The mighty Dahlan Empire is falling, ravaged by a mysterious plague and internal unrest. While surviving powers and invading nations fight among themselves, adventurers and mercenaries venture inside this land full of opportunities.
Create your character and embark on an epic journey, enjoying complete freedom in a true sandbox RPG experience. Everything you do affects the world and its people. All important events are recorded. All characters will interpret what’s happening based on their morality and their faction.
The game’s narrative changes based on your choices and the people you help, making your adventure in the world of Dustgrave unique to you.
Hello everyone!
This Dev. Diary will cover the most important feature in Dustgrave: the Relationship System.
Aren't you tired of NPCs forgetting what you did for them? Isn't it a bummer that you just saved an entire city and only got "+5 Relations" with the local noble?
Well, we have a solution! Thanks to countless hours of mental gymnastics and coding, we developed a complex system of records that the game can use to keep track of everything happening in the world. In particular, everything you, the player, do.
Stealing an apple? Ending a bandit's life? Trespassing? Saving someone's family? Helping someone with a quest? The game will remember everything, just like your former toxic partner.
By recording every meaningful deed, we can calculate relationships between characters and factions at runtime instead of relying on a simple score that wouldn't reflect a constantly changing world.
Since no one cares about boring theory, let's start making examples.
Let's say you, the player, a brave yet sexy adventurer, are traveling around the world and meet a group of robbers. They chase you and demand all your valuables to be handed to them. "Sir, that sounds like a felony." is what you say. "Haven't you read the game description? This is a dangerous land. Anarchy reigns supreme."
A violent fight erupts.
Thanks to being an actual person and not a foolish AI, you beat them, leaving their lifeless bodies on the ground. Only one of them manages to run away.
In the meantime, many new Records have been created:
How do those records affect your relationships with the rest of the world?
Well, for starters, the people you just killed aren't going to like you. Yes, they are dead, but maybe there are ways to convey with them in a fantasy setting. Just saying.
All their relatives? They are going to hate you. You can be sure of that. That record alone may give you a staggering -100 Relationships with their closest relatives, and maybe a -35 if they were only distant cousins.
Their faction will not like it, but they have so many unimportant bandits in their rank (at least twelve, I'd say) that they will only care a little. We can numerically define "a little" as something like -2 for each of them. That alone won't make their faction outright hostile, but will make any future attempt to repair things a little trickier.
What about local authorities? Killing is considered by most people somewhat rude, but since you've been rude to their enemies, they will actually like you more for that!
Every NPC in the game will interpret any meaningful record according to their existing relationships and ethical values.
Dustgrave's database has more than a hundred unique Records we can use. For each one of them, we can define the impact on relationships and how people with different moral values react to those records. So, not only will the world remember what you (and even other NPCs) did, but every single individual will respond uniquely.
That's not it. Those Records can also be used in events and dialogues. NPCs will directly refer to the things you did for them, and special events may trigger in reaction to your actions.
Did you steal a lot of valuables from a merchant? They may pay some bounty hunters and put them on your tracks.
Did you save someone's life in the past? Well, you can rub that on their face and tell them it's time to pay back the favor!
Did you forget the game unpaused and stared for hours at a guy working in the fields? I mean, there is no point in making a Record for that. We are not tracking that. But we could do that if we wanted! So don't stalk people, not even unintentionally!
We’re designing Dustgrave’s combat system to be deep and challenging, giving players a lot of tactical options to engage their enemies. In this article...
Dustgrave's demo currently includes all features and much of the game content. Feel free to try it and share with us your opinion or suggestions!