Actions Taken in an RPG - Devlog #9

I previously wrote about how saving is actually rewinding time in All Hail Temos. When you play, the game is always keeping track of what you do, so that you can rewind it to any previous time, replay from there, and do not have to specifically make save points. You can even rewind back “into the future”, before you rewound time previously. The timeline is continuous no matter how much time rewinding and playing you do, you can go back to previous states.

I described the Checkpoint and Journal system before, but this time I will look at the Journal Items that are being saved, which are almost like “turn actions” you take in the game, but triggered by real-time play.





All Hail Temos is an Action RPG, a Scrolls-Like, and as such is not a turn-based game. But when the game saves a journal of all the actions you are taken, it ends up looking a little like a turn-based game, where only the most important actions are listed.

It’s interesting to me, because it boils down what is happening in the RPG to it’s most basic essence.

These are the actions I am currently supporting, or the basic verbs in the game. Some of them are quite versatile verbs, so there may be dozens of ways to use a single verb.

It’s a long list, but I will go over the groups of them after this. Printing all of them for people who want to read them in one place, but feel free to skip below as I will go over them in groups.

• Player uses Door
  
• Player Teleports
  
• Story Set
  
• Speech Player
  
• Speech Actor
  
• Item Get
  
• Item Drop
  
• Item Move
  
• Trade Item
  
• Knockout Player
  
• Knockout Actor
  
• Knockout Creature
  
• Death Player
  
• Death Actor
  
• Death Creature
  
• World Event
  
• Add Experience to Actor
  
• Add Skill to Actor
  
• Add Familiarity to Actor
  
• Add Trait to Actor
  
• Remove Trait to Actor
  
• Add Effect to Actor
  
• Remove Effect to Actor
  
• Disable Skill
  
• Enable Skill
  
• Craft Create
  
• Craft Destroy
  

It’s a big list all together, so let’s break them down into what they do.

• Movement: Player uses Door and Player Teleport are just denoting movement. If a player is walking around outside, I don’t really need to register this in the journal, until they go through a doorway or teleport to a different location. Otherwise the base “save where they are” will cover it. When you reload a save game, I will save 3 states that capture everything going on, which covers about 5 seconds. This allows fine granularity of reloading time, and keeping all the arrows flying around, or action. Otherwise I reload to the last time you went through a door or teleported, changing locations.
  
• The Story Database: Story Set is the most versatile action in the game. It covers almost everything really, when you talk to someone, what you say, if you complete adventure objectives, or die, or kill someone. All of this is recorded into the Story Database, and Story Set does this work. In theory everything could be tracked with this single command, but it’s better to have specific actions saved to make it easier to rebuild the world and debug, than to put everything on the Story Database. Even though it ultimately houses a copy of nearly all the data, so it can be accessed in the dialogue and adventure systems.
  
• Dialogue: Speech Player and Speech Actor simply record what other actors and your player character say in the game. It’s all recorded, so you can review what was said any time in your journal to remind you of things. Especially if you have rewound time, you may have forgotten the final state of the conversation, but it will be preserved here for you.
  
• Items: You can pick up and drop items in the world, or inside containers, and Item Get and Item Drop track what item you got, how many of them, and where you got them from. This is like cryptocurrency blockchain, in that the game is auditing everything that happens. With Item Move you can also move items to a new location, and when you come back they will be in the new location, and if you rewind time, they will be in the previous location. Sounds like common sense, but making this work was a very large endeavor.
  
• Trading: Trade Item is exchanging items with another actor. This might be buying or selling with a merchant, or trading freely with a companion, or looting a body of a knocked out enemy. If it’s moving items or money between actors, I save it as a trade with appropriate meta-information.
  
• Combat Results: Knockout or Death of the Player, Actors, or Creatures are all recorded. These each are treated a little differently, so I track them all differently.
  
• World Events: If you do something in the world, such as activate a location-based artifact, turn on a machine, or destroy a building, these will be recorded as world events, so you can see what happened in your journal, and the game knows to trigger that event on reload or time rewinding.
  
• Add, Remove, Disable Attributes: XP, new skills, traits. You can add to these. You can disable or re-enable skills if you want to turn them off to tune your gameplay. You can add or remove traits, through advancing adventures around those. Tracking different types of progression.
  
• Crafting: Finally, we have the ability to destroy and create items. Turning 3 iron into a sword will destroy the iron, but create a sword.
  

Having a distinct set of actions is a part of all games, and so I don’t really consider it gameplay impacting. However, being able to rewind time very granularly in a narrative driven action RPG is fairly novel gameplay, and I am looking forward to seeing how players engage with this.

Will you use it differently than normal save and reload?

Having the gameplay turned into distinct units that can be saved and replayed does make it very clear to me, as the developer, when I am adding new functionality to the game, because I have to be able to explicitly save and replay it. This creates a very tight set of requirements for how the player is effecting the game world, which I also have a log of and can review to find problems or help balancing issues.

I considered making rewinding time a gameplay mechanic to some adventures, but I decided that the knowledge that you take back with you when you rewind time is the gameplay mechanic, so nothing extra would be as useful as that.



All Hail Temos was created to blend action RPG with world simulation, but focusing on the story narrative experience. All the details going into saving and restoring this data is to make the world feel more complete, and to allow trying out different story options easily, whenever you want to. So you can play out your own story, and try to get the conclusion you are looking for.

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