Devlog #1 - The start of a new adventure! (v0.0.1)

Hi everyone!

I'm Calandiel and this is the first public version of my new project, Gleba.

It's an experimental fantasy world simulation engine that will eventually (hopefully) turn into something akin to an open world first person RPG with 4x and grand strategy elements, but right now it's best used as a worldbuilding aid that let's you generate realistic planets from principles of plate tectonics, climate science, ecology, and more!

If you're familiar with my previous work on Songs of the Eons, you probably know what to expect (but this time better, faster, and not nearly as crash prone). For those who are new to such world generators, I'll write another devlog going into details of how a pile of code and maths ends up creating pretty maps of virtual worlds, but in this post I'll focus on the larger vision and project goals, as a reference for the future.

So, what is Gleba all about, why did I make this project in the first place and how can a first person open world RPG have "4x and grand strategy elements"?

Let's tackle these one by one. 

Gleba's goal is to make as accurate of a fantasy world simulation as is feasible on end user devices, while keeping the requirements reasonable (ideally it'd be possible to run it on something like a Google Pixel phone!), framerates high, and the gameplay loop approachable by an average person. This goes for everything from using plate tectonics for world generation, to having a 1:1 scale Earth sized planet as the game world, to simulating lives of individual NPCs the player talks to.

If you're a game designer, the above paragraph may ring a lot of alarm bells. Games don't need to be realistic and we often intentionally make them unrealistic to foster engaging experiences. *Why* make things more difficult for myself and, say, care about the impact of seasonal wind patterns on the local price of bread, the logistics of marching armies, or movement of trade ships in a first person RPG?

To be completely honest, the main reason is simply that I find such interactions *extremely* cool ^-^

If you don't, that's perfectly understandable, I realize that this project may end up being *very* niche (even though I hope to make the experience smooth enough that its "realism" won't stop people from enjoying it!), but that's a risk I'm willing to take and also the reason why Gleba will stay free to play until way later into development.

Fundamentally, Gleba exists as a result of my long standing (if minor!) dissatisfaction with games I greatly enjoy. Games like Dwarf Fortress, Skyrim, Gothic 2, Crusader Kings 2, Daggerfall, and Victoria 2. Games that are well received, that I personally played for thousands of hours (and will likely play for thousands more!). But also games that I found unable to scratch a very specific itch.

To explain what this itch is, I'll use an example, the quest "Season Unending" from Skyrim. If you're not familiar with it, long story short is that you broker a temporary truce between two factions in a civil war, so that you, the mythic hero, can save the world unimpeded by petty politics. During that quest you see important political figures gather in a neutral ground (a sort of remote monastery managed by an ancient order) and then help them decide on the terms of the truce by choosing from a list of options (primarily options on who gets what land).

Many people dislike this quest. And to be perfectly frank, it wasn't very complex, engaging, or replayable. But it stood out to me because it was a change in the tone and players position in the world. Here I was, sitting with the most important people in this part of the world, no longer an upstart mercenary, but a major player in my own right, on my first foray into the world of politics. Or so I thought! In reality, this is the *only* such foray in the game, and the end results of this quest are frankly quite inconsequential (and completely undone by another quest about winning the civil war for one of the sides).

This isn't too surprising. Every "consequence" in a traditional RPG has to be explicitly written down by a developer. These often interact with each other, leading to combinatorial explosion in the amount of code that needs to be written, encouraging linear storytelling or largely inconsequential side quests. This, of course, is completely fine. It's how we've been doing computer RPGs for decades. It works. But it's also *slightly* disappointing. Imagine if we *could* have an open world RPG where this isn't a problem. Where you can do peace negotiations between any two fighting factions instead of just two. Where those negotiations have lasting effects on the lives of the locals. Maybe striking peace between them will save lives that would otherwise be lost? Maybe it'll foster trade and fill the roads with merchants? Maybe it'll lead to armies being disbanded and ex-soldiers and mercenaries turning into banditry (a historically reoccurring problem ^-^).

The dissatisfaction I mentioned above is being unable to do things (that was otherwise allowed before) because they weren't specifically scripted for a given person. It's the dissatisfaction of content running out because we've already seen all the quests pertaining to being a mage, or a bard. It's the dissatisfaction of being told no by the game when the internal logic of the game world suggests you should be able to take some action (like when you're forbidden to kill an important NPC in a quest because they need to say their line of content later).

Simulation opens the door for emergent gameplay patterns and reactivity to the player (that's difficult to find in most projects, maybe besides games like Dwarf Fortress and Kenshi). If we had a simulated environment that can adapt to what the player does on the fly, we could have "Season Unending" not between two specific factions, but also between, say, two warring orc clans, or maybe even two feuding families of mead brewers.

Those games, to an extent, already exist. They just aren't first person RPGs. Crusader Kings 2 and the Sims largely apply the same rules to the player as to the NPCs and can react reasonably well when you go "off script".  Gleba will try to bring this "interactivity" of simulated game worlds from the realm of grand strategy games and life sims into the realm of first person RPGs.

I'm not the first person to try such things. Arguably, adventure mode of Dwarf Fortress, Caves of Qud, pre-release versions of TES IV: Oblivion, and a few other projects already tried doing something like this. I would say they all failed, at least *at this specific thing* (which is not a blemish on their overall quality at all, go play them, they're all amazing games ^-^).

I have a conjecture as to why (and Gleba is an attempt to test this conjecture). Namely, I think generating engaging dialogues, characters, and narratives (an important part of modern RPGs) is extremely difficult without a lot of contextual information. Information that games rarely include, whether they use procedural generation or not. Things like cultural norms, what type of cutlery is placed on tables, what types of jobs individual people do, how they spend their time, what opinions they have on the local priests, or what type of meals they like the most.  Things that all RPGs implicitly include in their script and worldbuilding. 

It's *cool* when a dark elf in Morrowind calls you a fetcher, an n'wah, or an outlander. It's (in my opinion ^-^) not nearly as cool to hear characters of different cultures, races, and backgrounds in Dwarf Fortress both say "This is terrifying" as a reply to twenty different things. The former tells you something about the culture of the world you're in, the latter only emphasizes it's own procedural nature, and (in my opinion ^-^) not in a good way.

But to generate those cool pieces of dialogue, you need context in which to base them. If you know that people A fought a large, bloody war with people B, you can detect it and adjust the reply given. If you know that a specific profession has some stereotype in another culture, you can have NPCs comment on it. Normal RPG writers do this by hand, but a game would need either to be provided this context or generate it. Gleba will opt for the latter.

This is the main reason for doing the type of "deep simulation" Gleba does. It matters where all the mountains are, where bays and deserts are, where winds blow, and so on, because all of these things will later serve as context for dialogues and NPC routines. We need to know that a certain road is difficult to take or that a specific river is unnavigable, and we also need to know *why*. Without that knowledge, we'd need to use the type of flat, repetitive writing that plagues most games with entirely procedurally generated dialogues.

All of this, of course, is still just conjecture. Gleba right now isn't a first person RPG, it's a worldbuilding tool. We'll see if I'm right or not in a few months, maybe a tad longer than that.

All that being said, let's talk about what I mean by "4x and grand strategy" in "open world first person RPG with 4x and grand strategy".
This is the last part of the core design and what I hope will close the gameplay loop. The long story short, is that I find the gameplay loop of most RPGs to end "too early". As an example, I'll use the guilds from Morrowind (but it's something present in many other RPGs). In Morrowind, when you join a guild, you climb its ranks from a novice, to a master, and eventually you become the guild leader.

Narratively, this is where you should start giving people orders of your own, start engaging with other guilds and factions, bribe local officials, and try to expand your guilds operations. None of this of course happens because it'd require putting the player in a proactive role (instead of the more typical reactive role they assume in computer RPGs, where the main way content is delivered is through prescripted quests) and proactive roles are just begging to cause the kind of combinatorial explosions in the amount of writing needed we discussed above.

In my opinion, and I do stress *opinion*, this causes dissonance in the writing. I finally climbed to the top and the story of the guild just... ends. There's games that do it better or worse but I'm not currently aware of any that really nail it. The closest would be something like Mount & Blade, but it's not *quite* the same.

This is why Gleba will incorporate elements of genres like 4x and grand strategy games. Things like rising armies and marching them to battle. Conducting diplomacy. Collecting taxes. Building cathedrals, or converting heathens. The logical "next step" after you become the strongest hero in the land, so that the game doesn't just suddenly end.


Anyhow, this was a very long devlog! I'll do my best to keep them shorter next time but I felt this one in particular had to contain more information, as a reference to point to in the future. If you're still reading, I hope you find the ideas behind Gleba at least a tiny bit intriguing. Check out the downloads page and our community forums!

Until next time,

Cal