All Hail Temos News

Due to how frequently games are hyped up, and fail to deliver, or even fail to release, I think it’s important not oversell my game. My goal is to keep the messaging very small, because as a solo developer I am limited in what I can create in a given time frame.

I’ve been programming for 40 years now, and have made quite a lot of software, and a few games before, but every project has it’s own issues, and in All Hail Temos, that issue is having an enormous scope.

This is part of the world I am building.



To me, to be a “Scrolls-like” game, you must have:

• A focus on world simulation. Areas are seamlessly connected directly or logically together.
  
• A focus on object simulation. The objects in this world are not scenery.
  
• A focus on character simulation. The people in the world have names, and their own behaviors. Most of them will have unique responses to you, or situational responses.
  
• Non-directed narrative play. You can go almost anywhere you want, almost any time you want, and engage with the narrative that exists with the characters there.
  
• There are many different abilities the player can use, but can’t use them all at once.
  
• Different types of play: combat, riding animals, crafting, decorating your house
  

I will go into a full list important elements and more detail in a later post, but I think this gives a good overview.

There is a reason there are not a lot of Scrolls-like games, and that’s because creating the above software, and then making a fun game on top of that is an enormous endeavor and so only a few companies have done it.

So, how to approach such a endeavor?

Chapon Town



Even though I have made all the terrain showed in the first map, set up the rivers, lakes, set up different climate zones, marked out the forests, and the major roads, set up the initial cities, villages and towns, it was still going to be an empty world narratively if I tried to release it at-scale.



So I changed my goal to focus on a single town, Chapon. This would be a mining town in the mountains, so it is fairly isolated and doesn’t do caravan commerce as it is not on a road, and is fairly far away from other settlements.

This allows intense focus to be on just this town to start, so I can work through all the core features and getting the narrative system working well in a smaller area, that is still a part of the bigger world. All the complexity of a spread out game, but in a single area.

Chapon’s location in the over world



There are many things I want to be in the game, as I think the Scrolls-like genre has the ability to hold all kinds of different gameplay in a single game, due to it’s comprehensive format.

But, to start, I have to hold off on many things I want to add, such as:

• Traveling the overworld. Constraining to 1 area means no fun overworld exploration.
  
• Riding animals. A faster and sometimes more fun way to travel the overworld.
  
• Flying. I specifically designed All Hail Temos to be able to allow flying in the game, which would normally break many games mechanics, and their world topology.
  
• Lots of different fighting styles and abilities, more detailed crafting.
  
• Base building. Personalizing.
  

Trying to do all of these things at once would result in a game that never releases, so I will balance out what I can get out initially, the core of the game that can’t be removed, from anything that can be cut to be deferred to a later release.



Even with features that I am cutting for the initial release, the work has been done to put those features in place. Such as all the interiors of the buildings are already built using the base building feature, but making that usable in the game takes much longer than building it enough so that it’s working, but not yet usable in-game.

Example of interior build with in-game admin base building tool

One reason I spent 8 years working on this game’s development was create all the different sub-components, like riding animals, flying, and base building, so that I could get them all into the game. Often, if software is not created with large features in mind early on, it is hard to get them in properly later. So all of this difficult long-term stuff was done first as a prototype, then figuring out how to integrate them all together, to a slimmed down release where the features exist inside, but aren’t playable yet.

This allows them to be more rapidly added on, and keep them integrated with all the other features, because they were all designed to exist at the start.



Not getting things that are fun isn’t very exciting though. Any benefits? Yes!

Actually, by focusing all my attention to this single town, I can make it very detailed in terms of the characters and adventures that take place there.

When making 50 small towns at once, the pattern will follow with something like making 3 small quests per town, and add it as a pit-stop for 2 larger quests that travel through multiple towns. Having a pattern like this is necessary for repetitive work.

When focusing on only a single town at a time, the adventures present in that specific time and place can be explored. Each character can be explored to see what interesting things can come from them. It allows depth over breadth, which is something I would like All Hail Temos to keep as a tradition. Over time, I will add breadth, but I want each area to start with depth.

When this town is complete, I can start on a new town, and really fill out the characters and adventures in that town. And repeating 1 area at a time, connecting them together with new and continuing adventures as I go.



Cutting features and content is a necessity for releasing software, and games are one of the most complex and content heavy types of software that exist, and a Scrolls-like game is also heavy for a game on features and content.

So I will keep working hard to cut things back as much as I can, to focus on making the first release of content really comprehensive, but as minimally comprehensive as I can. I expect that these initial adventures will be less sophisticated than later adventures will be, once I get in the flow of putting them together and get more experience structuring them. But, that is all a part of the journey.

It is said “Rome wasn’t built in a day”, and unfortunately I can’t get in everything I want into my initial release. But, if there is a reasonable audience for the initial release, then I can continue to just keep putting in content and features to build out what my vision is: A magical world full of mystery and adventure.

If you would like to learn more about All Hail Temos and get notified when the demo is released, please Wishlist and Follow.

In a previous blog, I wrote about how All Hail Temos would have “Many Adventures vs a Main Quest”. Now I want to show what some of these adventure structures look like.

All Hail Temos is a Scrolls-like first-person open world RPG that focuses on character and world-driven stories, versus a Chosen One or “Stop the End of the World” model used in many games.

In this entry I’ll show some of the shapes of the adventures I’m using, if you were to turn the stories into decision points.





The simplest example of the adventures in my demo has a shape like this. which I am labelling as “Protection”:



Your character enters the adventure, things happen, and ultimately there are 3 possible outcomes. The actual on-goings of the story may have several or many steps, but these are the decision points: Start, End 1, End 2, End 3.

There may be more decisions during the adventure than these final 3, but ultimately they will turn into 3 primary outcomes. Each of the decisions was still recorded and may affect future adventures, or personal relationships with the characters involved.



This adventure which I am labelling “Winner and Loser” has 2 outcomes, where ultimately your character is choosing a winner and a loser. There are 3 ways to enter into this adventure.



Having different ways to enter into the adventure gives a different context to the adventure, which is maintained throughout the adventure and ending, and can also affect future adventures when they reference the outcome of this adventure.



When I wrote the outline for this adventure, I didn’t intend on it to look so symmetrical, but that’s the way this adventure turned out. There are 4 ways you can initially start the adventure, shown on top.

Later, there are 2 more ways you can get into the adventure in the middle. You may not have taken the entries on the top, and you can start the adventure in the middle instead here.

This creates 2 outcomes, and each of those 2 outcomes has 2 outcomes themselves.



Ultimately there are 4 conclusions to this adventure, but there are many different ways that you can get into the adventure. Each of those different methods is completely recorded as to the steps that were taken, and this can change future adventures if you have or haven’t done specific things in the past.



In terms of the narrative gameplay, having adventures with several endings, but also several ways to start them gives many different ways that they can be played. Not only can different choices be made inside an adventure, but how you get to the adventure changes the context of it.

This can also add replayability if you want to see how you might have approached this differently. As more and more adventures are written, then these differences in choices and outcomes will stack to create more unique stories.



All Hail Temos is being created to provide action gameplay with branching narrative adventures, where you can choose how you want to approach things from different angles. The focus is on you creating a unique and fun adventure from characters and events in the world, as opposed to a strong central plot which everything else is revolving around.

If you would like to find out more, please Wishlist and Follow.

In a previous blog entry, I wrote about how to balance stats with skill groups, or how your stats map to groups of skills you can learn.

In this entry I will describe an overview of the initial set of skills in All Hail Temos.



Skill Groups are groups of skills that use specific stats, which can be seen in this chart, showing the stats that feed into the 5 orange colored skill groups.


Skill Groups: Combat, Influence, Craft, Experiment and Seduce.

Each skill group actually has 2 different skill sets, which comprise 2 aspects of that skill group, yielding 10 skill sets:



Next I will go over each of the skill groups, and what skills are in the skill sets. The skills themselves have techniques which can be leveled up to get different results. Techniques are what you bind to keys or buttons to invoke the skill, or some could be invoked from a menu if they are can be triggered that way.





The Combat skill group is governed by the Strength, Awareness and Agility stats and has 2 skill sets: Offense and Defense.

Offense deals with attacking skills, and defense deals with defensive skills. These skills are meant to change how the game is played. The skills are groups of techniques, which are what you have bound to keys or buttons to use to attack, defend or do other actions.

Some skills are passive, and so are always or situationally activated.

I will describe the techniques in a later blog entry, but as an example, 2-Handed weapons have a different set of techniques than 1-Handed weapons because your character will move differently and have different offensive capabilities and drawbacks with a 2H vs 1H.

This will allow different weapon types to feel very different, because by their initial technique design, they are not operating under the same premise. Each skill gets new questions and conclusions as to when they are good to use, and how you could use different techniques with them.





The Influence skill group is governed by the Social, Personality and Convincing stats, and has the 2 skill sets: Trade and Animal Training.

The Trading skill set is about doing trade deals, setting up trade routes, hiring employees, having contracts, etc. This is the economic simulation aspect of the game, and links with the narrative aspect, but is not written as a story. Instead these components are dynamic. Adventures will still come from these dynamic elements, but they are not written adventures.

The Animal Training skill set is about training and riding animals, getting them to fight for you, and fighting while riding them.





The Craft skill group is governed by the Accuracy, Wit and Endurance stats, and has the 2 skill sets: Craft and Field.

The Craft skill set is as it sounds, about crafting with different kinds of elements: smithing, cooking, sewing, making paper, constructing buildings, etc.

The Field skill set is about exploration, camping, farming and other nature related activities.





The Experiment skill group is governed by the Deduction, Flexibility and Precision stats, and has the 2 skill sets: Magic and Blessing.

The Magic skill set contains various types of magic that can be cast, actively or passively.

The Blessing skill set has to do with things that characters in Temos call “The Blessings of Temos” and have to do with your interactions with the sentient world of Temos, such as opening portals and rewinding time.





The Seduce skill group is governed by the Beauty, Grace and Charm stats, and has the 2 skill sets: Movement and Stealth.

The Movement skill set has to do with various types of moving, such as on different terrains, like land, cliffs, water, or being able to have different abilities, such as sliding, wall running or wall jumps. Or flying.

The Stealth skill set has to do with being quiet, being unseen, attacking unseen, etc.

How will this affect gameplay?

Skills are a collection of techniques, which I will cover later, and techniques are the actual things you use to do things in the game, such as jumping, swinging a sword, or how quickly you run or swim.

I have designed All Hail Temos to have a connection between all the different game elements to help with balancing, and also to help with distribution of the type of play a character will be able to perform.

Your character will be able to disable or enable different skills, or bind different techniques to your keys or buttons, and this will allow you to play differently. There should be enough techniques, that even if you want to try them all, there is a lot of different ways they can be set up, because they are also impacted by your characters stats in a very clear way. If it is a little complex…



There is a long chain between the different components of All Hail Temos, but I hope to make playing the game fairly simple in terms of interacting with the systems. The complexity in mapping everything together is done to provide reasoning for why things are as they are, and then a platform for how to tune them to make a really fun experience.

If you would like to know more or be notified when the demo and game are released, please Wishlist and Follow.

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.

If you want to learn more about All Hail Temos, please Wishlist and Follow.

In the last post I wrote about how adventures are entered into from different potential paths, and then you get different results, based on how you got into it, but I only touched on the different thing I want to do with All Hail Temos from the standard RPG’s main quest & side quests formula.

The definitions I use below are my working definitions for doing game design on this game, and not meant to be universal.

Is it wrong to not have a main quest?



The main quest of a game is typically the ending condition, you finish the game when you complete it. Maybe you can continue playing, but the game world was created around the main quest, and will often feel fairly empty when the main quest is over.

Games usually open with their main quest, so that you are given a reason to care about the world and your missions, and there are usually large stakes, often the fate of the world is at risk, unless a major problem is averted.

Also, the player is often given a special place in this story, as a Chosen One character, who was prophesized or has proven themselves to be the champion that will complete the main quest, and often the game world acknowledges that the player is this person at every opportunity.

This is good for many different reasons, as it keeps the player focused, it can help with the pacing of the story, and all the world supports this problem to keep the stakes high. With high stakes, the player can really care about the outcome, and everywhere they go, they will often see issues that are due to the main problem that must be solved, or villain that must be defeated.

Having a main villain is normally the focus, as you have someone to focus on, which is a specific person you can learn about. If the problem is more abstract such as “the moon will crash into the Earth”, there is less emotional investment. The player will not hate the moon for crashing into the earth, but they can hate a villain that has done villainous things, who they want to stop from doing even larger villainous things that threaten everyone.

This is a very good formula. A Hero’s Journey. It is proven to be entertaining again and again, as it speaks to the core of our emotional state.

But, I want to build the open world of All Hail Temos to be something different than singularly focused on this big problem, or having a central problem and few other big problems, and then many side quests.

Like the real world, there will be problems everywhere. Because there are characters everywhere, who want different things, and they are at odds with each other, and in their own struggle for survival. There is no central problem, and so no central adventures, but many adventures to be found.



If an “adventure” isn’t a main quest, is it a side quest? Not in All Hail Temos.

Side quests are typically very brief, and take the format of:

• Talking to a quest giver, they ask you to do something: “Bring me 3 wolf pelts.”
  
• You go kill 3 wolves, and bring the pelts. Or, acquire them another way, like buying, stealing or finding them.
  
• You bring the items back to the quest giver and get rewarded in money, items or XP.
  
• Maybe you get a follow up quest, or unlock information you need for a different quest.
  

Taking that apart, it can be seen as a transaction request and transaction fulfillment. You are asked to get X, you bring X and get paid Y.

But, there are more elements to it. The kind of quest tells you about the area, and maybe world history or current events. The character who asked you to go on the quest tells you about themselves and others in their area. The rewards move your progression forward, and you have accomplished something in-game.

There is both potential realism and gaming mechanics going on here as people really do need “3 wolf pelts” to do something regarding leather and fur. But, side quests can often seem like filler, and can be repetitive. So there are many ways to improve upon the standard side quest formula.

I believe it is important not to try to get rid of side quests, but to make them more contextual and optional.

Other benefits of side quests:

• They encourage you to explore local areas, or travel to distant areas. You have a reason to go do it because the quest gives you that reason. You can find other new things along the way.
  
• They allow you to switch to doing something else if you don’t feel like continuing with your last goal right now, or just finished something.
  
• You can do them fairly quickly, so you can have some fun playing even if you don’t have a long time to play this session.
  
• It gives you a reason to talk to new characters, because there will be many more opportunities for side quests than just going to shops and pursuing the main quest.
  

Of course, there are many negatives to avoid in side quests, such as too much repetition, not enough variety, with automatically generated quests often being too similar and feeling unrewarding. Also if the side quest is required for the main quest, but it doesn’t make sense, or it has harsh failure states it can make the game frustrating and potentially block finishing the game, because it’s a simple side quest, but you keep failing it, and can’t move the game forward.

So, while All Hail Temos won’t have a main quest, it will have side quests. But they will always be optional, and they will be based on the situations of the characters. I believe there is a place for this sort of a transactional short mission in an open world RPG, so I will keep them and try to put them to good use.



Now that we’ve covered how I am thinking about main and side quests, I’ll explain my vision for what an adventure brings that is different.

To start with, an adventure must have high stakes for someone. There must be risk for some of the characters involved with the quest, which is why it will not just be a list of tasks to do or transactions to make, because it is important to characters in the world.

This gives a spectrum of importance and caring. An adventure might mean that a character is able to realize their dream and start on a career they’ve been blocked from. Or succeed in finding lost treasure, that they need to save a loved one. For that character, this may be a “world ending” event if they fail, but other parts of the world may not notice the change significantly either way.

Because some characters have a large stake in this adventure, you are given a reason to also care about it, to see what happens to the characters. To help them solve their problem.

There are also adventures specifically about the player’s goals, such as the player becoming a desired profession, or getting hired by a powerful person to work for them, getting more adventures and rewards. This may create or increase rivalries that create more adventures as they try to take what you have earned, or otherwise damage you or your employer. Maybe you want your own business, and they are direct rivals or in a different circle or faction.

All of these things have their own risks and rewards, that are not typically present in side quests, but are the bread and butter of the main quest.

However, with a main quest, it is very difficult to have any branching narrative, because that really does mean the content starts getting 9 times bigger, then 81 times bigger, and is just completely unmanageable by a team of any size. So branching must be mostly decorative, so there is a feeling of different actions, without actually having to take different actions and produce more content.

With adventures, it is possible to have branching which can block some adventures, because you chose a different path, and they are mutually exclusive. Or you can still take part in that adventure, but must find it from a different direction, because of your choices, and end up getting a different kind of result because you approached the quest from a different situation.

Several paths into an adventure, many possible outcomes back on your path in.

In an open world RPG, I think this is interesting. And I don’t think completing even a very long adventure means the world suddenly feels purposeless. In fact, as you create more history, there are more possibilities of adventures that build on your previous adventures results.

This feeling and narrative mechanic is what I want to create with All Hail Temos.



It’s good to finish things. Cathartic. Freeing. You can move on, with a sense of accomplishment.

Without a main quest, how will this happen?

This is a problem in all open world RPGs, because the main quest doesn’t define the end of the ability to play. You can keep playing side quests after the main quest is completed in some games, or maybe some other large quests in the game outside the main quest. You can potentially see how your actions have changed the world. But, it’s still good to get a nice ending.

In All Hail Temos, I will accomplish this by what I’m calling “Epic Endings”, as all adventures will have endings with a conclusion, and moving characters further in their arcs, and making changes to the world due your choices and actions.

Some adventures will have an Epic Ending, which you will have to confirm before you start it, that you are now moving into a more funneled narrative experience, that will go to the completion of this longer more substantial adventure, and lead to a big ending. Then you win!

But, of course you can keep playing. And you can get more endings, and play more.

For the initial demo and EA launch I am aiming for just a single Epic Ending and many adventures, but if the game is well received I will keep writing more adventures, and expanding them until they deserve their own Epic Ending.



Stories, characters, theme and world building are part of what goes into making gameplay meaningful. In a game, there is a given set of mechanics, and there is a limit to how much the mechanics can be expanded on and changed in a meaningful way, and still remain coherent.

The meaning of the gameplay can be refreshed, if there are new characters or new stories being told, and you are learning more about the world. The gameplay becomes your ability to navigate and engage with these stories in a way beyond just listening and responding to dialogue.

This should hopefully help keep the game feeling fresh, while also adding more depth to what you already enjoy.

Of course, just having new stories doesn’t mean there shouldn’t also be adjustments to the mechanical gameplay requirements, new types of challenges, new environments, new combat patterns, but I believe there is a much larger space to keep a game fresh in story and characters than only in gameplay mechanics adjustments.

As I add content, I will aiming to improve both the narrative and gameplay variety for a free-choice-feeling role-playing experience.



I hope this illustrates some of my vision for providing a world with a lot of adventures, instead of focusing a world on a single world-ending scale problem. I think that the single-problem model is great, it can be very powerful and all the components in the game can support this problem and you resolving it: walking a hero’s path.

But, in an open world game, where you are free to pick the role you want to play, having a single major issue going on, the world-ending main quest, seems to go against the desire to explore and try to be who you want and approach things how you want.

If you want to see more about All Hail Temos, please Wishlist and Follow.