Satellite Reign - Squad Based Strategy from the creator of Syndicate Wars

[Vortex]

We're doing a reddit AMA at 21:00 GMT, 16:00 EST (in approx 8.5 hours)

I've posted about the reddit iama to a few subreddits , you may like to go upvote them for visibility.

http://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/1i03om/we_are_5_lives_studios_the_team_kickstarting/

http://www.reddit.com/r/gamedev/comments/1i03re/we_are_5_lives_studios_the_team_kickstarting/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Cyberpunk/comments/1i03sw/we_are_5_lives_studios_the_team_kickstarting/

http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1i04px/we_are_5_lives_studios_the_team_kickstarting/

[Vortex]

Agent Death

• Agents can and will die!
• If your agents body dies their consciousness is removed and implanted into a new body. 
• Agents will keep their skills and abilities which are carried across with their consciousness. 
• New agents are cloned from a selection of bodies back at base.
• New bodies can be obtained by multiple means, like: purchasing them from the black market or harvesting them from the population. 
• Cloned bodies have genetic traits that give small bonuses to your agents. 
• Agents lost in the field will lose their augmentations and equipment but if you are fast enough you can salvage the corpse for spare parts or we have multiple insurance packages available to suit your needs.

 

Classes

• Your squad is comprised of 4 different agents, each with their own class or speciality: Soldier, Support, Assassin or Hacker. 
• This is only the agents starting point. 
• You are free to customise each of your agents to be fully combat oriented, fully espionage oriented, or anything in-between. 
• Agents will be able to be customised by giving them different augmentations, skills / abilities, weapons and gear. 
• Each of these customisation options will allow them to play more of a combat role or an espionage role, or anything in-between.

[Vortex]

AI for emergent gameplay

Update #17 · Jul 13, 2013 · 40 comments

 

MikeD here.

I thought I'd write a piece about AI and how I'm coding it up with relevance to emergent game-play.

You may not want to read on if you prefer to think its all done by magic, but if you want to take a glimpse behind the curtain read on.

I like my ai's to react meaningfully to stimulus, which basically means giving them the ability to see and hear.

That may sound obvious, but a lot of ai's in games don't react to anything, they are simply pre-placed in the world, told to go to sleep and are woken up when the player enters a specific trigger box, perhaps halfway down a corridor they are in. So they wake up and start executing their pre given command shoot player. 

You can get away with this in linear games and sometimes its actually the best way if you want to have total control of your game, everything tightly scripted, almost like the ai's are following a movie script. Zombie dog jump through window 3 seconds after player steps into this invisible box. It can make games atmospheric, but the downside is its totally the same every time you play through, you die and restart the level, same guy triggers, same dog jumps through window, Yawn! 

I much prefer games that take a behavior driven approach, you basically code up multiple behaviors make them react to stimulus and give them a bit of decision making capability. 

So lets take a standard behavior, Guard. You can imagine this as a typical security guard, night after night given the duty to guard an area. Lets give him an area he is going to guard some kind of compound, nobody should be entering this secure area. 

The guard has 2 main senses we need to worry about sight and sound, sight has a field of view (FOV), say 150 degrees and a range, the range might be a km, but he also might not care about what anyone is doing 100 meters outside the volume he is guarding. Hearing has no FOV but has a range much shorter than sight lets say 100 meters.Sound travels slow so would take about 1/3rd of a second to travel 100 meters. Then we factor in reaction times too. 

Events, events are the means by which we communicate things happening that ai's need to know about. 

Fire a gun, broadcast that event to everyone within 500 meters say, here's the key though, the sound of the event goes into a queue for everyone within range. They will receive the event when the sound has correctly reached them, the visual of the event will reach them instantly, but if its outside their FOV or something is blocking their line of sight (LOS) they won't react to the visual cue. So really 2 events are created and are propagated at different rates, Gunshot audio event and visual event. Audio Events also are less precise they may only provide the listener with a possible volume for the source of the sound and the volume will be bigger the further away the sound is, and again if there's no LOS maybe the sound had to bounce off a few surfaces to reach the listener so its even less accurate where the source is.

How people react to events is decided by their current behavior as well as various stats they may have.So back to our guard, a gun shot outside his guarded area is probably going to raise his attention if its close enough, what's some of his basic responses we may have actions for.

• Go investigate 
• Take Cover 
• Sound an Alarm 
• Run Away and hide 
• Simply turn and look in that direction and wait 
• Ignore it 

 

With a bit of fuzzy logic we can decide which of these options the guard is going to take, we might factor in his boredom levels/ tiredness/ bravery perhaps its a violent area where gun shots are frequently heard outside his compound. 

To decide which action we take, we look at a set of essential properties that the AI is looking to maximize such as Financial, Safety, Food, Sex, Excitement, Sleep, Respect.

These properties generally decay over time, people get hungrier,sleepier,hornier..Doing something heroic might increase your respect levels and excitement levels.Running away might decrease respect a little but increase your safety but decrease finance (you are not paid to run away). 

Now each of the 6 actions above can have a +/- value assigned to each of the 7 essential properties for each of the type of events that might happen. 

Investigating a gunshot might increase heroic and excitement and decrease safety a little. 

The amount these essential properties changes can be scaled based on distance of the event, and also base stats such as how brave the ai is, or intelligence, or monetary greed etc. 

So now this Guard can compare the scores for all his choices choose the highest scoring option, compare it perhaps against his current activity and decide what to do. 

For extra dynamics the essential properties feed into each other, too much excitement can be detrimental to safety, sleep and hunger. 

Too much food can make him sleepy. We can factor sleepiness into reactions 

Everything feeds into everything else causing a chaotic system, but also a believable system, a systems where the Guard will go get some food because his hunger level got too high, or he fell asleep on the job because he got to sleepy, or he decided to run away from a shoot out because he’s basically a bit of a coward and the financial gains of defending the compound didn't out-way the risk of being killed. 

These stats can also factor into taking a bribe, or being distracted by an attractive member of the opposite sex, or what the guard is going to do when his work shift finishes. 

Of course the event might not be a gunshot, it might be a car crashing through a gate, or having a gun aimed at you, or being offered a bribe, or an explosion, or a bullet ricochet, or a near miss from a laser beam, or a muffled grunt or a soft foot fall behind you, the lights cutting out, a siren blaring, discovering a dead body... 

The bottom line is by giving AI’s behaviors, and a behavior being set up with lots of possible reactions to lots of different events, and factoring in base genetics of each AI with their current state and needs, we can make the world react to the player in a believable way, and can remove the scripted feel to the game as the AI reacts different depending on how you break into the compound to steal the computer equipment, by stealth, by explosives, by sheer gun power, perhaps you just offer the guard enough money, perhaps one of your female agents seduces him.    

[Majek]

So no Paypal yet. :/ Goddammit get funded already so i can support it too.

[Walsingham]

I only managed to read two phrases there:

 

- emergent gameplay

- female agents seduces him

[Spider]

So no Paypal yet. :/ Goddammit get funded already so i can support it too.

 

Yeah, was thinking the same.

[Humanoid]

I only managed to read two phrases there:

 

- emergent gameplay

- female agents seduces him

If one of the female agents in Syndicate tried to seduce me I'd be bloody terrified.

[Walsingham]

 

I only managed to read two phrases there:

 

- emergent gameplay

- female agents seduces him

If one of the female agents in Syndicate tried to seduce me I'd be bloody terrified.

 

"Happiness is waking up, on a bright spring morning, next to a beautiful, passionate, multi-murderess."

[Keyrock]

"Happiness is waking up, on a bright spring morning, next to a beautiful, passionate, multi-murderess."

I thought it was a warm gun.  Now I'm really confused.

 

This has really slowed down, though it should still make its goal.

[Lord Weh]

It's looking promising... I suspect it'll be funded, not so sure about the stretch goals though.

 

It's a shame a lot of the bigger sandbox destructable city elements will be reliant on stretch goals apparantly, but there's always a chance they'll add it in an expansion or some-such. If they get the formula for the base game right, there's lots of ways they can expand this in future. Looking forward to it.

[Vortex]

I'm sure they will hit 440k

 

 

Hopefulyl they manage to have paypal open before the last 48 hours and reminders....Btw stretch gals annunced:

 

[Chippy]

Hope this isn't aganist forum rules, but the original team that created Syndicate and it's sequel have started a Kickstarter (with only  5 days to go).

 

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/5livesstudios/satellite-reign

 

Syndicate was the game that made me a PC fan, and although a strategy game, it had - and looks like this title will aswell - as much RPG elements as the latest so-called RPG's.  Just without the dialogue, you could essentially build cyborgs and were responsible for your own resource management in obtaining personel (like scientists to add to your R&D department) to research better implants and weapons.

 

It also had a great story, with politics, science and social engineering all factoring into the potential freedom that is lost when corporations govern it all. 

 

I can still remember scenarios from these game's playing out that were as complex as any RPG in terms of game mechanics and variety - where else can you don a clone shield, sneak into a heavily fortified base, mind control your target and usher her into a hover car while your team mates have created a diversion by blowing open the front gates and storming in guns blazing...then as you try to make your getaway, the local poilice force get alerted and you speed back to the train station in both cars firing at the police in pursuit.  

 

On the same level: an enemy syndicate had tried to secure the train station (the getaway point) but ran into the turrets and traps I left, I destroyed a bank to gather funds and fought off the police response, I raided a enemy cult's base to aquire technology (using one of my disguised cyborg's to get close, then self detonate - I had already aquired his replacement by mind controlling an enemy syndicate's agent) , and aquired the passcode to the aforementioned base by trailing a ceo and mind controling him so that he could accompany me into the target area. 

 

 

I replayed Syndicate Wars a year ago and it had more atmosphere (from a game made in 1996) than many modern titles.  If they can remake a successor then - well I'm personally never getting married.

Edited July 23, 2013 by Chippy

[Gorth]

Post is fine. Just slightly out of place. Moved to the gaming section where is quite on topic

 

Loved the original Syndicate to death. A pox on who or whatever prevents American Revolt from getting released together with the GoG version of the original.

[Majek]

Shouldn't you merge it with the existing thread? Or just delete outright?

[Gorth]

Shouldn't you merge it with the existing thread? Or just delete outright?

Has to be very offensive to get deleted. Merge it is, thanks

[Vortex]

And they hit their funding goal!!! YAY

[Keyrock]

And they hit their funding goal!!! YAY

Sweet.

 

 

They should hit at least the first 2 stretch goals (composer, localisations), I'm hoping they can hit the 3rd (destructible environments).

[Chippy]

There isn't enough advertising for some of these Kickstarters - I only happened across this because of the latest Numenera update, and even when I backed it just got a few recommended games from Kickstarter (some that I've backed already).  It's a shame that some games can be missed especially by the hardcore fan that visits RPG sites, but games like this fall outside of that genre.  If games can still be classified as belonging totally to a genre.

 

I just look at the Kicking it Forward page every once in a while, but still miss some great stuff.

[AwesomeOcelot]

I miss a lot of stuff too, KickStarter's site is still terrible for browsing, and the listings on the "popular" section aren't even correct, when you go down to the individual sections they're correct. Kicktraq's hotlist does the job though, and RockPaperShotgun does a Kickstarter segment weekly.

Edited July 24, 2013 by AwesomeOcelot

[Vortex]

PayPal is up!!!

 

http://satellitereign.com/pledge/

[Huinehtar]

New update: localisations and Tek video

 

 

 

[Huinehtar]

BOOM !!!!!!!

 

14 hours left, now to Factions, District and Russell Zimmerman!

 

[Guest Slinky]

Oh awesome, they got Russel Shawn and enviromental destruction while I wasn't looking! I just jumped from cautious enthusiasm to 

[Majek]

Finally i can throw my money at them too.

[melkathi]

Pre-Alpha available to those with the appropriate pledge tiers. (I think Transistor and above)

 

Awesome!