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ZorbaTHut
1yr ago
(text post)
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I have always felt a sense of "place" in video games. The levels I've played over and over, I could draw a map, I know the environments. When I got a VR headset, I discovered people had taken places from games I like (such as Zelda: The Ocarina of Time) and imported them, so you could see them in full realisation. It's fantastic. I have the same sense of place in my dreams - I think I always have. Off the main street of my city, go down the stairs that don't exist, there's a bookstore with piles and piles of dusty archives. Across the basement, up the stairs, you're in a street from another city I've been in, and there's another book store here that doesn't exist in real life, this one selling RPG manuals. There's a non-existent game shop on the other side of the city, which sells a non-existent miniature game with inch-scale modern jet fighters in pewter, and I want to play it. But more than the people or events in my dreams, it's the places I remember. I could map them out, if they didn't follow non-euclidean dream logic. Sometimes I return to them in dreams years later.
When I looked at some videos of Medieval Dynasty (since its 2022 and games are collaborative experiences with the internet now and there's no joy in discovery), it was strange seeing the other villages that had been built by other players. You can build your village wherever you like, flat ground notwithstanding (and there's plenty around) - mine is near a lake in a forest. I've slowly clearcut the forest to provide the logs to build it, and it's nice and central to everything, with a great view. Others put theirs on the plains northeast, or in another forest - but all are different. Yet the whole game takes place in the village! So when I remember Mario 64, I remember surfing on a Koopa shell around Bob-omb Battlefield and the slide on Tall Tall Mountain. But when I think back to Medieval Dynasty, I remember my village. I remember running to the other side to get to my barn, farm and animals, then back across the entire thing to get to my smithy. I remember I can go to my storage, get out goods for the kitchen, smithy, workshop, food storage, and tailor, and I can run a clockwise circle around my village and visit those buildings in order. But to another player, the layout will be entirely different.
Have I left a mark on a virtual world that no-one else will ever see? Did the others really play the same game if they never visited the places I did?
Was this in VRChat somewhere? Where can one go to see this?
Steam VR Home Environments on the workshop for Steam VR. Some of them are recreations, and some seem to be ripped from the original game and imported. For example, you can find Zelda's Castle, the lakeside laboratory, Peach's Castle (both inside and out) from Mario 64, and the campfire scene from FFX - it was interesting seeing the varying heights of the characters. You don't notice on a regular screen, but Kimahri Ronso is a huge guy. The environments themselves are static, but its neat to BE in a place you've been in.
I don't know if there's a way to import them into VR chat (I only spent 5 minutes in VR chat) but it seems plausible.
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I would recommend Minecraft, given what you've described here. The vanilla game has no serious management ecosystem (villagers are useless idiots you stick in boxes), but Minecolonies adds a very robust one that gives a pretty interesting progression loop. Combat can be involved at start, especially before you have armor or a sufficient area cleared to avoid skeletons finding you, but it pretty quickly reaches the point where most monsters are resources to be harvested rather than challenges to be scaled.
These games fit into a rare category. There's a lot of Civ Builders, ranging from classics like Dwarf Fortress to ZorbaTHut's own work in Rimworld, but they're usually treating the player as an eye in the sky rather than part of the world. There's a lot of Harvest Moon (well, Story of Seasons/Rune Factory-likes), but they're usually not about customizing or varying your world that much -- usually you're limited to changing farm plots and the inside of a house, and maybe a story progression marker. Animal Crossing doesn't even really get that. Games focusing on roving bands like Kenshi or Blade And Mount have even less world customization, even if they have the NPC management bit, and tend to be too high-strung on the combat side. Meanwhile, dedicated Base Builders like ARK, Factorio or Planet Explorers leave the world feeling and being very empty.
Some of that's because meaningful pathfinding AI is hard, and widespread 3d customizable worlds is Hard (so hard, in fact, Subnautica built and then stripped out the system), and mixing those things and then adding meaningful NPCs on top of that is even harder. But it also just feels like a really underexplored space.
And that's a pity, because it's a really fun space.
Could this be resolved in part by having the player design routines for the AI? Like a Minecraft/Dwarf-Fortress/Factorio hybrid thing where you have a colony of NPCs and deformable terrain and you map out what paths you want them to take and what areas to go to for each activity and how to get there. Hand hold the NPC through a daily routine, and then let it copy it and/or adapt based on modular subroutines or something. It would be more effort for the player to have to manage a bunch of stuff every time they changed the terrain, but the player designing the area is going to have a better idea of what they intend than the AI is going to, and if the NPC management and automation was a core part of the gameplay experience and well-fleshed out then it wouldn't be pointless hassle for the player.
It's a solution, and not an unpopular one for games with a heavier RTS inspiration. There are tradeoffs -- having to 'program' the NPCs can get unwieldy if either job complexity or NPC count go too high, for one example, and you generally need to cap path complexity or duration -- but they're not entirely unsolvable ones, especially if NPCs have relatively simple 'complete' paths. It can be difficult as a fit thematically, though, unless your NPCs are intentionally robotic or very habitual, or if you have a lot of NPCs.
Minecolonies tries to compromise by considering workstations (or beds, etc) as automatic waypoints while leaving the option of manually-inserting additional user-defined ones, and then doing path-calculation between those nodes (with some range and other considerations). But this does have its own issues. There's still an absolute mess of special-cases that have to be considered even while expecting players to handle most severe breaks, and a number of annoying and subtle problems that can pop up.
((And there's still some bizarre cases that break it.))
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