Concept prototype

So I've been DMing a dungeons and dragons campaign as of late and it got me thinking, that even in a master piece of a game like Baldur's Gate 3 I don't get a similar free-form adventure as I get when playing a TTRPG, which these games are based of. I reminisced a bit about older games felt "freer" which I believe came from their technical limitations of the time. Take Morrowind as an example with how it did dialogues with NPCs. You picked a topic and the NPC would spit out some text, allowing me as the player to project whatever personality they wanted onto their character. Dwarf Fortress Adventure mode allows a wide range of possibilities as it only needs to spit out some text to accomplish the player feedback of their actions.

So I figured starting with limiting myself with a strained interface as text input and text output I'd allow myself to facilitate a similar experience. With the modern reality that people are using LLM chat clients more and more like chatgpt. But also that I can add a bit more modern flair to the game to aid the player, while remaining true to the limitation, I think I can make something that's fun to engage with.

The goal for the concept prototype is to have a traditional text parser based game with rooms, where the player has to investigate their current location to figure out how to get through a door to a second room, where a fight will be initiated.

Work done

So far this month I've worked 18h and 28m which is just shy of my monthly goal of spending 20h a month. There's still a few evenings left of the month so I might still fulfill that. In that time I've completed 50 tickets on my kanban board, each a task of varying size.

In august I worked on the structure for Rooms, Entities within them and being able to build descriptions from that composition. For September I focused on the user input through a text parser.

Text Input & Statement Interpreter

So for allowing the player to interact with the room I had a choice to make. I could go with the old way of a simple verb noun to let the player manipulate things in the room. But I can never do things easy so I went deep into natural language processing and tried to figure out what was the least amount of work I could do but still allow for some normal sounding statements that the game could process and understand.

So I went with a cheat of that we are very similar to the old traditional verb & noun but with allowing the player to filter more to be exact with what they want. It can be described as: verb <adjectives> direct_object <preposition_list>. This allows the player to write something like Take red apple from the table by the south wall in a room with several apples to pinpoint exactly which one they want with very natural looking English.

I will probably work more on the Statement Interpreter later to make it understand more concepts, because right now we are taking a bunch of shortcuts. For instance the Interpreter will understand a sentence like give coin to wizard but will not understand give wizard a coin, which means the same thing as the first statement. But for our purposes right now, this is good enough.

Room Entity Composition

I also did some improvements and rework of how room entities are composed. An entity is built up by components and tags. A component is something in the entity that needs mutable per-instance data, such as a container like a chest which needs to keep a list of items that are currently stored in it, and be able to remove them from that list. A tag is like a component but is not something that can change. As an example for this that we use right now is the InspectableTag which only holds a description for the entity and will not change.

Ideas for the Future

None of this is final but it is where I've been thinking on what will be the core-loop and meta-loop of the game. I've been starting to look at it as the player are acting as a party of inquisitors in charge of eradicating aberrations from a region.

Core Loop

The players will arrive at a settlement, they will talk with NPCs, maybe trade etc before they delve into the den where the aberrations live. The den could be an old manor, a cave system, a church complex, ruins, whatever abandoned scenery we can imagine. There the players will be going room by room trying to find the source of the infestation and cleanse the location. There will be monsters to fight and clues to gather. All of this has been procedurally generated, including the aberrations composition, what they are weak against and what is needed to cleanse them. I want it to be a bit of a detective work for the player.

The player finding a note like "They fear The Rose" and having to figure out what that could be and where they can find it.

Meta Loop

For each campaign/party that the player starts, we generate a region, this is the region that their party of inquisitors are in charge of, these represent an isolated area in a vast empire that they serve. The region will have a bunch of points of interest that will have aberrations and there will be a secret Big Bad Evil Guy that they need to find through collecting clues at these points of interests. The region will only be "saved" when the BBEG is defeated and will be "lost" if the party fail in this task.

At start the player will be faced with a few rumors allowing them to pick some of these points of interests to enter to try and find aberrations and cleanse them. Clearing one of these locations will give further rumors to act on.

So much for trying to keep things simple but I want to keep track of the statistics of how many regions are saved and lost as it could be fun to post on Discord. But it shouldn't be too much work.

What's Next

For October I am planning on working on Actions, the verbs of the input statement by the player. Being able to inspect and manipulate the game world. Hopefully also write all the content needed for my test scenario for the prototype. The descriptive text I have for myself on that task is

We'll have a hidden key leading to a locked chest/cabinet which will have a crowbar in it. The crowbar is to be used to open the door. Behind the door will be an aberration that will initiate a fight.

I most likely won't be able to finish also the combat system in a months time but hopefully have time to start on it. I am still working out the details for it but what I do know is I will not be doing a free-roam grid like how DnD combat usually works, but will try and gamify the "arena of your mind" to keep things simple.

And that's it for September! Thank you for reading and I'll see you in a months time!