Hey Exanimates,

Last month we went into some detail about the role system and what our main objectives for it are at this time. While there have been many big improvements and additions, the role system is the key feature of the next update and what supports the story going forward.

Having figured out many of the core role mechanics, we've been now focusing more on low level behaviour stuff, which while perhaps not as impressive in scope, is what you'll notice most during gameplay. This is basically where roles are used to control actions and activities or react to common events, rather than modelling relationships and long term goals.

This includes a lot of mechanics for NPCs to become aware of nearby events and things in the environment, as well as interact with them. NPCs should comment on things that are happening dynamically, notice objects and other things around them and use them. One important practical part of this is finding equipment, being able to determine whether it's useful to them or a party member and call it out or just use it. There's quite a lot of nuance to something like this, as we don't want NPCs to just be instantly aware of everything, objects that are hidden or just hard to spot should be more difficult for them to notice. We also don't want them to be constantly calling out every minor upgrade or greedily taking all the best items for themselves.

In terms of combat there's also going to be a fair bit of role involvement. We want NPCs to engage in different behaviours based on what's happening and also accept commands or requests. This could include helping allies in danger, perhaps gaining courage and rallying for someone they care about, requesting help and things like just commenting on notable combat events. In general we're also trying to make roles an important part of engagement, to build on the more animalistic emotion driven and sometimes selfish behaviour of current NPCs.

These aren't the only things we're working towards, we have quite a few advanced behaviours planned, but this is what we're focusing on right now and the requirements are shared. To support a lot of new behaviours and dynamic roles we're putting a lot of new AI functionality to engage in different actions and properly prioritise them, many mechanics for understanding circumstance, events and objects, put them in context and describe them in dialogue.

Roles aside, we've also been working on the late game "save system", or rather some ways to prevent losing all progress. This is however just one optional aspect of a quite large set of features involving various new mechanics. Supporting these properly and in a way that is future compatible has requirements that mean changing how some things work in a fundamental way.

Our design is such that any seemingly insignificant object or thing can potentially carry a lot of information, is fully persistent and can be understood and remembered by NPCs. Dynamic events and behaviours require and create a lot of dependencies with a scope that's not always predictable. This introduces a lot of difficulties with authoring and maintaining content, particularly in supporting a distributed workflow, or mods and player made content. All these interactions need to work both within that body of content and the game world they belong to.

We have a partial solution to this already, but there's still some very difficult problems that are becoming more relevant as we look into new features and expanding beyond Exanima's current scope. We've known we'd have to tackle these problems for a long time, and it didn't look easy, but now we've finally designed a solution. This will allow us and others to create large chunks of content in a completely independent way while supporting all these features. This content can then be seamlessly introduced into the game without requiring changes to shared resources or even existing saved games. It's a bit difficult to explain exactly how important this is, but it certainly is.

Best,

Bare Mettle