The main part of the game is simply the "Events" which happen all throughout your journey. These are a series of hand-crafted content mixed with procedural generation, with an AI that figures out how those connect or where to go from one event to the next. It's a lot simpler than it sounds. To make it possible to have procedural stories, I reuse a lot of the same events, but they are chopped up into segments, with enough variables to give them enough to feel different (or "different enough." Obviously there's a limit). So at any moment in one event which has a predetermined path to it, you could interrupt that event's story by doing some cunning plan, which then results in either a resolution or a new series of events. Each piece is very brief. The one you see where the blue shirts all leave the room was one of my longest segments, and IMO almost too long (I was afraid the player would get bored quickly if they had to watch stuff like that constantly, since it takes so long to fully animate.)



One example would be a 4-part diplomatic event. During any segment, you could simply select the Tactical Officer, select the command "Arm & Imprison" (or whatever), and it would then generate a scene with the same diplomatic table you were just in (room, artwork, eating animations of diplomats) and then tell it to spawn [X] number of Tactical Crew (based on how many you chose for the plan), and the result would be calculated just the same as it would be in ANY scenario. The AI knows the entry/exit points of the map, the obstacles (pathfinding), and can immediately calculate success/failure and if needed- I design specific locations characters have to move to in order to animate correctly.

Click to expand...