January Roundup

It's been an exceptionally productive month this January, despite some fairly severe illnesses, family surgeries, all the new year taxes, and car accidents thrown in the mix.

The first big one is our Name Generator script, which Kent and I have finally put together as we get our Symbol scripting language and custom XML serializer built up. 

Symbol is extremely extensible an very open.

During development, it means we can use human-readable XML files to add tags to all our objects. That gets serialized at runtime into a single binary file, which is silly fast and compresses all that data into something that takes at most 3 seconds to read instead of 30+, meaning our procedural generation's first step is blazing fast, letting each step after that go even faster -- including saving and loading.

In this case, Symbol saves a list of Syllables and Phonemes which have tag traits that establish a grammar.  The generator can assemble names that are from 1 to 4 syllables long, curated from a list that reliably produces names belonging to that faction's unique language. 

Names of the Acavii Empire

The Acavii have a very Latin adjacent language. Brought to the Fragment ~300 years before present as a lost Roman Legion, the survivors of this first contact integrated existent tribes into their new political bloc. Forever in a futile search for a way back to Rome, the literate members of their surviving founders established rules of succession and the rites of citizens in that original Latin, suffused with the languages of the tribes they encountered and merged. 

Despite efforts to remain pure, the Acavii were forced to adapt over time. Multiple near collapses of the empire followed by hard won resurgences have caused information loss, linguistic drift, and localization for the diverse sub-cultures that unite the tribal allegiances into one empire. This "Acavium" is Latin-ish. Some words survived intact from the founding Latin speakers, others were mispronounced over the ages until the mispronunciations and colloquial dialects became irrevocably dominant, their original grammar and sounds forgotten. 

The Acavii you encounter now are likely to have a "Gaius" rather than a "Caius" or a "Legiona" instead of "Legionis." 

Likewise, their names adapted to the new power structures which emerged over time. One's first name is usually short, often from an ancestral language unrelated to Latin such as Damos or Aigan, followed by their family's tribal identity such as Dacius or Evaninus, and the "patronymic" or "Fatherly" name of that family's immediate local ruler, such as Adovolcanus or Phylixes. 

Daeas Dacius Secuqunias

Marcavi Evavinus Maxas

There's also a sexual difference, where women have their own softer sounding names. These are often amended to their husband after being wed, losing their original family / tribal identity in the process. This can be especially harsh for more female dominant societies like the Vyn or freedom based societies like the Hethinn, where political marriages come with onerous burdens as the Empire attempts to erase local identities with a new national identity. 

Duotia Maxos Valphesius

Atilla Galvi Pierenix

Names of the Gehen Empire

The Gehen have been a fact of life on Morgana Fragment for so long that even the most ancient surviving hieroglyphs from thousands of years ago contain mentions of them by various pictographic names, usually in scenes of graphic violence. Some names have fallen into and out of favor, but the Gehen have always called that name familiar. 

The Gehen Empire until recently was a loose collection of war bands and nomadic herders who claimed one or two major cities and trading posts as their source of leadership. No one leading the other, tribal alliances would form and dissolve so frequently that entire families would be swept apart and scattered to the wind. So much so that family identity became much less important than who your warlord happened to be. 

These marauding raiders and steady pastoralists clashed with the densely populated urban bastions of the elite in both culture and language. The resulting linguistic hodgepodge would have one set of rules for the city dwellers, and other for the myriad territories of the grasslands and hill countries. Not to forget those along the Lines Gehenis that border the Acavii Empire, or the wild Hethinn folk to the West.  All spoke something slightly or significantly different, often only partially mutually intelligible. 

Their main spoken language at the time of your arrival on Morgana Fragment is called Gehenese, which consists of an amalgam of trade dialects and the more dominant scars of past attempts of nearly-successful warlords attempting to unify all the Gehen lands under one banner. Sounding like a mix of Mongolian, and Mandarin, Gehenese has many harsh consonants and accents fused together into a tonal language where different tonal inflections will convey different meanings. 

Notoriously difficult for outsiders to learn, Gehenese has consolidated into one language for the first time only recently. 

Under the edict of the newly risen God-Seer, Rhygr, his prophets and ardent missionaries have eliminated the former folk religions, supplanted with a single monotheistic deity which speaks through Rhygr, and shares a personal relationship to all the damned souls who have been reborn in this forsaken shard of land in the black void. 

A Gehen first name is typically something like Batzig or Ragan, and their last name a mix of their tribal identity amended with some part of their warlord. Its common for some derivation of Rhy to appear as well, adding the name of the new supreme god to their own identity. 

Shasej Tai Aang`xha

Taiche Lahk That-tsu

Are typical male names.

Keke Taiang`xha

Lallivi Lahk That-tsu

Are typical female names. Only slightly softer than the males, using the same warlord and tribal name. 

Names of the Vyn Mahali

The Vyn are a group who have inhabited the Fragment longer than most. The Vyn faith considers them the first men and women to walk the Fragment from which all others grew, but there are ruins older than their earliest known settlements which predate them by tens of thousands of years. It is true that the earliest Vyn inscriptions mention being alone in the vast desert, the scattered peoples of a great cataclysm which befell "the second world."

The Mahali is the modern incarnation of a nomadic culture recovering from the collapse of a once massive Vyn Empire. Their ruins litter half the fragment with monuments that boggle the mind, ruins of cities so vast it's almost impossible to imagine they were ever abandoned. The Mahali is a loose confederation of these nomadic groups trying to reassert control over the wastelands their fellow Vyn now wander, setting up towns in old ruins and plundering them for riches. 

The Vyn language is called "Vynca," though they have a slightly different word for language itself for every shade of emotion it may be spoken under. There's a Vynca for trade, a holy Vynca for the saying of prayers, a Vynca for use at home with your parents, a Vynca for your lover in bed, and a whole litany of Vynca speech for acts of violence & witchcraft.

Because their caravans and herds travel vast distances across the Fragment, the Vyn language has picked up bits of Acavii and Gehen, integrating their ideas and beliefs into their own system of thought. It's easier to communicate with Vyn traders than any other, and their lingua franca is often used as an intermediary between the others. Their names are also multicultural for the same reason. Their far traveled folk bring back more than just trade, but children of distant parentage. 

Atama Sa'iti Antlik`rel

Molozi Jira'hit

Josar Babosa

Bomba Nal`eheem

Are typical male names. 

Pelaay

Amililiway 

Mahana

Oarana

Are typical female Vyn names.

Names of the Hethinn Tribes

Fairly recent arrivals on a grand scheme, the Hethinn descended as a mass of people over several generations, part of a large spike in arrivals that happened close together. They found themselves in the frozen tundra of the far Western side of the Fragment, which faces away from the star for part of the year. 

After an initial wandering towards more temperate forests, the founding families encountered peoples who had been there far longer than they had, and integrated into their culture as much as was possible.  Many dozens of generations later, their folklore still tells of the folk who fell from the sky to live on the shattered skull of a slain giant, the skies full of its thoughts, and the people lost in the dark around a quiet campfire surrounded by strangers. 

These initial settlers lost all their original literature, and only had oral traditions to survive with as they fought their new rivals or married into welcoming groups. Many old tales perished after intermarrying with locals, who taught them how to survive the strange diseases and creatures they encountered. What little writing from the first generation remains are attempts at preserving those original survivor's tales, their runes, and finding some way to keep that emergent tradition alive. 

True writing wasn't brought to the Hethinn until later, usually through Acavii and Vyn explorers, who helped codify their language into a written script inspired by those haphazardly preserved and poorly documented runes kept by the founding families as heirlooms. 

The Hethinn spoke some derivation of old Slavic, Germanic, and Scandinavian, as they were abducted from Earth somewhere along a mass migration route probably in the 800s CE. Fragments of their languages are still persistent despite recent additions from pre-existing cultures. Ever adaptive, these peoples united with those indigenous groups, adopting their faith-ways and melding the languages together. 

Few misremembered tales from "Mithgar" remain, while new sagas of Morgana heroes have taken the fore. Having a difficult time interpreting their utterly alien circumstances, many words for animals and locations were already known to them by the time their groups set up camp, grafting common Nordic names onto them. 

While fairly large cities are now established, the local populations of the area are displaced into a scattering of interrelated subcultures in independent townships. Most Hethinn villages are arranged in "Thornes" meant to protect them from Groling incursion, which in the dark winter months are frequent, since the subterranean monsters are allergic to the intense radiation of the local star that persists across the rest of the Fragment. These Thornes are not frequently hostile to one another, but family feuds and degenerating trade relations often spark tribal conflicts, preventing any semblance of a coherent, unified Hethinn identity. 

The Hethinn have no sense of family names. Personal names are little more than nicknames, such as ,"this one we call Groka, he's the son of Hravna from Idyllin."

"This woman is Hildi Fyrhira, because of her fiery hair, as opposed to Hildi Inevisdottr from across the lake."

Hanvald Thrigsson

Elrud Ganggarsson

Brynnir Ingsson

Svinthir Thorinsag

Are typical male Hethinn names.

Inevi

Liltha

Oddja

Heithun

Are typical female names. 

I've also embarked on a big project to get the Negotiation Minigame fully fleshed out, probably a year from it being ready for prime time in game. 

The Negotiation System distills the most common parts of any argument or discussion and distills it down into a set of cards, played over a series of Rounds. 

You begin with a Greeting Card, which donates some kind of benefit to all similar cards you player later in the conversation, such as bonuses to Threats or Added Relationship Points. 

You may then choose to attach a Modifier to that Greeting, which confers some added effect. It's up to you if you begin with a strong opening, or simply play one greeting and get straight to the point. 

In this Greeting Chain, we've started off strong. This is the player talking to a man named Gaius, and Acavii Arms Trader who they have had positive relationships with in the past. They speak enough Acavii not need to play an interpretation or gesture card, and have a high enough relation that a Warm Greeting followed by a Charming Smile isn't off putting -- Gaius has a high Empathy score, so he's a bit more personable than most. 

We also offered him drink of Acavii Wine, which adds up to:

x2 Relationship Bonus for every Charm or Social skill (our player charter has invested an extra skill point in their Empathy -- Warm Greeting skill).

2 Relationship points from Charming Smile

3 Weights from Good Acavii Wine, times 2 from Warm Greeting = 6 weights in our favor. We also gain an extra 4 Relationship Points from the base 2 the wine gave us, and our Warm Greeting modifier.

We End our turn since we ran out of opening options that fit our intended warm, upbeat opening. 

Gaius plays a Modest Greeting, which is neither good nor bad, since he is pretty even keel despite our Friendly relationship. 

He also deploys his Offer of Genuine Thanks for the wine. This grants another 1 Point of positive Relationship, and gives him a weight for his future arguments. 

So far we're in the lead. 

It's time to get to the point of why we are here. 

We don't want to make a threatening Demand, we're not here to simply give gifts or ask for an item. We want to set up a regular trade caravan between our town and his. 

So we select from the list of Proposal types Trade, select Scheduled (as opposed to Just This Once) from the dropdown, and select "By Caravan..." as the delivery method. 

We are purely trading Food for Weapons, Primitive Medical Supplies, and Armor. No money involved.

Gaius lives on the fringes of Acavii Territory and his town has low food resources, but high metal and weapon crafting services. So we're doing him a solid, and he knows this because of his Wants & Needs system. 

Our town has plenty of food so we can spare it. 

This puts us on even footing with Gaius. 9 compared to 9 for a trade that's slightly in his favor over ours, because we offered no money and he's eating the caravan costs. 

After we End Turn, he accepts. We each gain 9 points of Positive Relationship, because it's not a lopsided scale, everybody wins, we have shaken hands on a deal that brings our relationship closer together. 

You could of course skip all of this and just Greet, Offer Trade, and that's it.

Just pay for it and forget about it. 

But Negotiation will help ensure you get what you want at better prices, and also improve relations. 

There are other paths here which involve making Demands, issuing Threats, and hurling curses -- these are an aggressive path that increase your Threat (and their fear of you) and lowers their relationship.

Sometimes its better to be feared than loved. >:D

This system is still a long ways away from done, but it solves a core issue with any Procedurally Generated Narrative Game -- how do you tell a character based story without needing a highly advanced Artificial Intelligence writing your dialogue for the myriad of conditions? 

Here we've distilled it down from a crazy system of string replacement and giant text libraries of generic responses, and instead built a simplistic but satisfying machine to carry that burden for us with abstraction -- which remains game-play relevant and powerful. 

I'm most excited to have religious debates between the various faith systems, and political discussions around the merits of War & Peace between factions. You can build rapport with people from different cultures with gifts and shared beliefs, convert them to your side with persuasion, and convince them to join your own Faction. 

There is a long, long road to getting there, but it's good to know that what started out as a major tech risk and possible hurdle now has enough design work put in that I am excited to work on it. It really shines a light on a dark qusetion mark looming over the project, so I'm glad that even through implementation & integration is further down the road, we have the art assets, we have the initial proof of concept, and we can proceed relying on that feature as a solid hook for our gameplay loop. 

I hope you are all well, and let me know what you think of this month's progress!