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CuriousGilgamesh7 days ago(+1)

Hello Jeff,

your generation method seems to be a very efficient approach to the very big task of automated telling of game histories. I'm actually working on something in a similar space myself — a tool for developers to help keep a game's history consistent as it grows — so seeing your approach was genuinely interesting to me.

As I understood your system: your story consists of single episodes that are of a certain type (war, natural disaster, peace, ...). The probability of choosing a certain episode type is at first equally distributed, and later the chosen episodes influence future episodes by adjusting these probabilities to create a story arc.

How did you decide the amount of influence that certain episodes have on future episode type probability? Has a generated history ever produced something that didn't actually make sense — and if so, what did you do about it? How does this history influence CultGame during gameplay?

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Bucephalus Studios6 days ago

Hi Gilgamesh!

Awesome to see someone else tackling this niche feature and making stuff to help other devs to boot.

Your understanding is correct. I’ve not touched the system in some time, but I recall setting fixed weight changes of future episode selections for each episode that are used upon its own selection. I didn’t think too much harder than that about it, and I figured keeping it granular like this would allow me to tune it in the future.

Because the history generation still has not had a ton of episodes yet designed for it, I unfortunately can’t definitively say that I’ve gotten an output that would be suitable for a production commercial game. I plan to flesh out the history generation more later to work out the bugs and get it up to a standard of quality, and I’ll definitely make a video on it.

At least for how it affects gameplay, the selection of episodes creates special characters, tile sites, factions, and conditions on the map after it has been generated. A episode talking about an ongoing war will start the game with the two mentioned factions at war.

Thanks for your interest! So cool to see people finding this after so long :)

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CuriousGilgamesh2 days ago

Really appreciate the honest answer — that it's not fully there yet is more useful to hear than if you'd said everything just works.

I know you're a busy guy, but would you be up for 20 minutes sometime to talk about exactly this — history generation and consistency?

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Bucephalus Studios2 days ago

No worries! And sure thing. You can message me at jeff@bucephalusstudios.com and we can work something out :)

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