indiegraze.com

on March 29, 2018

Including crafting, bio-steampunk, and procedural locations/content in a dynamically created narrative, Evodant Interactive’s Gyre: Nova State has a Kickstarter campaign running and a unique claim to fame with the Toska Polynarrative Engine™ driving the game’s storyline. With a team that includes veteran devs from across the industry, I checked in with CEO/CTO Dwayne Rudy on the world the studio is creating and the technology behind the project.

Erik Meyer: As Gyre: Nova State takes place in an alternate, mid-1800s history, I’m interested in the technological and social differences. Citizens have increasingly taken cybernetic form in mechanical cities, but what events precipitated this innovative renaissance? What inventions are recent, and what has become commonplace that might surprise us? Similarly, what kinds of social responses have come with this radical shift in the arc of industrialization?

Dwayne Rudy: Dozens of failed, real-world revolutions around our mid-1800s departed from our past and became successful in the history of the game. The period is commonly referred to as the Revolutions of 1848, where there was widespread political upheaval. Over 50 countries were impacted, so our alt-history suggests that these revolutions took a different turn and kick-started a period of unfettered technological exploration that passes through pre-electronic human-machine cybernetics to culminate in real artificial consciousness several centuries early. The singularity has arrived and an android population has driven organic-based humans to extinction.

Naturally, that advancement comes at a price. Mirroring what we see today, the populace has largely ignored Mother Earth in taking what they need from it. When you take on the form of a non-sleeping, non-eating “thing”, your mentality shifts. There is an underlying meme of society vs nature running throughout our story world.

Probably the biggest invention is what we call “flux”, which is the technological tipping point in our world. It’s a bit of an homage to Nikola Tesla’s work on free energy and is the critical piece that allows for the creation of flux-infused artificial brains, requiring only a small factor more energy to run than organic gray matter. They are quite a bit more powerful, however.

EM: For many 3D games with a large sense of scale, moving away from a rote narrative has been a recipe for repetitive quests and clichéd storylines, but you’re working to craft a dynamic narrative in real-time using the Toska Polynarrative Engine™, so I’m interested in the freedom and mechanics by which the engine does this. What kinds of permutations do you allow for, and how do you keep this kind of experience balanced/coherent?

DR: Branching narrative has been a global problem for devs for many years. Games that try to move away from it run into those very problems of “procedurally generated” quests, which really just boil down to Quest 28 that has a couple parameter changes, such as “Kill 10 rats” instead of “Kill 6 rats”. Or using a different weapon to run the same storyline. These are distinctions without a difference for us.

Trying to create larger narratives on the branching model leads to a budget explosion, and not necessarily a better game. We’ve all seen that case.

Doing something like this game requires a ground-up design process that integrates every aspect of the gameplay systems. With Toska at the helm, it needs to be able to act as the director, stage manager, scriptwriter, prop creator, and casting manager all simultaneously.

Toska generates projections into what I call the “polynarrative space”. What it’s doing is projecting possible resolutions to the story arc or denouement. But if you suddenly decide to go off in a new direction, Toska sees that and starts running new projections. However, once you get to the resolution phase of an arc, there’s an expectation by both the system and the player that it will resolve at some point (players need this to avoid unresolved issues in the narrative). If you ignore the resolution long enough, it may resolve in some other way without your involvement, since every other character involved in that arc is seeking a resolution to its goals as well.

Toska operates by running through the following (high-level) loop:

• Observe player and world states

• Factor in current narrative plan

• Project possible narrative paths that align with player psychology and character action

• Factor in non-player character (NPC) goals and behaviors

• Adjust narrative plan and NPC goals

• Present the narrative

This is a generalized outline, with the story adapting to a continuous change in the world state and character actions. At a deeper, implicit level, causation weaves throughout this narrative model.

The high-level loop allows for course corrections and is stage one of the narratological balancing.

EM: I first saw crafting in a steampunk experience with Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura in 2001, and since then, crafting has become a hot option contributing to feature creep in many titles, so within your project, how do you see crafting working within the larger context of the game? What quirky nuances and ways of extending play come with making things out of other things?

DR: We needed crafting to do two things in the game. One, be deep and allow for combinations that support the 3 main styles of gameplay (combat, stealth, diplomacy). Second, to disappear for those players that just don’t care about crafting. The latter is handled through the typical merchant offerings. You likely won’t get some of the really interesting items but that’s a choice the player can make. Over time, Toska will see this and reduce the number of blueprints and materials that the player comes across in favor of more appropriate “loot”.

For those interested even a little in crafting, then the system allows for thousands of combinations just on parts alone. Attributes for each component can be adjusted based on materials or processes.

We went through several iterations of the crafting system and we’re still making modifications to improve the crafting process and items that can be constructed. To avoid the difficulty in balancing the possible combinations, we put a framework in place that the system is built upon tying how the component-to-component interlocking system functions.

EM: The game incorporates combat, stealth, and diplomacy as upgradable skills, so as developers, do you fall more into the stats-based, numbers-heavy view of roleplaying, or are skills functioning more like upgrades in Deus Ex, whereby they unlock options and play styles? In following, what is your philosophy behind meaningful character abilities?

DR: Numbers are necessary, especially for balancing. Even if a game presents the player a “functional” description of an ability, you can bet there’s a number behind it somewhere, informing the system what to do.

So we assign numbers to places where they make sense and players can use them to make informed decisions. Damage, health, number of slots, range, and the like. Where we avoid player facing numbers is on the story side. An action that is “bold” is based on a function of Bayesian-like numbers and the core narrative algorithms. The one thing I wanted to avoid was the player constantly wondering, “How am I doing?” With an open narrative, there is still a Quest screen, but the quests are based on your personal narrative.

When we talk about meaningful character abilities, it is this communication of the narrative to the player that should be aligned to what they perceive is happening. A story is highly subjective, so what one person finds to be a good story may be quite different to someone else. Toska aligns your style of play to the narrative such that the player should feel everything is making sense (or makes sense in the end), so the abilities must also support your style of play that is integrated into how the narrative is presented.

EM: I like that the procedurally crafted environments respond to the atrocities or the altruism of players, and I note that many games have struggled to calibrate NPC responses or location shifts based on past deeds. Simply put, it is weird when an entire village either loves or hates a character they have never met because of a perceived ‘reputation’, so what challenges come with getting it right in this arena? What kinds of details can players expect to be responsive, and how (as devs) do you avoid jarring setting changes?

DR: Reputation was actually one of the easiest elements to handle. This is due to Toska’s hybrid cognitive model. I felt the same way about games that led you into a city, only to suddenly find you’re the hero or villain, presumably because “word has spread”. It always felt like a disconnect, bringing me out of the world for a time. Since Toska’s social mesh is time-stepped, we can allow for gossip over time, a key ingredient in stories with more diplomatic and social gameplay. This gives the world a more natural feel when it comes to reputation.

EM: You’re currently in the middle of a Kickstarter campaign, so from a studio POV, what kinds of intensity led up to the launch of the crowdfunding effort, and have any of the social media/news media/backer responses to your work provided a different lens/filter for your team?

DR: The lead up to the launch was intense. A lot of scrambling to get assets and copy ready because we actually didn’t fully decide to do one until late January. The response from those that have joined us has been fantastic! The one downside is that we thought we had a lot more folks engaged with the project, so it’s been a slow start. We’ve been doing a lot more on social media, and we have a referral program with additional exclusive rewards, so we’re pushing hard for a successful finish.

EM: To name just a few, your team includes veterans like Rob Bartel (former Bioware designer and producer) and Tom Zuber (who has done work for Electronic Arts and Sony, among others), so when it comes to the mix of talent and experience, what do these seasoned devs bring to your game world and the ability to execute/innovate?

DR: Having seasoned devs who have worked on properties such as Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, Mass Effect, and Dawn of War to name a few is amazing. I’ve spent a lot of time creating new development processes, so their input has informed how we compete at AAA levels without the AAA budget. They’ve seen the pitfalls to avoid. There’s over 50 years of experience in the games industry between just the three of us, so we’re very excited to bring all that to Gyre: Nova State and advance the state of the RPG genre.

EM: Every world has its hook, the thing that sets it apart from similar work, so in your open world, dystopian, bio-steampunk action RPG, what was the kernel that sparked the forward momentum? What helped to define this experience and set your project in motion?

DR: I’ve played a lot of table-top RPGs. Years ago I asked the question – how do I create the essential experience of a table-top game master in a digital form? One that was capable of driving an open-ended story, where the player was not forced into a fixed number of story endings. A digital dungeon master, if you will.

My background in computer science and artificial intelligence combined with my passion to find the answer, resulting in Toska. That’s what triggered everything around the development of all the integrated procedural systems and led to a game world where I could also investigate the transhumanism and human vs nature aspects while in Star Trek-like fashion, exploring contemporary issues through the game setting.

In case you missed it, here’s the trailer:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wP_Sh0ib96c