Showing posts with label nostrum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nostrum. Show all posts

Friday, July 25, 2014

Nostrum design problems and world as interface


I am currently trying to prototype some sort of social simulation in Nostrum, and I am currently facing three main design problems:

formal definitions (within my system) for emotional responses to information
While showing the game at GaymerX, I had to disconnect the social sim portion because, internally, the NPCs kept getting upset at each other for talking about each other to someone else -- and they would be so upset that they would just go inert. What is the difference between discussing someone else vs. talking behind their back, and does my system have the context to make that distinction? Information currently does not have a "positive" or "negative" valence, it is just information that might be true or false. Should I remove this from the system entirely if I can't make it intelligible? At the very least, I want a system that will collapse in an interesting way.

Thursday, June 26, 2014

Nostrum and "strategic retreat" into conversation analysis

So I was reading some of the Versu design papers and suddenly it hit me: they're doing a lot of the procedural narrative stuff that I want to do, and yet, their magnitude of systems complexity and authoring was still way too much for what I needed (or could feasibly engineer) for Nostrum.

I am now issuing a "strategic retreat" to all departments and agencies here at Radiator: we're going to leave "strong" procedural narrative alone, and pursue a different model for NPC simulation.

For this new approach, I'm digging up another old idea I had: to think of conversation as the exchange of information. For this, I'm leaning heavily on "conversation analysis" theory from linguistics...

Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Second time's the charm; procedural NPC dialogue in Nostrum


Last time I tried some type of "procedural narrative" thing, my hubris got the better of me -- naming the system after one of the most famous and influential writers of all-time was, perhaps, just a little arrogant.

Despite my attempt to scope it properly, that system suffered greatly from trying to do too much stuff... It was so much stuff that it was difficult for me to write anything with it. So with the procedurally generated NPCs in Nostrum, I'm developing a much simpler system which will hopefully work better, to solve a smaller problem...

The basis is still the same: Elan Ruskin's GDC 2012 presentation on AI-driven dynamic dialogue in Left 4 Dead 2.

Wednesday, September 25, 2013

Nostrum update: now with a map!

I added a map. This was the first version.


Then I tweaked the colors a bit. And animated it so it flaps in the wind based on how fast you're flying.


Then I added a border from an old atlas, and a map trail that indicates where you've been...


... But now I'm probably going to remove the trail, since I want the player to orient themselves with the compass and local landmarks.

Thursday, September 19, 2013

Nostrum and clouds.


Hey! I made "Nostrum," a short flight sim game for the Oculus Rift VR Jam thing, and I placed 2nd. I won a bunch of money and a t-shirt, so I'm pretty happy with that.

For the first week of the three week jam, I was actually prototyping a lion simulator game. Then I watched Porco Rosso and thought, "wow, that'd be a fantastic game." So I stashed away all that previous work and started something new.

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Further notes on developing games for virtual reality.


I'm pretty sure no one remembers that I promised to release Radiator: Polaris at the end of August 2013 (shhh), but here's what happened -- I was asked to join the Oculus VR Jam, so instead I've spent the last 3 weeks working mainly on Nostrum, a Porco Rosso inspired arcade flight sim / narrative-y roguelike. I think I'm going to work on it for another week or so before going back to Polaris.

A lot of my interest stems from VR requiring developers to re-consider a lot of basic ways of doing things in video games.