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General principles

The core idea is a radically social and organic game world, within an engaging, disbelief-suspending setting. This has several corollaries:
  • NO RPG GIMMICKS. No stupid missions you have to do repeatedly to gain points, etc.
    • We want players to do actually meaningful creative activities.
    • Not lure them into some dopamine-generating loop.
  • Intensive, simulation-based procedural generation to "fill out" the world
  • Highly polycentric game infrastructure run by players
    • Implies: everything open-source, no "anti-cheat"
    • Implies: game mechanics must be designed around things like "aimbotting" being pervasive
  • "Single shard" persistent world
  • Detailed, handcrafted setting that nevertheless does not have a fixed storyline for the future
    • See: Kaiserreich HOI4 mod, which does this beautifully
  • Vast human-directed automation
    • Basic model: a hierarchical "chain of command" ending in some sort of in-game sovereign polity. Every node in the CoC can either be AI-controlled or human-controlled.
      • Orders are "mid-level", between grand strategy and RTS. HOI4 is again a good guide.
      • AI units will blindly follow orders, modulo their own algorithms' calculations of how best to reach the goal.
      • Humans see orders but may or may not follow them.
    • First reason: nobody wants to do manual labor in a game
    • Second reason: this fixes the false dichotomy between a rich, ordered world and a Second Life-style "real-life social media disguised as a RPG".
      • See: Distant Worlds
Last modified 6mo ago