Sorcerer King: Feeding the Dungeon Master

from SorcererKing Forums

One of the major new features of Sorcerer King is the Dungeon Master.

Essentially, the Dungeon Master is the AI behind the game making sure that things stay interesting and different from game to game.

In coding terms, the Dungeon Master is a big fat state machine that you feed with your actions.  Here’s how it works:

 

First, I create a narrative resource.  In this case, I’m making one called Indifference.

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I am putting a _ in front of the name (_Indifference) because if we later decide to have some place where we show these DM resources I’ll filter based on the first character being a _ in the resource type. If it becomes really popular, we’ll just add a new XML key but we’ll see.

Next, I create a quest that might include an option that results in some indifference.

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If I pick the answer that has indifference, I can have it give the player a “reward”

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Thus if the player chooses this, 1 indifference is added to their hidden “resources”.

Now, when I create DM events, I can have options that look for indifference.

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So in this case, if the player has done a lot of “indifferent” things you can trigger on that.

Similarly, you can even create events that are triggered specifically on that with a % chance attached.

Mind you, everything I’m doing here is something you’ll be able to do (we’re not going to hand out the editor until the game’s released, however as we are constantly updating it).

Connect this to the Steamworks and suddenly players can start building a richer and richer game experience.

In the meantime, we will continued to have Cracked.com writers doing the hard work of writing the quests (seriously).

40,792 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

How do I know that the Dungeon Master is not a troll? And you know what they say: don't feed the troll  :grin:

But seriously: I love the idea of an AI director behind the scenes. I secretly hope that DM will troll me from time to time!

EDIT: I have an idea for a DM mechanic. DM could calculate player's luck (something like: how many times player rolled 0, instead of 20, if you know what I mean). If player is lucky/unlucky DM could punish/help him in some funny way. 

Reply #2 from SorcererKing Forums Top

Example from a quest I added today:

 

One of my pet peeves with quests is that if I lost, it really sucked.  But now I can give players an intangible consolation prize that might matter later in the game. It might matter a lot in fact.

 

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

That's awesome.

Reply #4 from SorcererKing Forums Top

That does look pretty cool!

Reply #5 from SorcererKing Forums Top

Is that the quest editor for the game? So, you could set up quests that can increase indifference, but also reduce indifference. So, you've added a pre-req for the quest to be triggered... that has so many possible quests.

This gets me rather excited to play this game further.

Reply #6 from LittleTinyFrogs Forums Top

I see huge potential here, for the game and for modders. Did you say you're going to make the editor available on release? That'd be sweet.

Imagine opening up other win conditions based on extremely brave, extremely cruel, etc. decisions...Or if not that far, giving you a way to find gate keys without attacking the lieutenants, or creating a teleporter right to the sk's gates.