Chronicles Design: On Fast Travel and the Faction Turn
There's some relevant game design talk going around today, and I kind of shy away from some of my not-implemented and not-playtested design ideas waiting to be poured into my game, not because they're secret but just because I'd rather show it all actually working instead of just talking about it.
But I feel like it for this so here we go!
When it comes to the larger run-based structure of Chronicles, I've talked a lot before about how the world isn't procedural but that it changes between runs. This is inspired by the notion of “Faction Turns” which I first heard about from Stars Without Number, and then also used to great effect running a modded 5e campaign through the Caverns of Thracia.
I believe Blades in the Dark does something similar to this but I haven't played it! Essentially, after enough time has passed, the world's factions get to “play a turn” wherein time passes in the larger world and macro-scale events take place including wars, changes of territory ownership, travel of key characters, etc. etc.
For Chronicles, the idea is that when your character falls in battle, the world will tick forward in time which will affect any of a very large list of possible variables. This can be as simple as shuffling around the enemy placement within a dungeon or as complicated as the defeat and razing of a population center. The world map system I'm working on uses a concept of “tile layering” to be able to phase in different states of the world piecemeal based on flags and counters that change from run to run.
This has a huge influence on how the player interfaces with the scale of the world. The only “fast travel” during one run is picking a starting point in the world from those you have unlocked. After that, it is a combination of just-plain-walking along with morrowind-style public transportation routes.
This is on my mind with the Dragon's Dogma Fast Travel quote going around today because the goal in my game is to create an environment where you aren't being forced to manually travel distances to create difficulty or friction, but rather that you get to traverse these distances because they'll be changing in subtle or not-so-subtle ways regularly!
Whether or not this actually works in practice or is achievable by a single creator remains to be seen, but I am fairly confident in my approach, primarily optimizing for how quick and easy it is to add new conditions and throw together a variety of layers. The next milestone should show off this working on a smaller scale :eggbug:
Edit: Here's a Masto post from last year talking about the new map system a bit!
From a commenter:
This is really cool and actually was the thing that caught my attention when I first read about Chronicles. I think no matter how successful you are with the execution, it's bound to produce something interesting!
If you're looking for inspo within video games, Unexplored 2: The Wayfarer's Legacy does something similar to this! Not quite the same and the implementation sounds very different than yours, but there are various factions in the game (ranging from clans and empires to “giant spider monster”) that act when your character dies, with imperial forces that are hunting you down spreading out on the map and the giant spider moving between caves to nest in (they're still updating the game so this might be somewhat outdated).
In theory it works great – every time you die the game world can become harder to traverse, but you do have allied factions and if you power them up they can beat back the imperial forces so you're encouraged to help these factions instead of beelining towards the main quest. In practice though, at least when I last played the game, dying wasn't a super common occurrence if you were careful and the actions during a tick weren't very drastic so it felt out of sync with the rest of the gameplay (I think they might have actually updated it to happen more than just on deaths now but it's been a while since I've given it a go).
I guess all that to say, maybe some questions to think about as you're building this out, if they're not already on your mind:
- What happens to someone who's really good at the game and will not die a lot? Will they miss part of the intended experience with this?
- What happens if someone sucks at the game and dies a lot? Does playing poorly always lead to a worse map state? Could that lead to snowballing failures? (Not always a bad thing!)
- How much variation can this system provide? If someone dies a bunch, will they end up in the same scenarios quickly?
- Can there be a set of conditions that make the map unplayable? Or just not fun to play?
- Could a large gap of time between deaths make the faction turns seem inconsequential, or in the opposite case, overwhelming? Should the amount of time since the last death factor into how many actions are taken between turns? Would it make sense within the story you're trying to tell?
I was already looking forward to the next milestone after playing the combat demo, but now I'm real excited for it!
Thank you for the very thorough response!! I will have to look into Unexplored 2, that sounds really interesting!
To address some of your questions, I have a few philosophical rules for faction turn consequences that should try to alleviate most of the obvious pitfalls.
1) Death is expected. Never or rarely dying on a blind playthrough would be highly unexpected partly due to a component of the difficulty being knowledge-based instead of only skill/tactical. Death isn't something that's generally punished with a worse game state, subscribing to the notion of “failing forward” where the progression of time may produce complications or variations, but avoid the snowball of everything getting harder. There's a lot of checks and balances needed to make this work.
2) Changes to the world have scope and can be heavily localized; being reactive to what areas were visited or where enemies were defeated or where the death took place. Series of events set in motion may not be strictly tied to a global clock, only beginning when the player has encountered it. A key trick here is to show evidence of things happening over the course of multiple runs to hint at progress being made or something having only recently happened. An example is a tunnel being dug where lanterns and pickaxes and miners are present and the passage widens or lengthens as time progresses.
3) Macro-scale changes driven by factions and larger timelines should be created with the goal of being able to be observed and interrupted. I want to avoid hidden timers that cut you off from content and I want the game to be completable with 0 or 10 thousand deaths. That being said, noticing something major in the world that took place is a great motivation to attempt to circumvent it or explore interactions with it on subsequent playthroughs!
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