adrix89
Cipher
- Google Doc form: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1spks8Yi3e4_uw1ZyM-Kvff5bbxfh-4m3cd1fXu7D0G4/edit?usp=sharing
- Note: This Document isn't going to be about All Sandbox Games, although there will be similarities and common elements and mechanics. It isn't going to be about Sandbox MMORPGs or Survival games, it isn't going to focus on base building and colony management sims like Rimworld/Dwarf Fortress or creative/engineering games like Minecraft or Factorio.
This Post will focus on single player procedural fantasy world simulation or sci-fi space universe simulation. It is also isn't about scripted open world games.
- This is just some of my thoughts on Sandbox RPG design. No this is not about how you should exactly make a Sandbox RPG and implement 100% all of the features. Just things to keep in mind.
As marketing terms for players that might work but for developers that is not how you make a sandbox game, and some developers truly believe pursuing those things is all you how you get good sandbox games, and then be surprised why they fail. Which leads us to our first topic.
Progression and Player Goals in a Sandbox game.
When a player starts a game he is not actually aimless and without a goal. His goal is progression through one of the progression paths you make available.
Wealth they can gain through trade, business, mercenary work or stealing and banditry.
Character progression through training or leveling their characters.
Gear through trading, crafting, combat or exploration.
There is also progression through base management, factions, city development, research, player controlled military or economic empires.
The problem arises when that progression Stops. Now if there is at least one additional progression path available they can at least engage with that, but sometimes it's Game Over. This is prevalent with Wealth as you can usually get so much more money than you can use.
While your world might be infinite, your progression isn't. So it's important how you properly pace things. The progression paths should connect with each other, even if the player does not control anything directly it can be left to the AI Factions develop things on behalf of the player as the player works with that faction.
Wealth can be invested into businesses and crafting, unlocking new gear, with gear being able to explore new areas and combat challenges that furthers character progression and unlocks new resources that loops back into new investments. Cities and societies can grow and develop themselves through business, trade and resources unlocking new research and technologies. It's best to mix things around and not do the same thing over and over. Substantial progress should be gated behind substantial challenge and achievement.
The most successful example of this kind of Sandbox progression is X3 Terran Conflict/Albion Prelude. Mostly based on Wealth you go from upgrading your ship through trade and mercenary work, to having a small fleet and traders, to building your own stations, to building and equipping your own fleet and contending with other factions and through conquest become your own empire.
In comparison in Starsector you can do missions or trade to get credits that you can invest in your fleet. But eventually you will make enough money and once you get your reputation high enough with a faction to buy ships progression kinda stops. At least with mods you can be your own faction and have recurring costs. The game is also developing in the direction of players having their own station that might be able to research technology and build more unique ships and equipment. So that is a new avenue of progression and sinks for wealth in the form of investments.
Capturing unique ships can also be a path of progression, especially if the encounters are challenging and require a lot of preparation and investment.
Challenge is another problem with progression systems. If the game becomes trivial at level 50 then even if your progression system continues to level 100 with new gear,skills and abilities it isn't going to matter. The easiest way to fix things is for NPCs and the world to progress themselves and have the same abilities and opportunities as the player. This is not necessarily level scaling, big fishes can swim in the world from the start and as the player grows and tackles some of the big fishes a new generation of NPCs can grow and fill in the void.
Unlike Starsector progression in Star Trader:Frontiers isn't so lucky. You only control one ship and need to buy and upgrade a ship or a set of ships(for various roles). At a certain point money doesn't matter and there is no fleet or empire you have to manage that requires major investments. You do not have any incentive to do any trades or missions for money. Only contract and faction reputation and story missions matter later.
Which leads us to Player Goals and Challenges.
As you can see while progression can get you far it's better for the player to have a proper goal to work towards with the appropriate challenge behind it.
The nature of Challenges can be Passive, acting as obstacles and threshold that players can tackle at their own pace, this is great to give the player an opportunity to experiment,learn and get used to the systems.
Active Challenges where you have an Active Opponent behind it that you engage and are in direct competition with. This does not necessarily stop at just combat or strategy, business and economic competition can be just as cutthroat like in the game "Offworld Trading Company", as well as politics and diplomacy.
Challenge is also what makes you invest your resources that you got from progression.
Attrition is a lovely concept that eats up resources steadily while not making things too difficult and severe for you. If the player has too much stuff accumulated then it is ripe for a active challenge, especially if it's the gate that necessitates overcoming to advance towards the next level of progression. Player can decide when they are ready to tackle a big challenge but once in conflict and active it's do or die.
One thing to keep in mind when designing the challenges is to have paths of retreat, options to surrender, backup plans and redundancies. With higher risks and biggers stakes its good to have some extra options to work with.
For Goals you have things like empire building and faction conquest can turn it into Strategy 4X kind of game where you conquer the world. Base management and defense can turn it into a kind of Rimworld and Tower Defense kind of game. The classic defeat the Last Boss can also work.
Those goals however are not trivial and don't just happen, you need to develop the appropriate gameplay,mechanics and structure to make it work. You are essentially making a game within a game with a true gameplay core built around that goal. Although in this case you can have multiple goals that the player can choose from, kinda like Victory Conditions in a Civilization game.
Of special note is "Emergent Gameplay" IS NOT a Goal. While it is true that if a player has enough tools and engages with enough systems and mechanics they can create their own goals with how to play the game. This is not guaranteed that the player will do that.
Emergence works whenever the stars aligns just right, in other words it is completely random and not something to be counted on, especially as a meaningful goal for the player.
Emergent Gameplay should be treated as Things Along the Journey not the Destination which is The Goal.
In Kenshi things can lead to a situation to be in conflict with Slavers which can lead to you leading a revolution against Slavers. But the progression, base building and faction interactions is something you would do naturally even outside of that context. There is certainly opportunity for those things to arise but for how things are going to work that is already clearly defined.
To have a Goal means ultimately to Win the Game. To Win the Game means ultimately that the game will End.
Now things don't have to be that strict as you can still have an option to play, but there is a clear delimitation between the time before and after Winning, it is the game telling you to start again.
If you are a Procedural Sandbox Game with a lot of emergent systems that can lead to a lot of possibilities starting over isn't that much of a problem. In fact like Roguelikes, Hardcore Ironman Permadeath might even be an option.
The 4X genre also had a lot of experimentation with winning objectives so it might not be about just conquering everything. A lot of interesting things can be done here.
On the other hand if you do not want to Win the Game. If you want an Endless World things get a little bit more complicated.
The Endless Game
To some extent if you are not going to Win then the only option left is to Lose. Like Dwarf Fortress puts it "Losing is Fun!".
Things have to decay, progress has to be lost, empires must fall! Things have to be reset so that you can still have a challenge.
If you had a wide spanning empire that has conquered everything and has unlocked everything things would not be very interesting now would it?
This is the case for the player as it is for the AI. Ultimately the world needs to tend towards a default state, even as things can change the progress needs to be reset so as for new opportunities to arise.
What this does give you is an actual History towards your world. This is not just some Lore or procedurally generated history. But actually history you lived in and shaped.
The legendary sword you find in a ruin might be the sword you built and was once in your production screen that you dismissed as not being that good, that ancient ruin might have once been your utopian capital.
How you Lose can be done in a couple of ways:
- Mounting pressure. The higher you progress and develop things the riskier and more difficult it is to manage things and the more opportunity for things to go horribly wrong. This is how Dwarf Fortress works.
- Scaling external threats. Similar to mounting pressure you can have more powerful threats like monsters or bandits invade your territory or bigger factions begin to target you.
- Cataclysmic Events. This work more like a hard reset button when things go too out of hand. Rebellions that destabilize a wide spanning Empire. Dragons that torch all major cities. Reapers come. Rocks Fall Everybody Dies.
- Failed Challenges. The most interesting method to lose, while other methods are more artificial it is the challenges you fail as you progress and compete with your peers that could be the most meaningful. If you get in into a fight with a faction and lose, don't expect to be spared. Although how much you lose and how much you keep can depend on your preparation and paths of retreat. But there are stakes in a bet and rewards from taking risks, it wouldn't be a risk if you had nothing to lose. This is the most natural,fair and interesting way to lose with stories of revenge and drama.
Once you have a working Endless World there is a lot of opportunity to see how time shapes things.
No character lives forever, a new generation will be born. Some things can be inherited, some paths can end. New factions are born and rise to the challenge.
It does not necessarily even have to be about having a dynasty. You can build an empire in a game and then switch sides to another character fighting against an empire you built. In Crusader Kings you can play as any faction from any saved game.
It is like this that the world can becomes more like a playground. Although the structure of progression and systems remain defined. Progression remains the same but maybe you can add some variety, new opportunities and paths. What was obsolete as you progressed before might become relevant in this scenario as some resources become unavailable.
An interesting idea is when you main character dies, you can simulate the passage of time for some amount of years before you control the next character. The heir to your estate might have been captured or is in hiding that you have to rescue with your new character.
The Evil Sorcerer that you were fighting in the epic last battle that you lost might have corrupted your love interest in your party to the dark side, the results of your failure means he has built his own evil empire while the rest of your surviving party are now hopeless drunkards in bars marred by guilt.
The passage of time can make your game feel fresh as you don't know absolutely everything about the world on how things have turned out, while retaining the history you lived in and its impact and consequence of your actions on the world.
The Unknown and Discovery
A Game World that you can know perfectly with perfect information does not capture your imagination and makes the world look artificial. You might think this is just a simple thing, but the psychological impact is massive.
In a Linear Game it is all about exploring an Unknown space and turning it into Known space, even if it is linear it is powerful enough to engage players even outside progression. This should give you an idea how powerful the Unknown is.
In current Open World games you are given far too much information to the point that it trivializes its content and turns it into a pointless task grind.
It's not that you cannot have convenience features to the things that you know, there is plenty of unknown to be had.
The Fog of Knowledge should shroud the whole world at the start and keep what you know about the world to a minimum, information should be collected from scratch through action, exploration and detective work.
The Fog of Knowledge should also act as protection for the player, the challenges they have to contend with should be around the local area and the peripheral of the unknown. Local powers, local competition and only when the player grows and progresses does the bigger opponents come into play.
The Controlled Known Space is the space that you have Colonized for the purpose of working with it, this is your territory. You have to know it so that you can effectively utilize it. Progression that has ways to increase this space is an interesting proposition. Furthermore the way to colonize space can get pretty complex, it's not just about a home base or control of a city or kingdom. The tendrils of colonized space can reach far with complex logistics and investments.
Enemy Space is the space your opponents knowledge and influence they control, and that you have to carefully scrutinize to be successful. It is the challenge behind gathering information. It is also what they like you have networked, colonized and organized as their own. However defeating them can have many forms, its not just kill and destroy, it can also mean what you control as vassalage, or cripple and control key places so that they are not a threat.
An essential point about Enemy Space is that it things can change and you should never be sure exactly what is going on in it as they will have free agency in their space just like you do in your own controlled space.
Neutral Space is known space that is not under the control of your or an enemy faction. Neutral space is usually poorly utilize in games with factions. By not being in control it presents an opportunity of skirmishing between factions with smaller stakes and competing for resources in that zone as well as having neutral trade hubs. It also facilitates complex schemes and logistics not possible in spaces of either faction control.
The Unknown is where new opportunities to change the status quo reside as well as great dangers the best are kept unawakened. Tread carefully, but tread you must, as progression dictates.
Representation of the World
While it's great to imagine what goes bump in the night in our world. As developers we must be more pragmatic and realistic on how all that shit works in code,systems and mechanics.
For a novel writer the advice is "You write what you know", this is a tiny little bit of a problem for games.
You see a writer as well as all humans have what I like to call a "Representation of the World" a model of our view of the world and how it works, a simulation of the world inside our brains.
The problem is games don't have that. Everything has to be explicitly coded system by system, mechanic by mechanic until we get a working simulation.
In other games you can have scripted scenes where a writer can add bits and pieces to the world to give substance to it. But that is limited content and goes against the concept of a Dynamic Sandbox game.
Scripting is a crutch, and if we want to reach greater heights we must do the more through work.
Another note about the difference between literary novel and a simulated world. In a novel every line, every object, every dialog must have a reason to exist for the overall narrative. In our case things are generated based on the logic and systems of the world as a way to represent the world. How we give it meaning is by giving them function and making them choices/gameplay for the purpose overcoming challenges.
In other words the equivalent of "chekhov's gun" for a game "is a series of interesting decisions".
Chaos Theory
A note about the thing called "emergence". The most ideal world simulation we can create is one where you have small bits of variation and interactions between systems, this interactions should not be random but should snowball into a great chaos.
Like the wings of the butterfly causing a storm, there should be a causal chain between an event and this small bits.
While this cannot be seen or understood by the player in individual cases, appearing random, it will give rise to certain patterns within the chaos that cannot be achieved through pure randomness. It will also facilitate for more subtle emergent situations.
NPC and Player Agency
The most fundamental part of Sandbox design is what can you do. What are your actions?
Fortunately we have a lot of games to draw upon, what can a player do in a game we can generalize to the AI also.
The concept of Player and NPC action parity is essential. Whatever the player can do the NPC can do also.
You can start from simple basics and even with that you can get interesting results:
Kill, hunt monsters, collect loot, level up/progress, trade, steal, use items, manage inventory, craft items, build structures, gather/mine resources, run and manage guilds/businesses/factions.
Of interesting note in a MMO where there are other players around you can obtain pretty similar results if we give NPCs a similar level of agency. This is even more interesting in Sandbox MMOs where you have things like trading and economy. What if EVE was controlled by AI NPCs?
Unlike a MMO however the AI can be controlled to act as a developer desires. What a player will not do an AI can be made to do. What is boring to the player is not a problem for AI. AI also do not have the limitations of players like synchronization between time zones and limited play time.
That means quests that involve multiple competing parties are not a problem as you don't have to synchronize the players. Complex Quests that will take a lot of time can also be doable since time runs only when the player is present and can go at their own pace.
Of Pawns, Knights, Chessmasters and God. AI Levels of Agency.
To make a truly dynamic world you need to give agency to AI. But with our current computational resources it remains difficult to simulate everything. Even if we were to do it, the world would be too chaotic and hard for the player to comprehend it. So I propose to break things down based on a hierarchy of AI agency.
There would be three levels of AI NPCs:
- Pawns. A passive AI that follows a routine and does not deviate from it on their own. They can be controlled and commanded by higher level AI to do a task but they will fall back on their routine after or the new task becomes the new routine. They have simple desires, like wealth, power, lust, status, job/skill mastery that can be attracted by offers from higher level AI or player based on their personality traits and manipulated to do their bidding.
They can be of any social status, from peasants to kings and princes. The only limit is their competence as they will not adapt to the situation and changes. But important ones will usually be controlled by higher level agents. This also does not mean they are powerless or not dangerous.
Since they always follow the routine the results can easily be abstracted out freeing up the simulation process, if that routine is disturbed that would already be handled by the high level AI that disturbances comes from.
As challenges they are more like obstacles that can be engaged at the player's own pace.
- Knights. This is a limited number of agent AI that are active and can act freely in the world where their actions would be fully simulated. They have their own web of relationships and can fully command and manipulate Pawn level AIs. They are usually part of a bigger faction through which they act as the hands and feet. Although independents do exist on their own and act individually with their personal goals.
The loyalty to the faction can be ever shifting as they can develop and change with the great scheming web of games being about the ability to turn them to your side as they have pretty complex personality and desires.
They also have great power, first by drawing upon the resources from the network of relationships they control. Second by having high level of personal progression and actively seeking ways to get more. And third by situating themselves in key roles and maintaining their secrecy.
As challenges they are very dangerous as they will actively attack you and work to undermine you however they can until they achieve their goals.
However an active agent isn't necessarily hostile to the player, it depends on your reputation and conflicts you have with that agent and faction. Some might even be friendly if the player and agent goals align and can work together. It is in fact absolutely essential to convince them to your side and have your own allies.
- Chessmasters. Are the AI Players of the Big Game that are in control of the big factions in the world. If your game has a Win condition they will play to win and compete with each other and with You if you get in on The Game.
They will use Knights and Pawns as their pieces on the chessboard and will use You the same way for their goals and they will have enough power to back up their threats.
No piece is not replaceable and can't be sacrifice, whether it is a Pawn, a Knight or You.
Chessmaster characters are generated having a bigger ideology, a vision of the world that defines them. It's what defines a Knight's allegiance and loyalty to that vision and what needs to be target in order for them to turn.
Chessmasters in a sense are more simple then the more complex personality of Knights, but its that purity that makes them dangerous and makes playing The Game interesting.
Through the mirror of Chessmasters the Player can define himself in the world, what role he should take and what he is fighting for and how.
A Chessmaster does not necessarily have to work through a hierarchy or political authority. It can just as well be a secret society controlling things in the background and through the use of their agents.
- God. This has the role of an AI director that is not a character. It can freely manipulate the world to make things interesting and to ensure things don't go out of hand. It makes sure the challenges are manageable and so as to not overwhelm the player and might even help the player in some cases. It also keeps the Big Game in a stalemate until the player is at the appropriate stage of progress to participate.
Roleplay has alway been the goal of Tabletop RPGs, the transition to the digital medium while it was attempted was not that successful.
Roleplay if you boil things down is improv acting with a GM acting as a judge to resolve things and keep the story moving.
Computer RPGs have tried to give you a story, choices and branched in that story. But everything has to be scripted and everything is much more limited. Even when the games have complex character creation from Tabletop games most of the skills and stats are wasted as you do not have the freedom and flexibility to utilize them.
Even in Sandbox simulation where you do have the freedom with in the agency given it still rings hollow due to the nature of the format. Games are much more about winning, goals and progression then it is about roleplay that goes against playing efficiently even if you can technically play that role. There is not much reaction and acknowledgement from the world from playing that role so that is another reason.
Instead of the focus to get players to get into a role that might or might not happen I think the great opportunity is to focus on the complete opposite direction.
That is to simulate NPCs to play roles. A NPCs is something that a developer can fully control and program to do whatever you want no matter how boring,mundane and inefficient it would be for the player.
Once you have a framework for agency like the above discussed AI levels. Meaning what actions a character can do how it is governed by the system to generate consequence. Then the personality and the "thinking" is itself trivial.
You simply do not need that much, most AIs are a bunch of If Else statements.
The best way to create dynamic NPCs is through Traits.
What Traits give is an easy way to composing things through multiple bits and pieces.
The more bits and pieces you have the more unique they can become and synergize and combine with each other to get the much sought after emergence.
Traits can also be very flexible, it can be simple Flags in If statements all over the code, it can be used Tags for filters and search and used for list set operations like unions. It can be used with callback functions for arbitrary code.
In comparison the usual philosophy is to have a bar with two poles, like love-hate, introvert-extrovert, courageous-coward that you put into a fancy algorithm.
The problem with this is there isn't much difference between 10%, 20%, 30% to define the character.
Even worse is you do not have the combinations and synergy between traits that gives rise to emergence since algorithms are much more defined in their results given.
If you need it you can just add a severity level to the Trait so you can have Suicidal, Heroic, Courageous, Careful, Coward or Traumatized. Furthermore you can go more in depth like being Suicidal or Traumatized might have a reason that can be explored and overcome with further character development. Like the Traumatized trait could be overcome and become Heroic.
Relationships with other NPCs can be done through a judgement function.
NPCs not only could have likes and dislikes on other character traits but more importantly they can judge the behaviour and actions in events they know with a wholistic totality where all the traits and previous knowledge applies to form a complex opinion and emotional reaction.
In other words a combination of traits gives rise to complex behaviour, and that complex behaviour is judged through a function that takes a combination of traits as arguments.
Even with this simple behaviour and judgement system it can fully utilize an ever expanding number of character personality traits to give rise to emergence and depth creating some possible pretty interesting and unique characters as the traits work synergistically with each other.
To me with this Character Personalities are pretty much a solved problem, there is already enough complexity and depth.
Levels of Information, Authority, Rumors and Lies
Information around an Event, which is a series of actions that forms a plan from a Active AI Agent that pursues a certain goal. That Event can have certain levels of Information, that can represent the accuracy and authority on what has happened in that event.
Participants and Witnesses are the Characters that directly witnessed the event and have a high degree of authority and trust on what happened in the event. Of course Participants can have their conflict of interest and witnesses can be suppressed or silenced.
An Investigator may try to do some detective work, gathering evidence and cross examining the witness testimony.
Informed Parties can be told the supposed accurate version of the Event by the Participants or Investigator. If that Informed Party has governmental authority they can make an Official Announcement on what happened and write it in the history books. Of course that is not necessarily what truly happened, only what suits the agenda of those with that authority and what has been compromised to be presented to the public.
Rumors from Witnesses and other character that know can slowly propagate and mutate into the form of rumors.
Participants can lie and manipulate the details in the Event and "convince" the witnesses to their side, evidence can be doctored and another party can be framed with the Investigator getting the wrong picture or be bribed directly.
This lies could be a breach of trust and betrayal that is judged by character's personality.
Diplomacy,Negotiations and Contracts.
Every single NPC has some form of desire.
Using a NPC's desire, personality judgement function, relationship and past events/history we can create a System of Values for a NPC.
This is an actual quantified value that can represent the current "favor" that relationship has and the value fulfilling a desire has.
With that value anything the character has and any action the character can do be traded for by the Player or AI Agents.
The character personality,skills and role/class can define the cost that action or item can have.
For example getting a Blacksmith to betray and kill a character can have a huge cost that needs to be traded in equivalent value to that character.
While an Assassin can do the same just for a couple of coins. Of course tasking the Assassin to make a sword would be a completely different value. They would need to invest time and money to learn that skill, might be easier to just steal a sword. But with enough value matched they could be commanded to do that.
With enough value Characters can even become life and death slaves.
And how you put Character's under your influence and control is exactly through this system.
Of course your rivals can do the same and give better offers. Characters have some amount of judgment and knowledge on what AI Agents can offer. Relationships can also be a factor with the same thing having a different threshold of Value for different characters. They might begrudgingly work together with a character they hate if that trade is high enough.
Trade, Economy and Progression/Power
A good Trade and Economic system is based on three things: Specialty Resources, Monopolies and Progression.
Specialty Resources are exclusive and rare resources you have in your territory that other areas do not have.
The basics of trade is the more rare and distant a resource is the more valuable it is and the higher the profit.
Trade is all about creating efficient routes to match all those locations to their distant locations that don't have them.
Although Trade that becomes a routine can become boring, you need new factors that appear that you have to deal with and adapt to. Your competition can also be an active challenge for you.
Usually the depth of a trade game resides in the mechanics of the demand consumption.
Monopolies are the control of this Rare Resources and Products becoming the only acces point for them. Undermining your rivals and dealing with other owners to manipulate the market in your favor.
Monopolies then become true bargaining power that you can use in deals and alliances.
Of course that Power also needs appropriate Military Power in order to be maintained. Overarching might lead to some wonderful surprises like an army that is parked next to you.
Progression is the advancement of technology and civilization.
Where new products becomes available that you can keep exclusively. Options to substitute specialty resources to more readily available ones in products. City and population development increase give rise to higher and more advanced demands and rarer luxuries.
That city cultural and civilization advancement might be directly tied to progression. The more advanced the more upkeep in the form of resources and product demands.
In some cases only the Capital and Port City Trade Hub might be capable to handle that resource demand to maintain that level of advancement/progression.
This could affect the progression of other regions as resources for progression become sucked by the Capital.
The Kingdom and its King might need to be careful against the discontentment of other feudal nobles and make deals and scheme to play nobels against each other to maintain the Resource Flow and consequently his Economical and Military Power Advantage that level of advancement provides.
The Desire for Progression and Advancement is omnipresent for all, from the simplest NPC to the most technologically advanced civilization.
Crafting, production chains and equipment progression and artifacts are directly tied to the above concepts. Character's desires and values can similarly mapped to that economical progression.
Character Power and Progression
Like with the Economic Resources. Character's progression with skills and knowledge can be considered another form of Resource that ties to monopoly and progression .
After all it is Characters that use their skills in crafting to create the products.
Without the Character's with the necessary skills and knowledge even if you have to resources you cannot make it.
Characters are also necessary to train a new generation of talents that is necessary to progress further into higher levels of that skill.
Characters also need to be carefully controlled if you want to maintain a monopoly.
If that character can be convinced to work for you,train other for you, or hired to use their skill in a project you could get all the benefit without any of the slow investment to get to that point.
If you can make a deal and hire someone to create the most advanced building, structures, facilities and tools that might not be available at your level of advancement and technology the that can be just as good. Although it could be sabotaged and destroyed or they can decay and the tools eventually consumed.
Likewise if a Key Character can be neutralized, all that skill and knowledge may be lost forever. What spreads throughout the world and what is lost forever by keeping things too secret can be an interesting dynamic.
The recipes, techniques and technology that Characters can unlock can depend on their skill, knowledge attainment and experience they have in that domain, their facilities and tools, the reverse engineering of products as well as the cultural and civilizational development of an area.
New ideas and prototypes can be generated through experimentation and research or through mutation when crafting a product.
Technology does not need to be linear. Special techniques, item catalysis and gear can act as support in opening multiple paths towards recipes with similar results and effects.
Empire and Strategy
To some extent all Sandbox games are about Factions that compete with each other at a Strategic Level.
4X and Grand Strategy games already demonstrate what kind of mechanics,systems and gameplay is available to this level.
A couple of things to note for our case is that the Player does no necessarily need to have control at this level. With enough relationship and manipulation of Key Characters in position of Political Power. As well as deals using Economic Power. The player can influence the situation indirectly, of course that would not be perfect control as Characters would still have their own Agency and be impeded by enemy Rivals.
The Strategic Level is best suited to be controlled exclusively by AI's for a couple of reasons:
- First the AI playing with each other will mitigate the weakness of the AI being exploited by a good player, having a level of indirection means the AI can still play within the confines of that level.
- Second the Balance of Power should be kept relatively even. If the player was in control he could easily destabilize the system. The balance exists so that a level of challenge and opportunity is maintained. Although if the game has an End Goal the player should eventually win against an appropriate level of challenge.
- Third we can make use this for the purpose of drama that the player experiences. If the player was in direct control this kind of manipulations of the rules and setup would be unfair to the player from his understanding of the rules. Having a level of indirection means there is one step distance from that player judgment.
I do not have much ideas on this topic and I am very interested in ideas and concepts for this.
The Desire and System of Values based Negotiations System is robust enough in principle. But it is also very Transactional and "Business like". Manipulations based on that are also possible.
Scheming, Plots and Deals with characters and factions against other rival characters and factions. Schemes based on Information and Rumors System are also possible.
But Casual Relationships, Dramatic Scenes, Emotional Impact and making relationships meaningful to the player is still unknown to me on how to achieve it. Although the concepts so fat hopefully becomes a few steps towards that direction.
I do not think authored scripted events are good for this kind Sandbox game, it goes against the nature of being a Dynamic game and impede it.
I also do not think procedural dialog/text is the solution. That kind of system tends to be a black hole that sucks up time,brainpower and motivation for a project that is already complicated enough without it.
Although a constrained scripting language for the purpose building responses, in other words an evolution of the keyword system could be interesting to explore.
Something like some sort of Mini-Games are probably the right kind of avenue to explore I think.
Having a level of abstraction can be beneficial and we could try some of the mechanics and concepts from board games for this.
Something like The Sims that is a bit more advanced and in depth would be perfect. But I don't yet know how to add this more advanced concepts to it.
End
That's what I have so far. Like I said before this is just a collection of ideas for a Procedural Sandbox RPG with the ideal to be a fully functional Fantasy World that you can explore and experience just like you would want to experience a world in a fantasy novel.
I think this is the power of the medium that goes beyond just "Games" and into a domain more like the movie "The Matrix".
If you have any comments and questions feel free to ask.
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