Author: Glen Pawley

I’m a big turn-based strategy game player, and a lot of the ideas behind Star Dynasties came from such games, including the way the player typically interacts with the game.

You see a map of the galaxy, which you can explore to understand your situation and work out what are the most important issues that you need to address, or what the next steps are to achieve your longer-term strategy of succeeding in the game.

To interact with the game, you have access to a global list of all the actions you can take, or you can click on specific entities in the galaxy (such as a character) and see a list of the specific actions you can take that are context-specific to that character.  Your character has a set of action points that limits how many actions can be completed in one turn, and after you consume them (or when you feel there is no further good action to take) you choose to End the Turn.  I call this more typical way to play the game Strategy Mode.

Another Way to Play

As I described in the post about the game’s vision, Star Dynasties is designed to focus more on the human dramas of a feudal society in space, rather than the micromanagement of empire building or military conquest.  A consequence of this focus is that actions are similar to events in a narrative rather than task instructions, e.g. “Find a marriage partner for John” as opposed to “Move Unit X from Sol to Alpha Centauri”.

As I explored different ways to structure the UI, particularly trying to deal with early feedback that there was a steep learning curve to pick up the concepts of the game, I realized that the nature of the game’s action list allows the possibility of a seperate and complementary choose-your-own-adventure interface to playing the game, which I call Story Mode.

Instead of giving you the full set of actions to explore, the game presents you with 3 possible choices which the AI calculates as the most realistic actions that your character would take next, based on their personality traits, and current situation (with the occasional curveball thrown in).

You select one action, and take any further decisions required by the process flow of that action (e.g. marriage action asks you to choose a marriage partner).  After the action is fully resolved, you are presented with another decision between three choices.  At any time, you can elect not to take any of the actions offered, in which case this is equivalent to ending your turn.  In most cases, however, multiple actions will be attractive and you will have to decide what to focus on, knowing that you may not get the same opportunities again as the simulation changes the world state.

Furthermore, the UI proactively fetches the information that is most relevant to each decision.  For example, if you are choosing between suitors in a marriage, as you mouse over each one, the UI will bring up that character’s details, their family, and their political house.  Lastly, decisions with lots of alternatives are simplified down to the subset that the AI thinks are the best.  In the marriage suitors example, the AI will shrink the alternatives down to the 3 that it thinks are a good match.

It’s important to note that beneath the changes to the UI, it is the exact same game and world simulation.  That said, the interaction mode you choose leads to two very different experiences.

Contrasting the two Modes

In Story Mode, the game feels considerably more like a narrative in which you roleplay a character and guide their actions.  Because the game does more of the legwork in filtering actions and presenting you with the information you need to take a good decision, it’s a more streamlined experience that allows you to focus on the story that’s unfolding.  It’s also easier to pick up when you’re new to the game, or if you don’t have a lot of time to devote to it.

In Strategy Mode, your ability to trigger actions that may be wildly out of character (such as declaring war on your best friend) gives you the freedom to choose how much you want to roleplay your character, or perhaps play the game in order to conquer the galaxy or build a powerful dynasty across the generations.  It can also be more satisfying if you enjoy exploring the world and it’s detail at your own pace.

I believe that most players will be naturally drawn to one mode or another, although not necessarily the one they expect – despite my background as a strategy game player I’ve found myself thoroughly enjoying Story Mode.

There is of course a cost, and a design risk, in implementing two interaction modes instead of one.  However, I am hoping that this is outweighed by the potential reward of engaging two complementary audiences.

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Please share your feedback about  Strategy Mode / Story Mode and join in other discussions on the Star Dynasties reddit

I’ve been working on building support for the two separate game modes that Star Dynasties will have, but in trying to write a post about it I’ve realized I first need to talk about the fundamental concepts and vision of the game.

What is Star Dynasties about?

 

A game about being a king that focuses on human drama

The initial spark was the thought, after countless playthroughs of Civilization and other classic strategy games, that history (particularly ancient and medieval history) looks very different from the narratives that arise in those games.  Kings and emperors were much more dependent on social and political skills than they were on their technical and administrative skills.  And in societies where political power was primarily personal or dynastic, kingdoms rose and fell as much on the basis of human foible and drama as on the basis of economic and military strength.  Alliances were built on personal charisma and friendships, wars have been fought over a lover, thrones have been lost through social ineptitude, rebellions have started from feuds between a monarch’s rulers and their personal friends, etc.

It’s this personal dimension that makes a lot of history, fantasy, or future feudal sci-fi fascinating.  When you strip away the context of a story about a medieval or fictional monarch, the narrative is full of human experiences that we can relate to.  A king worrying about his heirs is no different from any father wanting the best for their children’s future.  Acts of personal betrayal or indiscretions that lead to the ruin of a realm or royal dynasty, may be events with much higher stakes and on a much grander scale than our lives, yet in their essence there is something that resonates deeply with our own human experience.

 

A simulation of a feudal society that generates believable narratives

There is something deeply fascinating in observing, and interacting with, a complex system.  In part, the “fun” of playing a game is the sheer thrill of working out patterns, and manipulating them to achieve certain goals.  And what can be more complex, yet universally resonant, than a human society; with all those individuals trying to live out their own lives, seeking happiness, avoiding isolation and pain, and bending the rules and culture of that society to their personal benefit and wellbeing?

Games such as Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld have proven that you can generate elaborate and convincing stories from a world simulation that reaches a certain level of complexity.  When a player experiences two events in succession, they will inevitably link them in their minds in a story, especially if the events have a logical sequence in a narrative sense.  For example, if in the first event character A does something nice for character B, and in the second event character B does something nice for character A, any human observer would say that this is a reciprocation and that the two events are linked, even if the second event was not triggered explicitly by a simulated “reciprocity rule”.  The fact that the player perceives the two events as a quid pro quo is an emergent property of the simulation, rather than something that was necessarily explicitly coded in the simulation rules.

This is also true for more complex event chains; a sequence of negative acts that happen to escalate will appear to be a planned strategy of conquest or harassment, a sequence where positive acts are unrewarded at a critical moment will appear to be a betrayal.  The critical prerequisite is to make sure that the sequences of events that occur in the simulation are not unbelievable or immersion breaking – we can then trust the human brain to do the rest.

 

A feudal frontier sci-fi setting

The choice of a science fiction setting allows for interesting design decisions or world building that would not be possible in a historical setting.  I love sci-fi because it creates what-if scenarios that couldn’t be set up in a historical context, and it allows us to strip away ancillary details to focus on the core properties of a social or political pattern.

Furthermore, it provides the freedom to solve some knotty game design or implementation problems by altering a detail in the setting.  For example, Star Dynasties has a population control mechanic that serves both to limit runaway population growth in the simulation over time, and provides an interesting political tool by which you can reward your favourites.

At the same time, it’s important to note that the requirement to model a realistic feudal system that persists through multiple generations does create some hard constraints.  Marriages and kinship relationships are the key enablers of legitimate power transfer and alliances, the economy must be land-locked (or planet-locked) and relatively disconnected to maintain the long-term stratification of the society, technological growth must be relatively stagnant, etc.

 

Similarity to existing games

Star Dynasties was inspired originally by a love of empire management strategy games such as Civilization, Total War, Knights of Honor, etc.

In choosing to focus on the human drama, I have drawn inspiration from roleplaying simulation games such as The Sims, King of Dragon Pass, and choose your own adventure-style games such as Nation States and Reigns.  In understanding how complexity creates emergent narratives, games like Dwarf Fortress and RimWorld have been instructive.

The game that shares the most concepts and similarities with Star Dynasties is Crusader Kings.  To the maximum extent possible (I am a solo dev with some help), my intention is to build a game that has an even greater emphasis on, and mechanistic understanding of, stories of human drama.  For example, the simulation in Star Dynasties understands the notions of empathy, simplistic morality, social obligations, grudges and favours; and uses that to build logically consistent sequences of events.  I would also like the player experience to be focused on navigating a branching narrative that rewards strategic thinking, with less administrative micromanagement tasks such as troop movement.

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Please share your feedback about Game Vision / Concepts and join in other discussions on the Star Dynasties reddit

I’ve been out of the country visiting my folks so progress since the last post has been slow.  I’ve built a few more basic UI screens for the game, but I thought I would talk about something relatively done and dusted – portrait generation.  Characters are the central focus of Star Dynasties, and bringing them to life visually is an important design goal.  The game generates over a thousand characters for a game, so portraits also have to be generated dynamically.

 

Portraits are assembled from a library of sprites designed to stitch together seamlessly.  Each component of the portrait is drawn on a seperate layer in a pre-determined order to create a human face.  Some of these components are handled as multiple sprites.  For example, the hair component is split into two seperate sprites; one is drawn beneath the face, the other is drawn on top of the face.  Most components are also re-colored to further differentiate characters from each other; allowing for a dynamic range of eye colors, skin colors, dress colors, etc.

One complexity stems from the fact that through the game you will play through the lifetime of many characters.  Thus characters age, and their facial features must age appropriately.  Some features (such as eyes) change significantly as we age, so we need a version of each different type of eye sprite for each age group that we are representing in the game.  Some other features age more slowly, so we can get away with less granular modifications.  In addition, hair color changes as we age, so hair color is lightened for older characters.

There are other less immediately noticeable aspects of portrait generation that I hope players will appreciate as they become familiar with the game.

• Facial feature sprites for male / female faces are drawn in matched pairs.  This allows me to have children that inherit features from both mother and father, and leads to entire families that share facial similarities.
• Dress color is picked so that it advertises the affiliation of the character to their house.  Characters of a house whose flag is blue will be wearing blue and yellow, blue and green, different shades of blue, etc.  Seeing all the characters of a house in one list will show a clear chromatic theme.

 

This is a good time to give a shout out to the awesome artist for Star Dynasties, Ven Locklear.  Check out his portfolio.

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Please share your feedback on Portrait Generation and join in other discussions on the Star Dynasties reddit