Sui Generis Post-funding Update #19

There’s a new Kickstarter post-funding update for Sui Generis, this time giving us some sorely needed hard details on the “dynamic story” aspect of the title, which has so far been kept under wraps. Here’s a sampling that, in my opinion, gives the idea:

A lord who suffers from heart disease has a dearly loved daughter as only heir. A neighbouring lord has ambitions to marry one of his sons to the first lord’s daughter, but they are not on good terms and the union is repeatedly refused. The second lord hires some thugs to kidnap the daughter. He also has the local apothecary’s stores destroyed so that he can no longer produce a rare heart medicine. The first lord will fall ill and the second lord’s son will carry out a daring rescue of the daughter, thus securing his place at her side.

Immediately we see various opportunities for you to be hired or otherwise employed, if you are a likely candidate. You might be asked to kidnap the daughter, to search for and rescue her, to find more of the rare herb, to urgently deliver new medicine to the stricken lord. But just because you were hired this doesn’t mean you’ll do what you were asked. You might simply report the kidnapping plot, you might demand your own ransom for the daughter, you might destroy the herb rather than retrieve it.

While you might indeed not be tasked with any such thing, you may still witness these events as they transpire and alter the conditions that guide them. As an example, you could steal the thugs’ weapons in their sleep, thereby delaying the ambush. Perhaps later you’ll witness them looking for new weapons.

So, we have a well-structured story that remains completely dynamic. There are only a few possible outcomes but many ways to arrive at them. Most of this should be possible just because that’s how things work. There is no need for actual involvement in or knowledge of the plotline. Besides the fundamental outcomes of all this there are many smaller ones, many factors that will guide and affect future events. In becoming involved you might gain rewards, allies or enemies, you might shift the balance of power and ideally set greater events in motion.

One of the core concepts is that NPCs never do things just because we designers said they should. Everything they say and do is the result of a decision. They have goals, ambitions, emotions and various traits that guide everything they do. To create behaviours and plotlines we first have to create motivations. NPCs will always have choices and they will make one because the conditions are right. A great many parameters are involved in making any of these decisions and altering any of them can change the course of events. This doesn’t just apply to specific plotlines, we want every apparently insignificant NPC action and behaviour to be driven by decisions and always to react to changing conditions.

Can we really do all this? As we’ve said before, we have to try. It is difficult, we ourselves have to occasionally remind ourselves why it might be possible. We are committed to it and actively working towards it. To us this is the only way worth doing it. It’s the same attitude we have with everything. We’re doing combat using physics because that’s kind of how it works. It might be far from perfect but it’s a lot better and infinitely less boring than comparing a couple of numbers.

There are also quite a few screenshots and details on environments, non-human races and the inventory systems in the full update, so I recommend you to check it out!

The ambitions of Bare Mettle Entertainment are almost unrestrained, and to be honest I’d caution against assuming they’ll be able to achieve everything they set themselves out to do. That said, it’s really hard for me to dislike their ambition itself, especially considering a fully dynamic, reactive world of that type would be extremely appreciated by me and, I suspect, our readers. I disagree though that physics-based combat is necessarily more entertaining than stats-based, but I digress.