Spoooooky Post Election Update

We were unfortunately not able to make much progress on Glorious Dawn this week. There are three main devs on this project, two of which have other jobs and one of which is a full time student. We have a lot of commitments outside of Glorious Dawn, and thus we aren't always able to do a significant amount of work every week. So, for this week's update, I asked Ben to instead write about a mechanic we're excited to implement into Glorious Dawn. This what he chose:

History

Hi, everyone! Here to chime in for another part of another weekly update! This time I’ll be taking a bit of a dive into one of the features I’m most looking forward to in the future; histories.

I think a lot of games that use procedural generation say they are inspired by Dwarf Fortress and in good conscious as a procedural generation game, I must certainly say the same. I have watched some of the GDC conferences where Tarn Adams describes and demonstrates a lot of these storytelling features behind the game, generating an entire lore for the world you have been placed in. Dwarf Fortress starts by creating this story for how the world was created, making it different every time. But in my efforts in creative writing, I want to present storytelling in Glorious Dawn in a much more interactive way.

In No Man’s Sky, there was an update that added these ruins with special artifacts that could be sold for a lot of money. The artifacts could be from a handful of categories, with each category having its own item icon, and the item would be given a procedural name and some flavor text. Like many other aspects of No Man’s Sky, ultimately the variety is limited, and if you look hard enough, you will soon find the limitations of how many different names and descriptions these items can have. And this text is vague, it gives these random items a little more purpose than the minerals and trade commodities in the game but in the grand scheme of things it does not have applicable knowledge. 

Minecraft recently released a lot of information about their next big update, the Cave Update. A feature that was a much smaller component of that announcement was an introduction to this archeology system, where players could visit sites and dig up ruins and remains of ancient items. Again, like No Man’s Sky these items means little in the bigger picture, but they imply a greater sense of story, it leads to meaning, and as they discuss in the announcement, the player creates their own story.

What I mean to take away from all these inspirations is that I want to integrate storytelling in small little pieces, but in a much more meaningful way. The galaxy wasn’t born yesterday, and though the player should be free to make their own story, if they are not alone, then neither the destinies nor the pasts of the aliens around them are necessarily up to the player. Where Dwarf Fortress reveals all, I want there to be a big picture, but for that to be the final reward of the player’s discovery over time, in little hints and items, like in the latter games I mentioned. While this reward is much less material than many of the more practical tasks in the game, I hope for it to be as far as a potential objective of players to uncover the full history of an alien species.

To go into further detail, when the galaxy starts, a history will be generated, and events will play out within alien factions. They will unify or split apart, their colonies may die out, they might go to war with another species. All of these events will be components of this unlockable timeline of the species. I hope to incorporate locations and names that will recur or exist in the actual galaxy. Then the player can investigate old locations, or talk to alien NPCs, and gain information about the species’ past. Some of this information might even be classified, and you may use that knowledge accordingly in negotiations with other factions. I also hope to this end, that by giving these species and factions a past that can be found, it will help to give them even more depth, even more reality. While again this will likely have limited functional reward for the player, I hope this more centralized meaning behind what they see and uncover is an interesting component of gameplay.

I (Andrew) am also really looking forward to this feature.  I am a CS/History double major (currently taking time off thanks to COVID) so a mechanic like this is like the stars aligning for me. This also higlights an important part of our vision for Glorious Dawn. Glorious Dawn, along with more traditional 4X style mechanics, will also focus on story telling potential. Features like this history implementation will allow us to make a game where exploration and narrative building are completely viable and fulfilling ways to play. This is why we call Glorious Dawn a 'Space Opera Simulator' - it's much more than just an empire building game.

Aight, that's all for now, see you all next week!