Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex News

The first Saturday of the month has arrived, so let's look back on what happened in the previous month. It's a fair bit this time, so let's get to it!




As expected, much work was done on random events based on faction scores. I briefly touched on those last month. These events are caused by large factions in the realm, visible at all times on the scroll at the left of the screen. Sometimes they have disputes among themselves. Others times they directly petition for something from the crown. When things go badly, they can go very badly, like the noble rebellion I posted last month. Not all of these can eventually lead to a game over, but most can. It is not wise to antagonize one group too much.



It's not all bad though. Now and again, if they really like you, a faction can grant you a boon. These favors are sometimes rather powerful.



Quite a lot of these events have been created, but more are still required.




A lot of the work in preparing these faction-based random events is in creating effects and interactions. Among other things, this finally prompted me to code the legal system. Some of the things that are requested are laws benefiting a faction or reducing royal power. As you pass these, you might find your capacity to do things (at least without tyranny) wanes.



Other legal restrictions can be forced on you from outside. For example if you annoy the Church too much, the realm might be placed under interdict.



There are ways to revoke these decrees. If a faction likes you enough, it may decide it trusts you enough to no longer need a previous law, for example. It is a topic for another day, but with all this in place, I can build the Magnum Concilium feature to interact with the legal system. More on that another time though!




I made some improvements to the visuals. First, I found myself often losing track of characters. Which William was my friend, which Edouard was my enemy? Now relations information is communicated via color: redder colors are enemies, bluer colors are friends.



You might have noticed, but there are new page textures as well. The previous one was fine, but always looked to me more like paper than vellum. Additionally, there are now several similar-yet-distinct page sets for increased visual variety.

I also introduced a very subtle jitter in the text. There are occasional deviations in spacing and weight on letters. Even professional medieval scribes didn't make perfect, mechanical letters every single time, after all. Here's an event with a lot of text. You may or may not notice examples at normal scale, but you can definitely notice it zoomed. In this way, it is like the minor randomness in the rubrications.






Finishing this faction and law stuff! After that, I'll see what's left to do before starting testing. I don't think much remains to be done at that point.

More next time!

It's the first Saturday of the month, so that means it's time to review the last month's progress.



As promised, random events that are primarily tied to date were first on the agenda. Since DGR is set in 12th century England — whose economy was very much still agrarian — one of the most important date-linked events was the harvest. Sometimes everything went well. Other times things went badly, resulting in less than happy outcomes.



Chance wasn't the only thing driving these results however. There is now a rudimentary weather system under the hood that tracks years by warmth and regions by precipitation. This can result in a number of outcomes. (Guichard is a bit, though not excessively, greedy; pay him no mind.)



That does lead me to a bit of a quandary though. As a software guy and map-staring enthusiast, a weather map mode seems obvious. On the other hand, many games in this genre give shockingly large amounts of information that no king could possible have had. I try to push back against this, for example by reconnaissance getting stale. As of now, I've largely decided against such a map mode. I wouldn't mind hearing some opinions about this though.




The next item on the agenda is random events based on faction scores. This touches the legal system, which needed a fair bit of work. It's still early days on this, this is what I'm actively working on now. Here's a teaser.






The original economic model I used tried to infer urban population from the number of knight's fees in a county. It more or less worked and, if I do say so myself, was nearly perfect for Yorkshire. Unfortunately it was tragically incorrect for Middlesex — London and all that. Worse, the player sort of controls Middlesex for more or less the whole game and may or may not ever come to control Yorkshire.

I had to use numbers slightly outside the 12th century, but every county now tracks its urban population separately from number of fees. This urban population is where most of the infantry comes from, though the rural population does still contribute some. This is a change I have wanted to make for some time, but what prompted doing it now was that some of those faction-based events do interact with the magnitude of urban population.




Finishing faction-based events, including the minor factions. When that's done, the game should technically be playable from beginning to end. There is still more necessary content, especially relating to spouse and children. There is other content I want to do as well, plus some technical work on options and such. However I think the earliest round of testing can come before some of those things.

More next time!

One day late, but the time for a monthly update post has come.




The previous batch of 400-ish trait-based random events was finished during May. It took a bit longer than anticipated, but I also had a paid side project going on these last 2.5 months. For better and worse, that's more or less over now.

When I finished those events, I noticed a bit of a problem. These events all assume that the player has traits. I could see a scenario in which the player character, perhaps accidentally or perhaps on purpose, ends up without any personality traits. Being drab and painfully average just wouldn't do, so I wrote another medium-sized set of events that will move the needle. Here's one example:



Each of these options gives a reasonably large bump to one of the personality traits. What's interesting about these events though is that they have an impossibly low — but non-zero — weight most of the time. However if a player character happens to have a total trait sum under a certain threshold, this set of events have vastly higher weight. In DGR, every aspect of an event is a function, so even weights can do cool things like this.

This solves two problems: the one described above, but it also allowed me to finally delete a placeholder event. That was a change I was very happy to make.




I'm being a bit of a broken record here, but what I said last time. The random events based on faction and season are the next things that need to be done, and then I really want to see testing start.

On another note, there was a thread about DGR recently, and one of the topics was modding. I've said from the beginning that event modding should be very easy, but modding other aspects would be hard. I kind of wonder how much interest there is in mods for DGR? Some of my influences are extremely moddable: Crusader Kings for instance has numerous high quality mods. On the other hand, I'm not sure there's even such a thing as a mod for King of Dragon Pass.

Dear reader, would you be interested in modding DGR? Mod tools are unlikely to appear at launch one way or the other. However there are a few decisions I need to make in the near future that will directly touch moddability.

Once again, the first Saturday has arrived and with it a monthly update post.




If you've been following these updates, you'll know that the current priority is getting the game into a state where it can be played beginning to end. The biggest hurdle to that right now is sufficient main-phase random events. So this month I picked up where I left off and continued writing those.



This graphic may not seem particularly frightening, but there are some implications. You see, the current batch of events are random events that are triggered by player traits. I opted for a uniform flow for these; it makes composition and balancing ever so slightly easier. There is an introduction to the scenario, a "safe" choice that takes you away from the trait that triggered it, and another choice that takes you toward the trait but randomly will go well or badly. That's 4 pieces of content per trait. Also, there are two different scenarios per trait: one for simply having the trait, another for having a high value of the trait.

All that's fine and good if you have, like, 5 traits. In DGR, there are 49 traits that participate in this scheme — and a few more that do not. Most of these events (though not all) are fairly simple, but still result in some faction adjustments in addition to the movement of traits. However it turns out that writing 392 pieces of content is a bit time consuming. I have not quite written all 392, but I am close to finishing this part. Some examples:






More main-phase random events still need to be written after this. Specifically random events that flow from the faction values and from the seasons are required. All of the above trait-based random events are allowed to repeat, but carry a multiple year cooldown. There must be other events that are more amenable to repetition, should nothing with a higher weight be chosen. Besides, all these events can alter personality traits, and personality is meant to be rather less malleable upon the conclusion of the introductory phase in Normandy.

When all that's complete, as frightening as it is to say, I think I want to start testing. Hopefully more on that soon.

If you've been following the Twitter, you might have seen mention of going to a convention. Yesterday I attended a local convention, ETSU Con, along with some other people from the Tri-Cities Game Developers. If I met you at the con, thanks for checking out the Steam page! If you're looking for the group link, let me know and I can get it for you. Attending this con is a big part of why this post is appearing now rather than yesterday.

Pictures of our table exist, I'm told, but because of my absolute lack of media savvy, I don't have any of them. They will be posted on Twitter if I ever do get them.

Development-wise, I didn't quite get the full demo I wanted done in time to show. However driving toward it did result in a lot of things getting built that I had been putting off. There's now a user-friendly splash screen that hides the flash of weird content on loading. Though the music has been finished for some time, it's now fully integrated via playlists that are dynamically tweaked based on the current event being displayed, optionally with aggressive fading upon list changes. Speaking of options, there are now much more convenient options like remembering game window position between sessions (the previous method I was using was weird and bad, as most things are that developers build for themselves). Age progression properly updates the portrait now. I squashed some old bugs that somehow escaped notice for years. I replaced much placeholder text with the words that aught to be there. Most foolishly of all, I updated my dependencies from their circa '17 versions to the newest. All-in-all it's looking a lot more like a game and less like a random development project now.

Very little of this shows well in screenshots, but here's the splash screen. It's based on the key art which is slowly but surely becoming standard for Dei Gratia Rex across all my social media. Speaking of which, did you happen to notice the new buttons and such here on Steam, as well as the new screenshots?






The more deeply I tested the entire courtship module, the more bugs surfaced. I actually spent the first part of the month fixing things which I thought were working. So it goes in software sometimes. It can be annoying, but I'd much rather find the bugs now than find them in a bug report later.




My present goal is to "close the loop." I think enough systems are in place now such that satisfying stories can emerge. That's not to say that there isn't more that must be added, especially regarding the player's family. However development at the moment is focused on making the game playable from beginning to end so that I can get this into the hands of testers sooner rather than later.

First on the list is vastly expanding the number of "main phase" random events. These are things you see when you're not at war, touring the realm, holding tournaments, during the introduction in Normandy, and so forth. The bad news is that many of these are needed. The good news however is that the vast majority of them are rather a lot simpler than the "phase-bound" random events. I actually tried to have just enough done for the con, but it was always a bit hubristic to think I could do weeks of work in 4 days, regardless of how much I crunched.



More next time!