Mastodawn

While I'm not against having hundreds or thousands or billions of people rambling around a base-building game, it's clear their life stories cannot all be told.

So how do we determine whose lives take the spotlight, and what happens to those that don't?

The answers are: we ask the player, and nothing.

We cannot meaningfully tell the player the story of every person involved in getting each person their pair of pants, and even if we could, why would we bother? It's unfocused and disjointed.

It would make more sense to tell the story of ONE person involved in that chain, and their friends and family.

Whether it's the button-maker or the tailor or the lady that sells them off the back of her truck for suspiciously discounted prices, THEIR life story can be interesting and unfold.

But then the other half of that question rears its ugly head:

What does your base building have to do with their lives?

Is is meaningful to build a base that can manufacture pants? Is it meaningful to make it a 200-person facility that goes from cotton to slacks with no slack? Vertically integrated pants?

Well... what kind of lives does that create? What lifestyles, what social pressures? How do the people feel about being there? How do they feel about your pants, too, I guess?

Most such games, the pants are the end product.

In DF or Rimworld or whatever, you have a stockpile of pants and shirts and socks and shoes and whatever because "people demand it" and maybe, just maybe, "people don't like dying in the cold weather". But it's just a toggle: "if we have pants, we don't complain."

Trying to add additional complexity makes it extremely annoying.

Rimworld has rules where if people wear their favorite color, they get a mood boost. Nobody has ever used it.

So we really have three story opportunities here, only one of which sees light in current games:

1) No pants? Activate the complaining routine. We express our dislike of dingle-dongles swingin' free!

2) Get pants? Classically, just disable that complaining. However we can actually use choice and customization of pants as a form of expression and outreach.

3) Making pants? How does pants manufacturing lifestyle differ from, say, farming? Or programming?

If we assume the people in our facility are there to express our successes and failures and choice of direction in facility construction, personal stories about HAVING something should be as expressive as stories about NOT having something.

Similarly, the way people labor - and what they do when not laboring - should matter a lot more, be expressed a lot more.

"He lived a hard life slingin' crates on the dock-" vs "he lived a hard life washing other people's clothes" might sound similar at first glance, but the actual lifestyles are very different.

Their physicality is different, their environment is different, the number of new faces they meet is different, even how people talk to each other is different, and at what volume.

Add into that cultural lock-in, like the laundromat being Elf-owned and the docks being Hobbit-owned.

So I ask, how does construction work? How do facilities interlock?

How do we create a dock or a laundromat or a desperate post-apocalyptic farming cult such that people's lives express our successes and failures and choices?

And I keep coming around to a holistic integration.

Rather than being overly concerned about stockpile management, I'm more concerned about externalities.

What environment are they working and living in?

This opens the door to a lot of small-scale industries, like in reality.

You don't particularly need a centralized tailor station if each family has a a sack of tools they break out on rainy days, and each family essentially makes their own clothes from scratch in their living room by candlelight.

Sure it's not efficient or particularly enjoyable, but THAT IS THE POINT. Our facility's inefficiency is a way of life for those that live in it.

Or more advanced worlds - people work in an air-conditioned office with nice bathrooms and drive home each day-

This leads to a different kind of life, and the dreary, hollow social aspects of worklife start to ring true.

Plus, offices aren't exactly efficient either.

We're simply choosing which inefficiencies to embrace based on which efficiencies we embraced. Office buildings without highways and cars are impossible.

So when we, as a player, choose to make a part of our base, we have to ask ourselves what efficiencies and inefficiencies are we embracing, and how?

For example, we might simply make a home. In DF or Rimworld, you'd add a bed and a table and maybe a bookshelf and call it a day.

But if we take our new concerns into account: the home is a place of widespread industry. This is where everything You Can't Easily Buy gets made.

We can allocate multipurpose utilities for that. Let me draw a fenced-in space we'll call "the yard".

What's in the yard?

Food pressures? Yard's full of chickens and gardens.

Travel pressures? Yard's full of play areas and gazebos and maybe a pool!

Social pressures? Yard's carefully fenced off and short-cropped.

Whether this is automatic, manual, or somewhere between, the point is that the lifestyles our constructions afford are expressed by What Is In Your Yard.

Of course the same mentality easy applies everywhere.

What's in your bedroom?

Well, what is your personal life?

Posters of your favorite musicians? Piles of books? Dumbells? Dolls?

There's no wrong answer, except for the one wrong answer DF and Rimworld have:

Nothing.

For some reason, the people in those games never express themselves through their spaces, although obviously the player can just customize it all manually if they feel like it.

What do we build?

If our spaces are largely full of cheap or free multipurpose allocations for all the things we DON'T centralize, then the answer is obviously: we choose what to centralize.

If we're in a post-apocalypse trying to survive, then we're clearly going to centralize food and water ASAP, and choosing how to do that is going to be a priority.

A more advanced civilization might centralize water by creating citywide plumbing. But we might just have One Good Well.

How hard we have to focus on specializing that depends on the pressures.

A post-apocalypse probably has extremely severe food and water pressures, so we may focus on centralizing and optimizing those to the exclusion of all else, meaning that each little person or family will handle everything else - cooking, clothes, socializing, playing - in their homes and yards, collecting debris from the beforetimes to express themselves with.

But if we're playing in a softer world where civilization exists, we may find there's simply no reason to centralize on food, because we can just go buy some.

Even in something like a deserted wilderness, if food and water are Very Easy To Get, we may be satisfied with our optimizations and move on to other things, only coming back to it once our society overwhelms it with new pressures - as shown by the rise of home gardening.

This is all really only possible if we abstract out the simulations.

If a person decorating their little shack requires them physically walking out into the wilds step by step and physically noticing a fun piece of decor from the beforetimes and physically picking it up and lugging it back-

That's extremely limiting and a tremendous time burden.

Instead, if we simulate more roughly - say, hour by hour - that's simply "downtime hour: wandering".

It's also worth considering how much of a resident's life arc is defined by the base, by the player, and/or by "luck" (algorithm).

For example, if you have two residents dating each other and working in your facility, there's a number of standard ways their relationship could progress - marriage, breakup, having a kid...

Even more, if we want to create a proper arc. Like having an ideal that they can't agree on, and whether they'll agree before they break up or what, and having them act on it.

In most such games it's simply luck-based, because the role of the game is to throw random crap at the player and let them assemble it into a narrative.

Do they break up? 1% chance per day. Get married? 2% chance per day. Preggers? 0.5% per day, all modified by various characteristics.

However, it's also possible to allow the player more control over that narrative by making the progressions require player interference.

Because their lifestyles are expressions of your base-building, their arcs can also be extensions of your base-building.

Maybe their mismatched values are sending them down a path to breakup.

You can let that progress, or even explore it proactively if you want. But you can also put them into environments where the values are not a factor, or where one of the values is Obviously Correct, or even just get them some therapy.

This doesn't instantly solve the issue. It walks towards a solution.

The point is to create arcs that express a player's choices, rather than spam a player with randomness.

Randomness has value, but rather than assembling random pieces into a narrative, I'd rather the player assemble a narrative AGAINST random pieces.

Like, the player knows this or that won't work out, so they have to find a way to make it work out, or to find an alternative path.

This already exists in the physics of the world-

Winter's coming, the crops will stop growing. You plan around it, it shapes your base.

But if you have characters with arcs defined by their characteristics and the life they find themselves leading, rather than simply shrugging, we can use that to shape the base!

A classic example is Rimworld's "pyromaniac" trait, which is such a catastrophic negative that you simply exile anyone that has it.

People have tried building bases to mitigate it, but it's such a pointless chore they just exile.

What if there were traits that combine with lifestyles to create more interesting progressions?

The games do dabble with this, like DF's royalty demanding arbitrary production and export rules- but, again, you're in a reactive role. There's no arc, you just get something random and have to shrug and roll with it.

But let's say someone has a trait that does affect things - how do you make an "arc" out of that?

Well, what about turning it into a cultural element?

For example, if you have someone that's unable to take the heat, you can obviously build your base with lots of shaded or airconditioned areas so they can feel most comfortable-

But what if we don't get that technology until we have someone that needs it?

What if in order to discover air conditioning, we need to have people that can't take the heat?

In a hot environment, maybe that's everyone. Maybe it's instant - summer comes, AIR CONDITIONING RESEARCH UNLOCKED-

Buuut not everywhere.

Similarly, what if the tier of research reflects the tier of restriction?

We unlock air conditioning research when people need air condition, but the first level is quite rough and power-expensive.

The more annoyingly sensitive someone is to heat, the more they'll be annoyed by even that level of comfort, which in turn unlocks more precise, more efficient air cons-

So maybe you encourage people to amp up their "negative" traits so you can unlock better results-

And maybe they spread-

We can probably extend this idea to things like, say, having anger management issues.

In most such games, angry residents are a big issue because they'll just randomly kill people.

But we can probably channel that in two healthy directions: directed anger and refined self-control.

IE, Klingons vs Vulcans.

And we unlock "technology" (more like spaces and rituals and rules, not physical tools) to push in that direction.

In a short while, we have "centralized" our culture's anger response - either into honorable combat or careful self-reflection.

This radically changes the lives people lead, even if they don't have the 'angry' trait.

The same is true of air conditioning, of course, although admittedly it's a bit less evocative.

In this unending #gameDesign thread, I wanted to mention that stockpiles have no meaning in these looser simulations.

The exacting stockpiles used in DF and Rimworld are useful because the games are obsessed with exact positions and travel pathing.

But in a less physical simulation, we can simply assume there's stockpiles and we don't have to care much about their physicality.

In fact, we don't even need exact counts of goods!

Pants example: in DF and similar, you have an exact quantity of pants of specific makes. Then individuals path to the stockpile and take a specific pair.

But there's little reason to track tens or hundreds of specific pants. What we actually want to know is the rough number and how diverse the options are.

The player isn't here to play pants police. That's the little dude inside the game's job. He can care about exact pants numbers.

Functionally, we don't need to track pants: we need to track the pants production chain. If the pants factory is doing well, we can simply assume it's making a lot of diverse pants suitable for all comers.

And this also happens if you make your own pants at home. The existence of your home tailoring tools means you can make or alter pants as you please. So, again, precise tracking is less important.

The reason we want to track less is to allow more expression from the inhabitants.

Dale spends a lot of time making and patching his pants at home. But they fit great and the patches reflect his personality.

George buys jeans from the shop. They don't produce a variety, but they do produce a lot. So his jeans were quick to get, but fit poorly and the way they don't let him express his personality is a facet of his lifestyle, stifled by the market...

I use pants as an example. In reality, the expressiveness of pants is fairly limited in this kind of video game because when are you going to see anyone's legs?!

It'd have to be narrated. 'Wearing perfectly-fitted corderoy with cat-paw patches on the knees-'

Or maybe... it's the other characters that react, rather than relying on the player to notice.

"Nice pants, Lloyd, I love the cat paw patches and your butt looks great."

These elements of self-expression are likely tightly linked to the traits we can use to steer our progression, as talked about earlier.

The angry guy wears angry clothes. As you harness his anger into a useful direction, his fashion embraces that new direction.

Others sucked into the same progression but missing the 'angry' trait would dress differently but similarly, expressing that they have similar lifestyles but different driving characteristics.

Since I got a driveby snarking while I was asleep, I do want to talk about what makes games like these games rather than just stories.

The answer should be obvious- they're collaborative stories built on a framework, like a tabletop RPG but even nerdier.

You have a lot of control, but there's also a lot of randomness. A random world, but you choose where to settle. Harsh constraints, but you construct your way through them. Ongoing conflicts, and your people endure because of your choices.

Some of the constraints are imposed by the game: dwarves must eat. This place has an aquifer. You must have an anvil to build a smithy.

Other constraints are in your head: this will be the library-vault. This one will be the leader. I will build this hall out of green glass.

Others are having options and coming up with reasons to choose. I embark here rather than there. I choose her instead of him. I build this here, not there-

And the core of the play is navigating these contrasting and conflicting pressures by building.

The game's buildables have rules. What do they do? How much do they cost? What is required to unlock or upgrade them? These lock the elements into the framework of constraints.

You build in response to the pressures of the game, the constraints and progressions you and it agreed on.

DFlikes express your successes and failures via human interest stories. Your base is built for people.

Even as you change the rules, mod the game, or just flat-out cheat, you are using the rules and mechanics and progressions to create pressures to respond to.

However, in these games the human interest element- while core to the game- is erratic and unfocused. Obviously there are arcs built into the rules- train a skill and you get good. Fight and you will probably be injured. Rise in rank and you become useless. Don't have enough to eat, things go bad.

But-

But most of the things specific to this base, these characters, are random. They get married. They get sick. They get injured in specific ways. They never express themselves except through tantrums.

Obviously some randomness can be good. You are negotiating with the game and part of that is rules about what MIGHT happen.

However, simply spamming unstructured randomness at the player and asking them to weave it into a coherent experience with no tools is extremely tiring and flat.