So the Nemesis system is being patented which sucks. For those that don't know, a patent grants "a property right by a sovereign authority to an inventor. A patent provides the inventor exclusive rights to the patented process, design, or invention for a certain period in exchange for a complete disclosure of the invention." The Nemesis system patent covers (as summarized by IGN) "a system featuring procedurally-generated NPCs that exist in a hierarchy and interact with and will remember the actions of players, have their appearance/behavior altered by players, and whose place in that hierarchy can change and affect the position of other NPCs in said hierarchy".

So now's a great time to use this while it's still in legal limbo. Those who want to read the patent themselves can find a copy here. It's very long so I'm not posting the whole thing, but I want to note it mentions procedurally generating dialogue for such NPCs, for those who are faster at writing than implementing these game mechanics.

So here's the core bullet points from the patent, translated to common English:

• game events involving a player, and an NPC that is controlled in response to a set of defined rules and in response to what the player does
• changing an NPC based on the parameters of a second NPC
• changing an NPC based on a trigger event such as player death, passage of a specified amount of time during game play, or when the player enters a new zone/area
• affecting an NPC's parameters can change the parameters of a second NPC in a faction of NPCs, based at least in part on the one of the game events
• the faction of NPCs is a ranked hierarchy  in which rank is positively correlated with game playing power, and changing the parameters comprises at least one of: changing a rank of an NPC in the hierarchy, or designating an NPC one of a ranked member of the hierarchy, or a non-member of the ranked hierarchy.
• the ability for such NPCs to be interacted with by other players, and for their interactions to affect parameters and the NPC faction's hierarchy
• changing NPC parameters affects at least one of:  the appearance of an NPC, the behavioral personality trait of an NPC, a game-playing ability of an NPC, increasing a probability that an NPC will succeed in future interaction with the player, or a power center attribute associated with the character parameters.
• detecting, selecting, and changing NPC dialog in response to the player, as well as remembering prior interactions to affect dialog further

Rules: Use as many of the above bullet points as you can. Make something in some way regarding this system. Maybe you want to make something adjacent to stay distant enough from legality. Maybe something making fun of the system. Do whatever, it's not like I'm someone that's going to file a patent and retroactively send DMCA requests.

Jam starts now, and ends when the U.S. east coast hits midnight.