All Hail Temos News

The power of the Scrolls-like platform is that there can be many levels of gameplay in a single game, and they fit together because of the world simulation, character customization, and narrative aspects work together to create a lot of possible experiences.

Because I’m building the game as a solo developer, I have the ability and responsibility to put all of the different experiences together into All Hail Temos. Here is how I am looking at the different kinds of experiences I want, and how I am going to introduce them into the game.



First I will just list a sequence of progressions, as to how I design for the player experience to change throughout their playtime. Many of these will start simultaneously on a new game, but other come along later and are not immediately accessible to new players.

My design stack for experience is:

1. Explore and loot everything. Touch things that move. Environment interactivity.
   
2. Talk to people. Steal things in front of people. Social interactivity.
   
3. Engage in conversations and see if you can follow up, through going on the related adventures. Creates narrative, theme and meaning.
   
4. Combat and other obstacles to engage and overcome. Action skill building and resource management.
   
5. Progression. Improve at things, and determine new abilities for personalization.
   
6. A place to call home. Getting and improving a home, for utility and personalization.
   
7. Build an empire. Improve your holdings and position in the world. Widen your base.
   
8. A legacy. Do something worth being remembered for. A key event.
   
9. Making a difference. Impact on the world. A change that lasts.
   

To start with, the world must have a basic level of interactivity. The environments can’t be things you can look at, and stand on but not touch. You need to be able to pick up things in the environment, and either use them or sell them, or learn from them, but the world has things in it that makes it worth exploring.

Things you take must have a purpose. The most basic purpose is that you can sell them, a higher purpose is that you might upgrade your gear with better or different style items, which may effect your playstyle. Other purposes include using things to help with your progression, such as leveling up.

In All Hail Temos, you can sacrifice items which destroys them, but allows you to upgrade your skills. An item that hasn’t been used before is worth less than an item you have used and “charged”, so collecting items, using them, and sacrificing them has an inherent purpose beyond just selling an item you don’t use anymore. Items can be sold for money, or sacrificed for progression.

This gives a reason to move around the world, find things and take or use them. A “Level 1” experience of a Scrolls-like game.



The world must have people and creatures in it that you can interact with. You can talk with, getting near them, or taking your weapon out causes them to react to you. If you steal something in front of them, they call for the guards or demand you return the item.

There should be a sense of your actions having a reaction from the people in the world What happens when you equip your weapon, or take off your clothes, or dress like the enemy?

What happens if you cut down a merchant in a crowded area? Or a character walks into a room where you are standing with a dead body? How do they react?

This interactivity could be considered a “Level 2” experience of a Scrolls-like game. You now have living beings reacting to you, and you can interact with them.



Once you can talk with characters, next you will want to have complete interactions with them, such as solving a problem for them, or unlocking some requirement they had before they would talk more, etc. What is the result of this completed interaction?

Will you be paid in money? Information? Will it open up more adventures?

There should be a payoff for the completed interaction. An adventure has the promise of reward, and the promise should be kept.

In All Hail Temos, I prefer there to always be a reward with more story, and often opening up more adventures. Sometimes money will be paid, if it makes sense for that kind of situation, or an important or sentimental item will be received.

This reward could be considered a “Level 3” experience of a Scrolls-like game. You are getting meaning from your interactions, and they have an arc to them: a beginning, middle and end.



The order of these “levels” is not as important as the fact that they build on each other. The next level I am designing with is combat and other obstacles to exploring, so completing missions should provide reasonable difficulty.

Action and difficulty change up the slower pacing of a Scrolls-like, making an immediate goal of killing an enemy, or solving a puzzle. Scrolls-like games generally have a longer time between making new choices than many other games, because traveling between areas takes time, and there are usually many stacked goals that require resources or completing tasks before they can be worked on.

These sorts of immediate and blocking obstacles allow the player to switch focus from future goals to an immediate problem, and back again. Swapping between different styles of play is one of the things that makes the Scrolls-like platform appealing. You can improve at the action controls, and improve your character’s progression as well.

This can be considered a “Level 4” experience. For many games, this might be level 1, the introduction to the game. Enemies are around you, and you must survive, but for a Scrolls-like game, there are many areas that are safe and don’t require combat. Also, a player can choose to play a character that doesn’t fight, and that is also viable. They can sneak, bribe or talk their way through many situations.



After combat and navigating obstacles, there is the experience of improving your character. Improving stats, skills, learning new skills, getting better gear or improving existing gear, seeing how you are more effective against creatures you fought previously.

As you progress you also personalize your character, choosing the type of gear you like to play with, and the skills you like, which also means you are choosing not to upgrade different skills, making custom outcome. Being able to plan your upgrade path in advance is a big part of RPGs.

One reason games are fun is because you can see progression happen quickly. In real life, it might take 5-10 years or effort to be good at one skill, like playing guitar, or boxing. In an RPG you can start off unskilled and a few hours or days later you have a high level of skill. Making that change happen can be a lot of fun, if it has other supporting experiences to give it meaning.

The web game Cookie Clicker showed that just seeing numbers go up and progression occur from clicking on a cookie is interesting to people. But without other progression experience levels, it’s meaning doesn’t have weight.

The goal of improving and seeing the results can be considered a “Level 5” experience. You see the results of your efforts, and can accomplish things you could not do before.



After you have started to progress your character, it would nice to have a home base. Somewhere you can store things, centralize any functions you might want, such as crafting, and personalize it so that it is to your liking.

Having your own base and improving it could be a “Level 6” experience. Now you have somewhere to hang trophies, and can tune it for your playstyle so coming home gives you many crafting or gear options.

Being able to have companions hang out in the home can also add another layer to their interactions giving an option for relaxing conversations or activities.



Now that you have a home, and are progressing your skills, what else can you do? What can you achieve? Can you start a business, hire people, improve your holdings and position in the world?

Creating a system around yourself is possible in a Scrolls-like game, and while the initial release won’t have this content just due to constraints, it has always been in the design to be able to have employees, and set up trade deals for resources, and to use these in the adventures, in the same way as going to dungeons or talking with characters to solve problems.

This is a type of economic simulation, and while All Hail Temos is not a economic strategy game, so this is not the focus, I want to have some levels of this as it can add more play styles, and it makes the higher power levels more interesting.

Often, once you are personally powerful in a Scrolls-like game, many things become less interesting, because you are already the strongest person in the room. Once economics are brought into the picture, just being good with a sword, spell, light fingers or tongue may not get you into a specific adventure, but having a trade route secure for providing wood might.

This can be considered a “Level 7” experience, building on what you have done before, and making your place in the world more connected to the resources and characters of the world.



Having an empire, business or family allows for there to be the idea that “something can be left behind after you are done”. You have created something that moves outside of your own movements, and goes on working without you being directly involved.

This is a more conceptual experience than something like looting, combat or building an empire. This is the ability to think about how the characters you are employing are benefiting from this. Can you see the world working differently because of your actions?

This can be considered a “Level 8” experience, and goes beyond what you can actually do in the game, as there are enough systems in place that you can imagine what will happen with all those things without you.



My last design experience is making a change that lasts. Will you be remembered for something? Have you made your mark?

Did you accomplish something epic that massively changed a situation?

This is similar to bestowing a legacy, but goes in a different direction. Instead of creating something that will last because you made it, this would be seeing change in the world rippling out from the actions you took.

Things that were not directly changed by you have been impacted by your actions and decisions, and now you are seeing people living in a different world.

This can be considered a “Level 9” experience, and one that I think many games build up to with their main quest, but in typical story fashion, it is best to build to a strong climax, and then end quickly.

In a Scrolls-like game, there is no reason to end once an adventure is complete, so you can see how things have changed after the adventure as well. The world and characters tell the story better than a single event can.



At present the game is not complete, and so while I am designing for these experiences, they don’t exist yet. But, if I don’t design for them, I won’t be able to build them, so I feel it’s useful to both know what all the different experiences I want to provide are, and to be able to communicate them.

If I wrote a similar game to Flappy Bird, and then I wanted to add an experience of play like “Bestow a Legacy”, how would I do that?

It is a requirement to build the foundational layers of a game, so that it is possible to have a goal such as “Bestow a Legacy”, which would entail something like creating businesses that hired people that improved their community. Or, having a family that have children that also grow up and live and act in the world.

This is not current functionality, but it is an aspiration I have to build the foundation toward. A feature like that requires a number of ingredients to create, and my purpose now is to put all those ingredients together so that it is possible to start making “Bestow a Legacy” and all the other experiences occur in a satisfying way in All Hail Temos.



I wish I could get all of this into All Hail Temos on the initial release, but it is just too big of a goal to accomplish in one-shot. So instead, I will deliver up to the beginning of “Level 6”, having a place to call home, but there won’t be full base building or decoration until a post-release update, so I can focus on the previous 5 levels more.

If you would like to find out when All Hail Temos releases or get updates, please Wishlist and Follow on Steam.

In thinking about the different systems and the ways I want players to interact with them, I have decided that health should only be curable by potions, or in specific locations. Typing this now, it basically sounds like Dark Souls flasks and bonfires, although that is not how I got to this decision.

I’ll talk a bit here about why I think this is the right decision for All Hail Temos, and how it can focus the gameplay.





To start with, let me just say that I think of Health as “the device that triggers a halt in the current play”. It is like a “Time Out” in a sport, where the teams stop playing until the timeout is over. Except in games, you often go back to a previous saved state.

In All Hail Temos, running out of health doesn’t halt your progress, it moves you into a new narrative position. If you were in a cave exploring, you get knocked out. Now you wake up in a prison, or at home, or in a makeshift camp in the cave. Whatever is going on will collect your unconscious self and move it to another place in the story, and some changes may occur in the previous story you were doing.

Maybe your companions finished the mission without you, or abandoned the mission to bring you back, or all of you were captured by an enemy. Since All Hail Temos is a narrative focused game, there will be a narrative waiting to take over. If no specific narrative exists, than one of the general ones will be used, so that the story moves forward.

A player’s health going to zero is what triggers this narrative progression.



With this understanding of health, how do you get healed? There are only 2 solutions, through specific locations, such as shrines, or taking potions. Sleeping will not heal you. Sleeping gives a well-rested buff, so it is beneficial to sleep, but it will not heal your injuries.

The 2 main factors I am excluding here are: sleep and magic.

Magic is the reason I got to this position. All Hail Temos is a magical world, where magic is infused into everything, and everyone can perform magic.

The problem with this gameplay wise, is that healing spells effectively turn healing into stamina/time pools, after completing a fight, and used in combat are either instant heals or heal over time, and mean you are just kiting to stall for time while you heal, or using bursts of stamina you didn’t need in combat to use instant healing spells.

This is not the gameplay I want for All Hail Temos, as I don’t think it’s as engaging. Instead, there is the same time penalty for drinking a potion as performing an instant spell, the animation to drink/cast must be played, but the potion is based on items you possess, and items that are the best candidates for crafting (reason: used often), and whose ingredients can be found exploring.

By allowing casting healing spells, I am reducing the incentive to explore and craft, which are two fundamentals. Also, inside of crafting, there can be different ingredients that yield different effects. Healing may happen slower to faster. Healing may be able to keep healing you after 100%, so damage received after is still being healed before it runs out.

Also potions can provide other buffs besides healing, so having a reason to already collect potions, and possibly craft and explore to get the items (or explore to buy the items). This makes it more convenient to also craft or buy and use other potions, because potions are already part of the core gameplay.



Food serves the purpose of granting buffs that last for a period of time. Eating food has a cool down period, so you can’t change these buffs immediately, but you can change them after a few minutes, which lends strategy for when to eat something. A potion can be used to clear the cool down, so you can eat quickly, but it will cost you resources and you have to keep that potion. More strategic play opportunities here.

The buffs you gain from eating will have different styles, and these styles will interact with potions differently. So you can eat food that increases the effectiveness of certain kinds of potions, which deepens the strategies of what to eat, based on what potions you have available.

This also gives a benefit to buying or crafting food, and engages with the possible ingredients there to improve the effectiveness of potions.

All of this also promotes farming as a crafting skill, to directly create the ingredients you want for food or potions.

This style of flow is how I want to tune the economy.



There are 2 main patterns to an economy:

• Tap (Faucet), Sink
  
• Tap (Faucet), Store, Sink
  

[h2]Tap, Sink[/h2]

A Tap/Sink system is one where a product is produced (Tap) and then used (Sink). You could also think of it like a number goes up, then down. Start with 0 apples, then tap or grow 10 apples, then eat 10 apples. The Tap was 10, and the Sink was 10.

This creates a type of ping-pong effect, where first you tap, then you use. There is no ability to store the item, it has a direct purpose. If a treasure chest is found, and the player takes the items, this is like a Tap/Sink.

This simple pattern is useful for simple loops, such as “loot items, and sell them”. Find potions, and drink them. We use this pattern all the time.

[h2]Tap, Store, Sink[/h2]

Tap/Store/Stink adds a middle step, which is what creates the beginning of an economy.

10 apples are tapped. Then they are stored with a merchant. Then customers come and buy apples (sink).

This more complex pattern allows for hierarchy. We don’t just get an item and do something with it, it goes somewhere else, and can feed other loops that need that item or service.



A simple merchant is not that interesting, but where it gets interesting is in the chains of these elements.

For example, we have the Tap 10 apples, Store 10 apples, Sink 10 apples, with the merchant.

But now let’s add 2 crafters. 1 makes food, and another makes potions, and they both use apples. Now the Tap/Store/Sink is supplying 2 crafters, who tap (create) food and potions, and then can store them with merchants.

And so on, there can be layers of this, as in the raw materials needed to construct a building. And as these layers build up, a type of economy comes with it, where there are incentives to craft at each level, which the player can choose to get involved with.



This design is all about improving the breadth of possible gameplay, and getting players to be using more rich systems, instead more poor systems, in terms of how they interact with other gameplay.

Being able to cast healing spells on yourself avoids all the other gameplay systems, after you have learned the skill, and the only interesting decision is use of stamina and time to cast the spells, but I think those are poor gameplay systems compared to the rich crafting, food, potion and economic system that removing healing spells encourages.



All of the systems in All Hail Temos are designed in this way. Trying to look at all the best things that have been done, and seeing how they will work brought together, or if there are ways to improve on them.

There are many types of AIs used in games. My two favorites are G.O.A.P. and Utility AI. In All Hail Temos, I use Utility AI as the primary decision maker. In this post I’ll explain why, as well as give some technical details on how I am implementing this. I will also include an improvement I made for scaling up to very large behavior sets.

There have been games with branching narratives for a long time, such as Mass Effect which gave different endings, but also different details such as which of your companions survived, and would come back in sequels.

So, it can be said that while branching narratives are not common, they have been used for a long time.

I believe All Hail Temos is doing something newer in this area, which I am calling an “Open Branching Narrative”, which is much less common and you may not have seen before.

Previous branching narratives were still a linear story, but had different endings or details, and sometimes they were cut into different chunks of linear story and branching endings, but could be played in any order. We can also say branching narratives have “side effects” such as some characters dying, and not being available later, because it changes the total experience of the story, but doesn’t change any of the potential endings.

So if a linear story is just one chunk with one end, a branching narrative would be several chunks with different endings, that can be rearranged.

Open Branching Narrative has the same elements as a branching narrative, but also can be entered in different ways, entered at different progression of the narrative chunk.





In a previous post, I wrote about the Shape of an Adventure, and showed how there can be multiple ways to end an adventure, but also multiple ways to enter an adventure, and that adventures could be entered in the beginning or middle of the adventure.



Why would you enter into the middle of an adventure? Because you had already changed the world in such a way that the beginning of that adventure had already progressed.

For example if you had an adventure about rescuing a captured person, and there are several ways of the learning about the captured person, but as you encounter them, you say “No, I don’t want to do this”, rejecting the adventure.

Then later, when you happen to find the captured person, you also find the group of people you rejected helping, and are now in the middle of that adventure, if you choose to engage with it. Later, you may hear about the end of that adventure, and how the ending changed the world, because you declined to engage with it, rejecting it through action or inaction. It’s not a timed quest, it is an adventure that progressed along because of choices you made during interactions presented to you.

You were the one who made that adventure move forward by first rejecting the adventure. Then when you found the prisoner area, the adventure progressed so that you met the people there who want to rescue them.

If you had met a different group of people initially, then different people would be trying to rescue them, or perhaps guarding them, because alternative branches of the story could be presented differently. The same adventure, but with different parties having different goals.

So, I think about it like this:

• Having different endings means it is a branching narrative.
  
• The amount of branching increases if these branching narratives stack together, so a branch in one changes the next narrative. This means there is “more branching”, compared to being “more linear”.
  
• Next, if you allow different ways to start an adventure, and those different starts bring along new context to the adventure, this is now an “open branching narrative”.
  
• If there are even more times to start (such as in the middle of the adventure), or there is stacking between other adventures, then this is “more open branching”.
  

In this way All Hail Temos strives to be a “more open branching” style of gameplay.

One important aspect of having a first-person open world RPG, like All Hail Temos, is to have a good coverage of cases for how your NPCs will react to the player, and to other NPCs (allies and enemies).

In this post I am going to go over how I’m breaking down the work to cover a good set of cases for what an NPC needs to detect, and what they might do about it after they detected it.

Some of these will be determined by skill and narrative checks, all of them will take the context of the NPC involved into question to determine the action taken.



Anything the NPC could see I will group under sight.

[h3]NPC sees the Player has their weapon drawn[/h3]
- Call guards
- Run to safety
- Attack

[h3]NPC sees the Player attack a friendly NPC[/h3]
- Call guards
- Run to safety
- Attack

[h3]NPC Sees Player Steal Item[/h3]
- Call guards
- Attack
- Dialogue: Demand goods be returned or payment

[h3]NPC finds a dropped item[/h3]
- Ask if anybody dropped it
- Take it to the tavern, lost and found
- Take it for themselves

[h3]NPC sees enemies are attacking[/h3]
- Call guards
- Run to safety
- Attack

[h3]NPC sees an enemy, but is not seen yet[/h3]
- Sneak to safety (quieter)
- Sneak to guards (quieter)
- Sneak to attack
- Attack

[h3]NPC has the player stand next to them[/h3]
- Look at them, and then away
- Give them gestures based on mood, disposition, and rank.

[h3]NPC finds an unconscious body[/h3]
- Call guards
- Run to safety
- Ready for attack

[h3]NPC sees an injured ally[/h3]
- Heal them
- Run for help healing them
- Carry them to safety or healing


One of the keys for having stealth implementations is the volume level of sounds, and what type of sounds that might be, as well as the proper amount of remembering and forgetting things so that guards are interesting, but gameable.

[h3]NPC hear a dangerous sound[/h3]
- Run to safety

- Run to guards, calling for them

[h3]NPC on Guard hears a noise[/h3]
- Check it out
- Run to safety
- Run to backup, without calling for them
- Sneak to safety (quieter)
- Sneak to get backup (quieter)


Direct interaction with the NPC.

[h3]NPC is attacked by player[/h3]
- Call guards
- Run to safety
- Attack
- Dialogue: Contextual response

[h3]Player collides with force into the NPC[/h3]
- Call guards

- Run to safety
- Attack
- Dialogue: Rebuke

[h3]NPC is hit by an object, without knowing where it came from[/h3]
- Investigate where it came from
- Call guards
- Run to safety

[h3]NPC is afflicted with a negative status effect (ex: burning)[/h3]
- Cure status effect
- Run for help
- Call for help


In terms of gameplay, I’m not going to be implementing any AI features about taste and smell initially. Smell could become a sense in a later version of hunting or something like that. I’m not sure if taste can be implemented for any useful purpose in NPC AI.




In terms of actual sensation, you might consider this proprioception, but it is also keeping track of their status and status of their equipment.

[h3]NPC is injured[/h3]
- Heal
- Run to safety
- Call for help

[h3]NPC is out of ammunition[/h3]
- Run to safety
- Look for ammunition
- Switch weapons

[h3]NPC regains consciousness, but has clothes looted[/h3]
- Put on clothes inside inventory
- Run home to get clothes
- Ask teammates for clothes

[h3]NPC regains consciousness, but has no weapons[/h3]
- Look for weapons
- Ask teammates for weapons
- Run home to get weapon


- Teamwork would not normally be a sense, but it’s easier to put it through the same workflow as the senses, as they have sensors for what is going on with their teammates as part of their decision making process.

[h3]NPC is checking something out[/h3]
- Call out to come together
- Call out to spread out

[h3]NPC found their target[/h3]
- Attack
- Call for backup


Having a good coverage of NPC behaviors should make the game more interesting, as the NPCs are configured to react to the player in a lot of different circumstances, and then will do something based on their stats and the context.



In the future I will go into more detail on the AI decision making system I’m using, and the pros and cons of how I have things set up. For now, this was an overview of how I’m thinking about AI reaction coverage.

If you’d like to know when the demo is released or find out more about All Hail Temos, please Wishlist and Follow on Steam.