Procedural Story Generation Design – Astrobase Command Dev Update – 19 Feb 2018

Hey guys!

The design is currently at a phase where a top-down approach is being used to determine the details of story generation (whereas the station simulation had been a bit more bottom-up). This means coming up with fictional scenarios as targets for what we want the story engine to support, which essentially boils down to episode plot-lines.

So for example: Alice notices a personal item is missing, asks around, and Bob mentions he saw Charlie using a similar item. Alice confronts Charlie and Charlie claims he found the item in the a hallway and picked up. Lt. Dan steps in and does an investigation and concludes Bob could not have stolen the item, but doesn’t find the real culprit. Then all the crew is worried about who is the thief, and everyone is more suspicious.

This could be generally expanded to include “who is the murderer, who is the saboteur, etc” or generally a whodunnit of someone doing an action in secret that he or she is not supposed to do (aka crime). What we don’t want to do is hard code this scenario, but rather make the parts in such a fashion that it can emerge in a procedural manner based on the personality system. And then the concepts could be put together in different ways (Charlie brazenly takes the item while Alice is watching, because he’s a bully, and argues to Dan she wasn’t using it anyway).

If you’d like to help, easiest way is to past some scenarios (generic or specific) in the general discord channel! After we get a good list, we can work backwards to settle on some common parts that can be used in a bunch of different ways. Shout-out to Max has contributed close to 40 already.

We want to know: What part of Astrobase Command’s story system would you prefer we develop next? Space adventures (e.g. sending crews to mine asteroids) vs planet adventures (e.g. exploring planetary surfaces)

Vote at this strawpoll:

On the development front, a new build is available on Itch.

Here are the patch notes for version 0.2.11:

Improvements

– Added In-Game Options Menu (Music Volume, SFX Volume, UI Scale)

– Added UI scaling for comfortable viewing

– Added scroll wheel zoom on held facing documents for comfortable viewing

– Added additional sound effects to UI and desk

– Scenery scale adjustments

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Astrobase Command Development Update - 09 Feb 2018
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