idea is a discreet, self-contained chunk of story. These can be Time Caves, Branch and Bottlenecks, Gauntlets, or any other pattern, but they must above all be brief. How do storylets solve anything? Using the power of simulation and random numbers, these storylets can be arranged in unpredictable, though plausible, ways. This is variously called the "Floating Modules" pattern, probabilistic-driven narrative, and probably other things as well; whatever it is called, this is the approach used in Dei Gratia Rex.
DGR is by no means the first game to arrange its narrative around simulation-driven storylets. King of Dragon Pass did this back in 1999, and even it had some forbears. Since then, different takes on the approach have been tried in such diverse places as Reigns and Crusader Kings 2, to say nothing of the recent KoDP spiritual successor Six Ages.
Circling back to continuation events: those are floating modules that may or may not be triggered by previous choices in events, though experienced at a delay. Much of the month's work went into writing these.
If you'd like to read more about these narrative patterns, I'd highly recommend Sam Kabo Ashwell's post on the subject. For an even deeper dive than that, Emily Short has written extensively on this and many related topics. Here is a recent post; read that and follow the links to previous material.
Warfare
One of the bullet points for DGR is “hard historical fiction.” The reference there is of course hard sci-fi. By that I mean the game is a work of fiction and not a pure simulation, but at the same time I am making every effort to avoid the grossly ahistorical. Some research revealed that mass peasant levies — present in just about every medieval game I have played which has armies in it — are about as historically veracious as horned viking helmets, at least in 12th century England.
The Anglo-Saxon period did indeed have the fyrd. This isn't quite the pitchfork-wielding peasant horde of the popular imagination, but it was a large mobilization of commoners. It was however a fairly unique institution created to solve a specific problem, and in any case it withered under Norman rule. That's not to say that peasants didn't fight. The Assize of Arms, which historically appeared at the tail end of our time period, gives clues as to how things worked.
What I'm currently working on is turning the historical facts into a system that both fits the gameplay mechanics and is also fun.
Other Stuff
There were also some other changes. Some stubborn bugs were squashed. Info windows were expanded and improved. There are also some experiments with larger coats of arms; this is still very much a work in progress, as the SVG I wrote for the randomized coats of arms assumed a much lower resolution.
That's probably about everything worthy of note from November. More next month!