TLDR; thoughts about procedurally generated fantasy RPG, links to the python source code for a game with similar premise that had a successful kikstarter , but was abandoned by the developer.
Hello guys, I just love procedural generation, i’m still caught in excitement as i marvel at the dream of I:B come true, i still remember the days where i’d check the main page of the infinity website waiting for the retrospective, man that seems like a distant dream now. I still can’t believe it that we even got I:B going. Also i’m dying for June 21st to come so i can play NMS, it’s no infinity, but hey it’ll fill a gap, at least untill josh, finishes limit theory.
So, without further ado, I have just finished playing Xcom 2, great game, and the procedural maps made the play-through quite marvelous, but when i was trying to do another run, I just couldn’t find the interest to do so anymore, and it made me wonder why, in short, the reason is that even though i have installed quite a few mods, i have already went through the underlying story, and with the wonderment gone, i was left with just the gameplay, which was fine, but not so great to make me want to play again just to go through the motions.
Anyway, i have been thinking about procedural fantasy RPG games, and i’ve looked for some, but they all have the same idea as Xcom 2, procedural maps. And to be honest, that just doesn’t do it for me in terms of replayability. For me, i needed a new story, a hidden mystery to explore, thinking about the subject and looking for games and discussion made me realize that making a procedurally generated story was not an easy task at all, as there isn’t any algorithm that comes close to the human capability of writing a good story.
i got lost in thought, and i changed my idea around, started thinking in a different direction, now that direction was too complex to accomplish for an amateur, and even that i am not, i have basic understanding of code, but beyond that i have no clue what to do. I am a dentist, so i’d rather just fork over a few dollars on a game than spend the time and effort learning the necessary skills to make one lol.
My idea in short was to make procedural tools to help make things, creatures, races, weapons, buildings, and so on, think spore but more “realistic”, and then after generating the world and populating it with those procedurally created characters, you can pick a random character and make a story about them using a story engine, that way there’s an endless source of stories through crowd sourcing, combining best of both worlds. I keep thinking this would work best in the hands of a small company, that’d create different worlds and then allows their player base to populate it with stories, and the most popular stories would get canonized, and they would alter the course of the world as a whole, anyway, i’m getting lost in thought again lol.
In my search for such a game, i have found something interesting, at first it was called cult: the awakening of the old ones, and then it was called empyrea: origins, the project had a successful kickstarter campaign, but unfortunately the project was abandoned by the developer but fortunately the source code was released, so if anyone is interested here are the links
https://bitbucket.org/dmhagar/empyrea-public
it’s in python, so if anyone can make heads or tails from it, and think it’d make a good pet project, let me know what happens