Exanima

[Asid]

Coffee Diary - August 2024
Mon, 5 August 2024



Hey Exanimates,

Last month we went into some detail about the role system and what our main objectives for it are at this time. While there have been many big improvements and additions, the role system is the key feature of the next update and what supports the story going forward.

Having figured out many of the core role mechanics, we've been now focusing more on low level behaviour stuff, which while perhaps not as impressive in scope, is what you'll notice most during gameplay. This is basically where roles are used to control actions and activities or react to common events, rather than modelling relationships and long term goals.

This includes a lot of mechanics for NPCs to become aware of nearby events and things in the environment, as well as interact with them. NPCs should comment on things that are happening dynamically, notice objects and other things around them and use them. One important practical part of this is finding equipment, being able to determine whether it's useful to them or a party member and call it out or just use it. There's quite a lot of nuance to something like this, as we don't want NPCs to just be instantly aware of everything, objects that are hidden or just hard to spot should be more difficult for them to notice. We also don't want them to be constantly calling out every minor upgrade or greedily taking all the best items for themselves.

In terms of combat there's also going to be a fair bit of role involvement. We want NPCs to engage in different behaviours based on what's happening and also accept commands or requests. This could include helping allies in danger, perhaps gaining courage and rallying for someone they care about, requesting help and things like just commenting on notable combat events. In general we're also trying to make roles an important part of engagement, to build on the more animalistic emotion driven and sometimes selfish behaviour of current NPCs.

These aren't the only things we're working towards, we have quite a few advanced behaviours planned, but this is what we're focusing on right now and the requirements are shared. To support a lot of new behaviours and dynamic roles we're putting a lot of new AI functionality to engage in different actions and properly prioritise them, many mechanics for understanding circumstance, events and objects, put them in context and describe them in dialogue.

Roles aside, we've also been working on the late game "save system", or rather some ways to prevent losing all progress. This is however just one optional aspect of a quite large set of features involving various new mechanics. Supporting these properly and in a way that is future compatible has requirements that mean changing how some things work in a fundamental way.

Our design is such that any seemingly insignificant object or thing can potentially carry a lot of information, is fully persistent and can be understood and remembered by NPCs. Dynamic events and behaviours require and create a lot of dependencies with a scope that's not always predictable. This introduces a lot of difficulties with authoring and maintaining content, particularly in supporting a distributed workflow, or mods and player made content. All these interactions need to work both within that body of content and the game world they belong to.

We have a partial solution to this already, but there's still some very difficult problems that are becoming more relevant as we look into new features and expanding beyond Exanima's current scope. We've known we'd have to tackle these problems for a long time, and it didn't look easy, but now we've finally designed a solution. This will allow us and others to create large chunks of content in a completely independent way while supporting all these features. This content can then be seamlessly introduced into the game without requiring changes to shared resources or even existing saved games. It's a bit difficult to explain exactly how important this is, but it certainly is.

Best,

Bare Mettle
 

[Asid]

Coffee Diary - September 2024
Mon, 2 September 2024




Hey Exanimates,

In our last diary we talked about some of our immediate goals for AI and the role system, this is a series of things that provide NPCs with better awareness, more behaviours and interactions. Since then we've been gradually implementing and testing these features, and as we did this we ran into some complex dialogue issues. Right now we're mostly focusing on improving the dialogue system to handle these more complex and frequent interactions.

The dialogue system is designed to be very dynamic. Rather than well known scripted events and dedicated dialogue modes and moments, communication is something that can happen naturally at any time and during any other activity. There's a lot of factors contributing to when and if certain dialogue is used, not just simple triggers. You can even talk during combat or anything else, and so might NPCs, but only if it's appropriate, with context, urgency, relations and emotional states and all sorts affecting these things. There can even be multiple dialogues running at once between different people, and people can join and leave or interject into conversations. On top of all this, all role interactions are remembered by characters, the status and details of their relationship are being constantly updated by multiple things at once and stored permanently.

All this is to make characters feel alive and intelligent with lots of potential for cool emergent behaviour. That last part is particularly important to us, it shouldn't feel like scripted moments, but things that actually happen organically.

One of the first problems we had to tackle is NPCs dealing with multiple dialogues at once, knowing what to prioritise, when to wait before saying something else and so on. Synchronising the various relation updates from multiple dialogues, activities and events was also a back end issue we had to solve and optimise. Because the system is so open and broad in scope, we need to try to account for every hypothetical scenario, even if rare. We're working on other features too, like NPCs repeating urgent requests and becoming annoyed or concerned if they don't receive a reply, with a reaction that is appropriate to the specific context. In general we've made a bit of a shift in functionality, with less focus on raw scripting of roles and dialogue and more on AI handling common behaviours so that we can support a better emergent style while also removing some of the burden of scripting complex role interactions.

As we tackle and explore these things and develop features we see the potential for many more applications. They are sometimes quite niche, and currently we don't often have the right content to feature a lot of them, but it opens many doors for content to come, giving us more tools to create interesting gameplay elements and situations.


Beyond progress on roles and dialogue, we're working on new content, and a few other things besides. The new area is a pretty big departure from previous content and we've been making many changes and additions to support it. Right now we're also focusing on our vegetation art pipeline to produce many high quality and efficient assets. We're also continuing to improve many assets throughout the game, and we're completely overhauling many older overworld / arena items, improving them dramatically.

Best,

Bare Mettle

[Asid]

Coffee Diary - October 2024
Mon, October 7, 2024



Hey Exanimates,

While we're making good progress with new content and a few other things besides, development is still very much focused on AI and the role system. We've been particularly focused on searching and looting behaviour, as it uses many different things that have other applications, the building blocks for being aware of and interacting with the world, and it's a really good case for highly complex role interactions. Importantly, looting is also a really big part of the core gameplay loop, which gives NPCs plenty to do outside of combat and makes them more active participants. We also recognise that searching every container and inspecting every item really becomes one of the more tedious aspects of the game long term.

Companions that can be genuinely useful in searching and looting alleviates a lot of the work from the player and adds a lot of value. If NPCs are also able to equip themselves they become much more self-sufficient and capable, for companions it means it saves the player a lot of micromanaging their equipment and inventories, particularly in the early game where upgrades are frequent and temporary. Another benefit is that companions can help players navigate and learn the complex equipment system, by pointing out useful items and upgrades that the player may have missed or not recognised. There's lots of good practical reasons to flesh out these behaviours, but we think it's also one of the most important steps to making the NPCs feel alive and intelligent, not just as companions, but in general.

Probably reading that you've raised your eyebrows a few times and wondered how it could work and what sort of problems it might cause. Indeed we've been navigating the many difficulties and complexities of all this and there's a lot, more than those that immediately stand out. We've been adding many features and improving a lot of core AI behaviour and interaction to support this and make it feel right.

Companions need to be able to move around somewhat independently now, and promptly understand when it's time to leave to not get separated. They need to see and recognise objects around them, understand what items might be useful, or interesting to the player, even what combinations of items might be useful if worn together, or make matching outfits. NPCs should not easily spot hidden or hard to see objects, remember what they already searched, know when something was discarded, be able to discard items that are no longer useful, not spam the player with insignificant finds and so on. They must also be able to name or describe any object in dialogue, with correct grammar and ideally varied and contextually appropriate dialogue. There's lots of details to consider to make this behaviour seem believable and natural.

We want NPCs to behave much like a human player, show awareness and interact with the world at a very high level. A lot of this comes from dynamic and narrative roles that can be played by anyone, and a lot comes from complex natural behaviour like this. With more AI and role features in place we can keep expanding the AI's capabilities. Our goal is to make them lifelike and create an emergent narrative that feels like it's actually happening, not predefined or scripted. This is often in direct conflict with conventional player-centric design, and we do need to find a delicate balance and make some concessions. It's a difficult and now familiar line we tread, but it's something we really miss in games and we want it.

To completely change the topic, we've also finished our new round of overworld and arena items. We've added new items and plan to better distribute some things across ranks, and we've completely overhauled some older items that weren't up to our current standards, which has been a point of feedback from the community. We've also made some notable improvements to the most prominent procedural materials like metal, leather and cloth. For the time being we are still limiting how many brand new items we add, as we are slowly working towards an overhaul of our characters that will improve the fidelity of all character assets and greatly improve our workflow for them, as well as introduce new features like dynamic cloth to them. When that happens we will add a large number of new clothing items in particular, but that's still some way off.



That's all for now. We are always working on a few other things and longer term goals, but we can't cover everything we're doing in our dev diaries. AI and roles are the current focus and a great big complex thing with many facets, we've been laying a lot of foundations which is always a process riddled with difficult problems decisions, but now we're seeing the results and soon we should be able to start testing and polishing the main features.

Best,

Bare Mettle

[Asid]

Coffee Diary - November 2024
Mon, 4 November 2024



Hey Exanimates,

Previously we mentioned how we'd been reworking many items, and how in future we want to add many new ones, particularly clothing, and make various improvements along the way. Adding more clothing as we expand on our world and content is important, quality improvements are also nice, but really more of a by-product of other things. The main motivation for "an overhaul of our characters" is that we desperately need to massively streamline and improve our workflow. We already made some important advancements here with our tools, but clothing is especially problematic because there's a huge number of different items of varying shapes that can be worn in any combination. Every combination needs to change the shape of clothing, and so something like a shirt needs to come in thousands of shapes. These are dynamically assembled, but even so we need as many as 500 3D models in very specific configurations. For one shirt. This part is all done by hand, and it can take weeks of confusing and tedious work, testing and adjusting. There are many things that can go wrong and they are slow and difficult to fix. Despite our efforts, we still have various issues like clipping and holes and sometimes have to give armours unflattering shapes in order to make them fit.

This proposed overhaul is something we've been talking about internally for a long time as "human 2.0". It's been kind of a distant dream, something we don't dare tackle until after a 1.0 release. We couldn't even consider such an overhaul unless we could solve the fundamental problem of how much work it takes to make just one item. Meanwhile, this is costing our artists lots of time that should be better spent elsewhere, for results that are still inadequate. Just recently, while trying to figure out how to make some items work, Madoc decided he'd had enough and put the role system temporarily aside to figure out what could be done. Even if we're not doing some big overhaul yet, solving some fundamental issues and streamlining the workflow was just too important.

Many curses and a few keyboards later, we have a new system and tools with lots of automation and a simplified workflow that turn weeks of work for one item into just a few hours. Quality character assets still take time of course, but the tedious, confusing and problem ridden part of it is basically gone. It solves a lot of problems, it's a huge relief to us and brings many benefits already. The way bodies and clothes deform for animation is better, things are far less prone to errors and issues like clipping, artists can focus on the real work, it's intuitive, it can be iterated on quickly, there's a lot of implicit future compatibility in assets and even loading times are improved. To really reap all the benefits we will eventually need to do our big "human 2.0" rework of many assets, but now we've already solved the biggest and most critical problems to support it.

This was a temporary shift in priorities, but a very important step that was well worth the time investment. We won't be adding lots of brand new clothes or generally upgrading characters just yet, but we're ready for it now. In the meantime you can expect some very nice visual upgrades to some of the most commonly seen items in the game. Updating these foundational items is how we solve our armour etc. fitting problems. We've also made more nice improvements to materials and randomisation. Here's some examples of some clothing type items that we're already reworked using the new system:



Despite this detour, we have made progress on AI and role features. Our approach continues to be to focus on the most difficult problems first and solve them well before we do many things with what we have. This will be the focus of initial testing, to properly identify what players notice most and any issues, so we can finalise the systems that will support more roles and interactions. There's practical elements here, and of course expanding AI capabilities has many gameplay implications, but we're mainly focused on immersion and lifelike NPCs. We really don't want any of this to feel like gamey features.

This means we're quite detail orientated, the little things such as how characters move and look around and how they describe what they found, that don't fundamentally change the functionality, but makes all the difference in our eyes. Dialogue in particular, with common and repetitive speech, has been quite difficult. We want to make it varied, flow from previous remarks and responses, while accommodating diverse grammar required by dynamic elements. This creates a large scope problem that needed new approaches. It does need care and effort, or we could break immersion rather than contribute to it. We might not immediately land where we'd like to be, there's always room for more nuance and variation, but the important thing is that we're building it in the right way and not cutting corners early.

It's been a very busy month, working on many different things besides and tying various loose ends. From here we should be able to focus on getting the role functionality ready for a test release, while we continue work on the next major content release.

Best,
Bare Mettle