What's happening / TLDR: Developer diaries introduce details of Espiocracy - Cold War strategy game in which you play as an intelligence agency. You can catch up with the most important dev diary (The Vision) and find out more on Steam page.
"Living, breathing game world" is a marketing term that in the last few years was abused enough to be associated with big empty sandboxes rather than interesting worlds. In a way, its popularity is inversely correlated with actual living & breathing worlds - in the 1990s and 2000s, arguably more games tried to pull off ecology systems or independent lives of NPCs, despite much stricter computational environment. In 2013, Tynan Sylvester, developer of RimWorld, diagnosed this "old dream in game design, the simulation dream" as "shattered and killed" by overwhelming complexity. A decade later, wiser by playing many fantastic indie games with intertwined simulated worlds, we meet here to wonder how the dream has been partially resurrected, and how Espiocracy can stand on the shoulders of these giants.
This period has seen game developers proudly saying that they're not really in the business of developing games - they're instead creating story generators, intentional sandboxes, or straight-up simulations. Instead of trying to fit square simulations into round games, they embraced the simulationist approach as the primary driving force.
Although I'm not brave enough to verbally join this crowd (Espiocracy is very much a strategy game first), the wider lesson is used here extensively: to create actually living, breathing game world, sometimes one may have to forget about the "game" part. This is the ultimate paradigm behind the large cast of (hopefully) believable and real actors in Espiocracy.
Not Only Predictions
In cooperation with the framework of motivation and predictions, actors also observe the world and directly react to changes - usually to actions of other actors. This creates natural disputes, such as actor X vehemently opposing constitutional changes proposed by actor Y, followed by response to response, and so on. More than just reaction chains, such an approach also ensures long-running series of interactions between actors, which form the basis of relationships between them (e.g. actor A supporting actor B over a number of issues leads to an alliance and further cooperation).
In addition to predictive and reactive activity, actors (both individual humans and organizations) live their own lives in the background. Every actor has routines - regular low-level activities. Let's take a look at the most prevalent examples, and how they are tied to historical simulation:
- Going on holidays to X -> Many human actors regularly move on the map to their favorite place(s), which opens up opportunities such as interception or taking power in absentia. This is how an analog of the 1991 Soviet coup d'état is included (Gorbachev went on holiday to Crimea and was isolated there by the conspirators).
- Working usually in X -> Actors working in the same place, e.g. government buildings, bump into each other and have more interactions. Others may prefer seclusion for its security, such as the late paranoid Stalin staying mostly in his dacha protected by camouflaged antiaircraft guns, or just for its peace, such as writers churning book after book on a household typewriter.
- Active in X -> A human actor can have a specific type of job in addition to what they're known for (e.g. Orwell at the start of the game is not only writing books but also works in the British press), an organization can contribute its members to additional activities (e.g. a church may run many schools), which expands actions available to the actor, and accumulates effects over time.
- Campaigning -> An example of routine tied to actor type, in this case, unearthed before an election by political actors, which limits time available for other activities, and makes a human actor or an organization's members travel on the map.
- Hiding -> Atomic option for actors vehemently afraid of capture (see: Saddam Hussein in 2003), which severely subtracts influence and limits all the other actions for the price of eventual survival.
- Heavy drinking -> A routine may be less of a conscious decision and more of a straight vulnerability (with rare unusual trade-offs, such as two human actors with the same routine getting along).
These quasi-environmental activities are supported by fully environmental actor events. They cover anything along the lines of diseases, accidents, severe mistakes of important members, lucky business bets, random meetings with other actors, or even falling in love. In the dark world of Espiocracy, such events are not fully random (hence "environmental"), and instead, they can be caused by other actors or players, while keeping the cover of just an event (it's love at first sight, not a honeypot!).
Plots
Motivation, predictions, reactions, routines, events... If you've read any book about good storytelling or building interesting characters, you may have a nagging feeling that this list lacks something larger than just an individual character - it lacks the use of tropes. How can this system capture revenge, redemption, or more complex arcs?
Most interesting tropes are directly implemented in Espiocracy as plots, that can take over the minds of actors, and then guide their actions. As plots rather than explicit tropes, they are less of a comic book arc, and more of a realistic combination of goals and methods, for instance, very Cold-War-ish unmasking the enemy within is used to propel McCarthyism by regularly pushing actors under its influence towards witch hunt and deeper paranoia.
Usually, plots are acquired in response to something, with a classic example of a revenge plot kicking in after large damage is attributed to another actor (including the player, e.g. revenge against the CIA after it killed the family of an actor). They may end once the goal is outdated, approximately achieved, or when actor's motivation fades away.
The Big Picture
Soaring even higher in our bird's-eye view, actors are influenced not only by aforementioned mechanics (and implied wider game world, in the form of i.a. wars or nukes), there is also a dedicated mechanic for local competition between all actors.
Actors are primarily characterized by 0-100 parameter of influence, which gates available actions and their reach (as described in DD#6). Every country has a limited pool of influence tied to local population size and State Power Index, roughly enough for 4-30 influential actors. The influence of any actor depletes the pool, which establishes an emergent competitive environment:
- Actor's ability to increase influence is scaled by whatever's left in the local pool. An actor increasing own influence simultaneously lowers that capability for all the other actors. Correspondingly, an actor lowering the influence of other actors frees it up to be captured.
- Overcrowding hurts all actors and eliminates the weakest ones.
- Power vacuum is real, quantifiable, and generates dynamic power grabs.
- New actors pick up the fight by merely existing and requiring initial influence.
Final Remarks
After our journey through the game world of Espiocracy - the map, world entities, and behavior of actors - it's time to get closer to the players and gameplay (and finally some lovely screenshots). The next dev diary, "AI of Players", will be posted on March 24th.
If you're not already wishlisting Espiocracy, consider doing it
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1670650/Espiocracy/
There is also a small community around Espiocracy:
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"Passion is the friction between soul and the outside world" - Andrei Tarkovsky