Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex News

First and foremost, happy New Year, everyone! It has been quite a ride, but hopefully things will be better this year than they were in the last.




Work on pitched battles has started. This is the very last piece of the war section. As frequently happens, there's nothing terribly good to show just yet, but here's a teaser:



Also on the agenda was line-fillers. Line-fillers, in a medieval context, are small illustrations placed at the end of a line of text which continue to the right margin. Medieval scribes loved patterns and hated empty space, so this even extended to the ends of lines. More practically, spacing was also a bit different in manuscripts than in modern writing. I've added these to DGR:



I'm currently repurposing some existing icons. However more appropriate art is going to be added before launch; until then I'll keep the setting off for most screenshots. Speaking of which, there will be one more batch of art assets! There are a few more miniatures that need to be added, plus some general decorations like the line-fillers and such. Also I missed the letter 'Æ' (that is, the AE ligature) when I commissioned the first set of art. It turns out that there are still Anglo-Saxons milling about in the 12th century and some of their names start with Æ. I've been writing around this omission thus far, but it would be a lot easier to be able to have that majuscule available.




The game has grown quite a lot over the year. The main accomplishment was most of a war system. In retrospect I should have made that part simpler and more abstract. A province-based map-staring war game delivered via hundreds of narrative events that tie into a simulation of people and kingdoms with a robust peace negotiation system could be a standalone game, at least it could be at indie scale. Regardless, what's done is done. I do think it will be worth it in the end though!

The simulation greatly improved as well, and I finally worked gameplay effects into the economics. Beyond that, a number of smaller changes and tweaks, like the initial-stroke rubrication, were made.

On the whole I'm pleased with the progress. My productivity was greatly reduced this year, but frankly a lot of that is beyond my control. It was a hard year for everyone.




In news simultaneously good and bad, Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex must launch at least by early May. I blew past the first hard deadline of the project last year, and some pain resulted from missing that date. Missing the next hard deadline would be worse. I'm hoping to be able to do a full launch then, but if it comes to it there will be an early access release at that time. Early access for me is like crowd funding: I don't want to be in a position where I disappoint people who have given me money. I very much believe in DGR, but I want to do everything I can to deliver the best possible experience from launch day on.

In other upcoming news, the game dev group of which I am a part is doing its second annual summit on the 16th of January at 3:00 PM EST (20:00 GMT). Since there are still pandemic concerns, this will be an online event that, as I understand it, will be streamed on Twitch. I'll be giving a talk on using floating modules to handle combinatorial explosion in narrative design, dissecting some DGR events as part of the presentation. If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of the game, please feel free to tune in! I'll have more information, including some links, in a future post this month.




Keep making it until it is done, as a wise person once suggested. It will be a bit tight, but I'm hoping for the best!

Once again, the time has come to review the work done over the previous month.




Perfect information in strategy games is a bit of a bugbear of mine. The computer has perfect info of course; it has to. It's very easy and very logical to communicate that perfect information to the player. However we're striving for "hard historical fiction" here, so things must be different.

Games have had fog of war from almost the beginning. But if you have a force in a province, the fog of war is lifted not only for that province but for all the adjoining ones. That's fair for modern times of course, but in the 12th century communication was slow and the telescope still didn't exist. Reconnaissance was based on moving people to high vantages and using their eyes, talking to people, and delivering information in person. This took time and energy, and that is reflected in Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex. Gathering information is a deliberate act which must be done, lest previous reports get stale.



If you've been reading these dev diaries for a while, you might remember me tossing around the idea of more map modes. If you like games like this, then map modes are also probably something you appreciate. I was worried that too much information would work against some of the goals of this project; the average game gives you more information than the Domesday Book, but updated daily. This system allowed me to add another map mode, at least during war, that graphs the amount of pillage done to a county without going too far towards too much info.






From almost the beginning, there has been an "energy" system for movement. You are limited in how far you can march in a given month, and good military commanders can do more here than others. However it's now being used for reconnaissance as well. Immediately the thought comes to mind: why not do a tiny recon every turn and continue about one's business? I anticipated this exploit; without full energy there is a chance (scaled to remaining energy) that this might happen:






The AI has come along nicely. It knows how to wage war, and it knows how to flee from stronger forces and chase weaker ones. I did underestimate how much work was involved, but I think the heavy lifting is done now.

After fleshing out the energy system, I noticed that there was a possibility to work yourself into an inescapable state. Specifically if you exhaust all your energy inside your own territory, you can't actually lay siege or raid. It is now possible to end the turn doing nothing, and there are a handful of camping events which can fire.

The AI's success in war caused me to, on occasion, want to retake things which it had besieged. Most of the siege events I wrote months ago were entirely inappropriate to do in your own land, so I wrote a class of events for liberating your own holdings.

I also noticed that it would be super cool to have some shortcuts to the map of territorial control, and shortcuts for rapidly exiting any map screen. Those are now in. Also, visible above and again subject to recon, the position of enemies is show on the map. The player's position is always available.

More to come on the first Saturday of next month! And in the mean time, I hope everyone who celebrates this December has as joyful and happy a season as is possible in these times. Here's to hoping for a better 2021!

Yet another first Saturday has come, so let's take a look at the previous month!




The majority of the time was taken up by writing AI for the various kingdoms that the player doesn't control. I joked that when you find yourself writing pathfinding on an undirected graph for your text game, you've probably taken a wrong turn somewhere. Dei Gratia Rex is of course a map game as well, and the simulation aspects are important for that.

There's not a lot of terribly interesting screenshots for this either I'm afraid. However I did find the need to tweak one of the map modes:



One of the design principals in DGR has always been — and remains — to present a throne-level game as opposed to a bird's eye game. Information about the political situation one hundred miles away was not always easy to come by in the 12th century; information about the lay of the land thousands of miles away was utterly unattainable. I play and enjoy games that do offer that sort of view of the world of course, but those are different games to this one. That said, in testing I found it pretty annoying to not know which of my counties had been besieged by the enemy. Updated information in the final version is mostly likely going to require expenditure of resources (even something as simple as spending time scouting rather than another activity), but for gameplay reasons this information does need to be available in some fashion.

Most likely I will add one more map mode to graph the effects of raiding and pillage. I've been going back and forth as to whether or not that was a good fit for the game's vision, but even for a game like this gameplay must come first.




Last time I mentioned trying to do a few things just for screenshot purposes. Since I'm still on some boring, code-heavy work at the moment, I did the same this month. I happened across some paleographic fonts sourced directly from real manuscripts, so naturally I had to make a trial run.



I'm no academic to be sure, but I am perhaps ever so slightly more familiar with this sort of thing than an average gamer might be. However I can barely read this! Further, I have far too much respect for you all to inflict the long s on you. It looked like a bust. Digging a bit deeper however, I found that I could actually disable the ligatures at the code level. This resulted in somewhat more legible results for us modern readers.



I'm not really convinced of this either though. Still, the experiment was an interesting one! I did receive a suggestion on Twitter to make this an optional toggle (and also to consider further accessibility here, like dyslexic-friendly fonts). That sounds pretty optimal to me, but as always I'm definitely interested in more input!




That's all for today. I'm going to try to get the AI finished in the next few days and move on to other work. Systems work has consumed much time lately, and I'm eager to create more content.

It's the first Saturday of a new month, so let's review what happened in the previous one. Today's post may be a bit shorter than usual. I've been a bit under the weather, but want to make sure to get something out anyway.




A lot of time was spent working on the simulation of AI kingdoms. I'm fairly satisfied with how things work inside the player's kingdom, but there are still a number of things that need to happen for the non-player kingdoms. Using the same rules where possible is of course something I want to do, however, for example, the economic simulation assumes you're going to be getting a few negative treasury events in the course of the year. This has to be controlled for, otherwise the AIs become unreasonably wealthy.

There are lots of things like this that needed, and still need, work. Unfortunately this stuff makes horrible screenshots.




Screenshots are something I've been struggling with. This is ultimately a visual medium, but I've been doing some work that just doesn't work with that. So I consciously took a bit of time last month to improve some things I could show off for this post!

Rubrication was a process in which certain letters or words in manuscripts were emphasized, usually with the addition of red ink. There are a number of historically-attested methods of doing this: red letters, initial-strokes, and even patterns of dots. Thus far Dei Gratia Rex has used red letters because that was simple. However, given that it was more common for this sort of thing, I've switched over to using initial-strokes.



Each stroke is actually slightly customized per letter. Further, there's some randomization going on to make each stroke ever so slightly different in terms of length, width, and curvature — as one would expect from a scribal hand. It is a very subtle effect; without pointing it out I wonder if it would even be noticed. That said, I do feel that a lot of little touches like this, even if not fully grasped at first, contribute to the medieval feel of the overall work. Here is some example text at normal and 4x magnification:






Numbers have thus far played a bit of havoc with text layout to the point that I wrote out number words in the main text more often than not. I decided to find a similar font with numerals that played a bit nicer. These new numerals don't, for example, have long descending sevens. This might actually be less authentically medieval, but it works better with layout and is a bit more legible. The old one is shown here at left, the new one at right.






That's about it for now. I would love to hear some input on the new numerals and rubrication.

It's the first Saturday in a new month, so the time to look back on the previous one has come.

What a month it was. I thought I had an air conditioning problem. Like most bugs, it went deeper though: it was actually an electrical problem. Some unsolicited advice that may save you a lot of money or even your life: if you detect a persistent smell of slightly rotted crab, sniff your outlets. It may very well be the smell of burning and/or melting electrical components. Frankly I'm thankful I caught it just in time and didn't have a fire. Long story short, I'm a little behind on my targets. Moving on...




Balancing is important work. It makes terrible screenshots though. That said, I spent some time trying to get the numbers right for the peace negotiations content. I'm reasonably happy with the current state of it, at least for the time being.

While finishing up this section, I noticed a few strange things though. For example, let's say you're currently besieging a county. You conclude a peace, but another war remains. Because of the timing involved, the game would fire an appropriate siege event targeting the now-neutral county after the peace, but before you reach the main war dispatch! That's not intended of course, so now there's special logic for that.



This is the same solution as many 4X games use: bouncing the forces back to friendly territory. It isn't instant in Dei Gratia Rex though, as the process takes a month.

While working on the numbers, it also occurred to me that demanding too much — especially of a wroth or prideful sort — would be seen as an insult and not good-faith negotiation. In such a case there would be no counterproposal and negotiations would break down. This is desirable sometimes, for instance if you don't really want peace yet but also don't want to anger your own people by refusing to even discuss the matter. From a gameplay perspective, it also serves as a disincentive to ask for everything and see what sticks.






I also spent a fair bit of time this month doing a lot of research and a little practice in marketing. Many indie games release every day. Almost all of them fail. Very few do much on the marketing front. I'm going to do the best I can to get the word out, but in an appropriate and non-spammy way. I can't afford a big ad campaign, so a lot of this is going to be social media and word of mouth. I'd appreciate it quite a lot if you were to tell someone who might be interested about the game.

The good news is that during August we got over the 1,000 total wishlists mark. A lot more work is needed on that front, but it is at least a strong sign that some people are interested.




I had intended to release DGR late this year, but before the winter sales period. That might have been a bit ambitious, and in the interim COVID-19 happened. The release is now planned for early next year.

I hate to push the date back, but it actually may be a good thing on the whole. Between now and the holiday sales, approximately everyone who might cover DGR is going to be very busy with Crusader Kings III. A small, niche release like DGR would get lost in the shuffle were it to release in the next two to three months. If I'm honest, I'd be playing it too right now if my computer wasn't 10 years old!

Thanks for reading. Another update next month, hopefully of a more exciting nature!