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[mapacible]

I'll take you up on that offer for sure! I expect to have a demo ready by end of March.

Our game's focus is as a story-generator for NPCs similar to Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld so it's important to see how other people interact with it and what types of stories they can find.

Though the player's goal is to wipe out all factions, he can also simply just have fun by playing with people's lives. We hide the relationships between characters from the player, so the player must use inference to figure this part out and then must use his minion's abilities to manipulate the characters in a limited way.

Here, one of the key abilities of the player is to share Intel with NPCs. Once the player has seen an event (ex: Character A made out with Character B), he can convert this witnessed event into an Intel that he can share only once to an NPC (the intel is consumed upon use). What happens when he shares the intel depends on the relationship of the character to those in the event. Let's say Character A is actually the lover of Character C, and you shared that intel to Character C about Character A making out with Character B. Then Character C will get angry and may take action against Character A or Character B.

[Gornova]

I really like the idea to share intel, but require some form of "prediction" from player on how an npc can react to an intel, did you consider this too ?

[mapacible]

When we share intel, it transfers the data related to the event onto the NPC. Now, we cannot exactly predict what the NPC would do with this information and when as it's up to the NPC's AI and situation. What we did is to make the Share Intel action look like a conversation between the NPC and the Diplomat (player's minion). When the Diplomat shares an Intel, the NPC would react with standard statements based on the relevance of the info to him/her.

Example responses:

"How is this relevant to me?" - the characters in the Intel has zero connection with the NPC
"Thanks for letting me know. I should do something about this!" - at least one of the characters in the Intel is in trouble and has a relationship with the NPC
"I don't believe this! How could [Name] do this to me?" - one of the characters is a lover of the NPC and did something romantic with another character

What do you think of this implementation? Good enough?

[Gornova]

yep fine!
It's from player perspective I think the issue.
For example:
- npc A hate B, but B does not care too much about A
- player share intel to npc A

how player is able to "predict" what will be the outcome for this action? If this is possible, I mean with a quick simulation, player can see for example that share that intel to npc A has as outcome that A try to kill B (with a %, not in absolute), or on the opposite side, B will start to follow A (%), something like that.

Without this kind of "prediction" is really hard for players to make moves and understand where and when do this kind of manipulations, right ?

[mapacible]

Definitely a valid concern and I would have to do some further testing to check if we need to address that. My thinking at the moment though is that it is an important part of the game's process for the player to figure out relationships in the world (we hide these from the player and they have to figure it out by checking who lives together, who interacts with who, what they do with each other, etc) and so directly related to that, is also anticipating how a piece of information will affect an NPC's reaction to the world.

But maybe I'm wrong and it would feel too opaque for players. Once we have the demo ready, I'd love to know how your experience with this current version pans out and I'd like to have other Dwarf Fortress players share their impressions. We can adjust accordingly!

[Gornova]

Sure!

[mapacible]

Here's a screenshot of the interior maps. This is a Cave landmark:

[mapacible]

Our steam page is up! https://store.steampowered.com/app/909320/Worlds_Bane/

Please wishlist us!

[crazyabe]

PTW.

[mapacible]

Hello everyone! We are looking for a few early testers. It's an informal test to check out whether the NPC AIs behave believably. Please send me a pm if you are interested.