Category: Game Design

Our last blog piece happened to mention Obsidian Mines. Obsidian Mines are unusual and I’ll get to explaining them in a minute. But first, let’s start with something easy, Silverthorn.

So, lets imagine that after harvesting is in the game, you log on to find a herb patch next to your settlement. (There will be herb patches all over the map. Lets assume you are lucky enough to have one on your doorstep.) You send scouts out to see what it is, and they report that it’s Silverthorn.

You build a Herbalist’s building, and recruit appropriate gatherer units. You send the units to the patch, and if they aren’t interrupted by someone else’s units, after a while they come back with the herbs for you. In terms of game mechanics, that’s pretty simple. It’s like sending out caravans to gather from the map, except you’re sending Herbalists, not Caravans.

But what do you do with your Silverthorn? This is not a herb you will need every day. It isn’t used for weapon making, and you probably only want to use one piece every couple of months, at least in times of peace. There are 80-90 patches of Silverthorn on the map, each potentially yielding two dozen pieces of Silverthorn herb each day. So what do you do?

You could share the patch with all your neighbours, and let anyone harvest when they wish.

Or you could put an army on the patch, reserving your spot and farming more of the herb every day: you might want to sell the herb on the market, or you might become your Alliance’s supplier. 80-90 patches sounds like a lot, but it’s still less than one patch per active Alliance in the game, and every Alliance is likely to want a supply.

And of course, you could destroy it, or an enemy could. It’s a herb patch – a growing thing – so if you just take some, it will grow back, but if you take every last piece of the herb then you have destroyed the patch.

The game mechanics are fairly simple, much like caravans. Where it gets complicated is that we hope to have nearly 30 herbs on the map by the end of the year, around half in the first gathering release.

So lots of people will have access to herbs that others need, and everyone will benefit from herbs that don’t happen to grow on their doorstep. The complexity is not in the mechanics. The complexity is in the questions it raises for the players. What do you do with a rare herb? Share it, sell it, give it away? What do you do if you would get an advantage from having a herb that isn’t available near you? Beg, buy, steal, or go without?

And in addition, where animals are slain patches of Hides, including rare animals parts, will be left behind (as in this image). And there are also minerals. Which brings us back to Obsidian.

Obsidian is a mineral, not a herb, so can’t be eradicated by over-farming. Its deposits are fixed on the map. There are not many deposits, and they are all in a fairly narrow geographical area. Its use is in weapon making: if you build a specialist Armourer or Weaponsmith (new buildings introduced with the harvesting release) and dedicate them solely to making, say, Obsidian Blades (swords) or Obsidian Platemail, then you could consume hudreds of pieces of Obsidian each day, which would require an Obsidian mine to be operated on an industrial scale. All of this makes it much more complicated than Silverthorn.

When gathering goes live, with the gatherer buildings and units, herbs and minerals and animal parts, and specialist weaponsmith and armourer buildings, it may look rather complicated.

But the result will be profound. Players will have different special resources available to them, and lots of choices in what to do with those resources.

From time to time we’ve seen the players discussing, and indeed have discussed ourselves amongst the dev team, which troops are ‘best’. Is it Knights for their fearsome attack?

Is it Trueshots as excellent all-rounders? Of course in most cases, the best troop type is the unit best suited to the task at hand: neither Knights nor Trueshots fare well when defending in forests, for example. But pretty soon, this answer will change. It will not just be the unit type best suited to the mission, but also the unit which is best equipped for the mission.

Enabling players to pick a unit’s equipment is an obvious step for Illyriad. We have always said that we want players to be free to do as they please in the world. And as most players enjoy their armies, we wanted to let them develop those soldiers to suit their own objectives and playing styles, with a variety of possible strategies. Thus we are developing the equipment system (what we are calling Crafting v1) to give players this freedom.

Different players may choose to approach this equipment in a number of ways. Which of these many approaches become popular is up to the players, and we wouldn’t presume to guess how they will make use of the available equipment. Some players may invest heavily in giving small Special Forces type units the absolute best equipment. Some players may collect only cheap equipment, or none at all. Some may hoard a single type of gear, so that their huge army becomes honed for one very specific role. Some may collect a range of weapons and armour, so that they can react effectively to any challenge. There is no one best way to use this gear: it’s up to the players to explore the possibilities.

What equipment is ideal will also depend upon the exact mission, as well as a player’s strategy. For example, when sending your Dwarven Halbardiers to defend a neighbouring settlement from an unexpected attack, you may want them to carry lighter than usual equipment so that they can get to their destination as fast as possible, before the attack strikes.

If they are to defend a wooded tournament square, then perhaps you want them to carry only shorter spears and armour adapted for woodland combat, so that they get bonuses based on that terrain.

If you want the same units to defend a nearby Obsidian Mine, then you may want really heavy armour that gives a bonus in defence and Pikes to fend of cavalry raiders, and as the troops won’t move often you won’t much care how much this bulky equipment slows their movement. And so on.

Obsidian Mines? Ah, yes. Not all of the weapons and armours will be made from common iron. And these rarer components will have to come from somewhere. So, the map may soon come to include Obsidian Mines, amongst other things. That, however, could take quite a while to explain, and for now I have descriptions to write for 26 specialist swords.

So the question of mining will have to wait until another day.

Having noticed animal populations moving around the map (wandering, breeding, dividing, sometimes fighting), players might reasonably expect that more NPC movement is in the cards. So, as developers, we should ‘switch on’ all NPC movement now, right? Well, before we are able to do that, there are a lot of things to consider.

As an example, take a look at the fellow on the right. In fact, just look at one detail. Look at the length of his legs.

Realistically, the rider’s legs are too long. So, the legs should be shorter. On the other hand, there is a tradition of showing riders out of proportion to their horses, and for very good reason: the Bayeux Tapestry for example shows riders whose toes seem almost to scrape the ground, but this is no error; showing the horse relatively reduced is a way to show more detail on the rider, and in a game like Illyriad, where the unit images are often very small, we want people to be able to see the rider clearly. So, the proportions are about right. But on the other hand again, our players will not be looking at the images as art historians, they will just see that the legs are too long. But then, perhaps there is a compromise….

That tiny detail took effort to talk through. It was an issue that we had to settle, so it required time. But in the grand scheme of NPC movement, it is a tiny detail – and just one of many tiny details. The whole process of ‘switching on’ broader NPC movements is a mass of tiny decisions, ranging from whether NPC cavalry would roam further from their homes than infantry, to whether Wulpor have preferences for what meat they eat, to whether Faction armies might intervene in sieges, to whether the perpetually-stoned Gnolls of Illyria would show intelligence in their battle tactics… and on, and on.

What sounds like a very simple goal, ‘switch on more NPC movement’, becomes a maze of these tiny decisions, which all need to be made. But we’re working our way through them. The devil is in the details. And so is the fun of developing the world of Illyria.

Old style game development (like boxed console games) can be a struggle to keep control. Any unexpected behaviour is a bug. Any part of the game that the developer doesn’t architect, is a source for alarm.

But with Illyriad, our goal is to surrender control. If we understand all the behaviours in the world, that means the world is too simple and predictable. Any part of the world that we don’t control is a potential source of wonder.

In old style game development, the developer wants to plan what will happen. In Illyriad, we want the players to have a part in what happens. The recent changes to animal behaviour are an excellent example of where the game is going.

Illyriad’s players are well aware that in the past, we have trialed a system by which items can be picked up from hunting animals. It wouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that, in the future, animals might be a source of items. Now, a conventional approach would be to say: “We must control the number of items that players can get from these animals! We must calculate the exact numbers of animals in the world, exactly where they will be – nothing will be gathered without us, the developers, decreeing that it shall be so.”

What the new animal behaviors mean is that we have ceded control of where animals go, and how many of them exist. Players can reduce population sizes by over-hunting, they can reduce populations in some areas but allows others to thrive, and in future perhaps players will get the ability to influence where animals move to and perhaps even how fast they breed.

Depending on how far or fast we take it, the locations of animals and the frequency of any item drops from them, will be mostly out of our control as developers.

Animal item drops, if they were to be reintroduced, would be gathered not because we have made it so, but because the players have made it so. It is, after all, their game and they should be able to influence it. This means that, as developers, we have to surrender control.

In the same vein as the last blog of “Illyriad dev history” regarding factions…

Here’re the first drafts of various elements of the World Map, along with a tiny sample of some of the incredibly pedantic arguments (my fault entirely) that went on about region naming; the amount of detail that went into all of this, I hope, shows through…

BIOMES

TOPOGRAPHY

We loved the mountain range that looked like a skull’s head, or a netherworld demon wielding a whip… and, given it was entirely fractally generated, we saw this as some kind of sign – and this is the candidate that was chosen.

SEAS

Rivers & Fresh Water

These were all then edited (quite substantially in many ways), especially the water.

We then applied over the political regions (manually drawn, largely around topographic boundaries, as a natural barrier to regional development).

Here’s the first draft, with some region names that never made it to the final cut.

Up until now, the entire world was randomly generated, just like all the other browser-based games – and we were deeply unhappy with that idea, hence this project.

iirc, due to a small corp forum accident, about 2 players saw this first map before it was released. They were sworn to secrecy – and they kept it. We remember you guys, tyvm!

Should anyone doubt the level of anal-retentiveness that went into all of this, please allow me to reproduce a small sample of a conversation from the inhouse corp forums regarding the naming of a region:

Originally posted by GM ThunderCat
“Qef” as a region – Not sure about this one as it reminds me of [redacted], not sure if that’s my dyslexia or disturbed mind…

Originally posted by GM Stormcrow
Definitely your disturbed mind, TC.

“Qaf” is the 50th Sura of the Qur’an – and it’s very much an Arabic “mystic word” – but by using an “e” (which doesn’t exist in Arabic) instead of the “a” we might escape the inevitable fatwa via transliteration .

Originally posted by GM ThunderCat
How about “Kul Tor” for Qef?

Originally posted by GM Stormcrow
Because mixing base languages (Kul – Sanskrit meaning “family” or “gathering”; Tor – OE, Gaelic twr meaning “Heap” or “Pile” and from where we get the word “Tower”) is bad m’kay?

We could mix Sanskrit and Arabic though, as that’s a fair enough mix.

Kul Qassim – where Qassim means the sand dunes from which the white Saxaul trees grow…?

PPS Edit. There’s actually no reason why we can’t have Kul Tor… Going back to my endlessly tedious “Why do all the names of the rivers on the East Coast of the UK begin with the letter ‘T’ (Thames, Tees, Tyne, Tweed, Tay etc etc)” party-stopper…  It’s because they’re all Sanskrit, from “Tayus”.

So, actually TC, there’s no reason not to have “Kul Tor”. If we can have the river Ketterick (from the sanskrit iekti, where we also get the word “projectile”) and we can have the the river Ale and places Alncromb and Alnwick (from Alaunna – sanskrit plus “combe” & “wick” – OE), then why not Kul Tor?

I sometimes worry for our sanity.