WHAT IS GENESIS?

A concept. It's something that I have been working on for the better part of a year now, and while I have very little physical evidence of that work, the core concept has definitely come a long way. Here's a very brief overview.

I want to create a game engine which can be used to create games in which you can really step into the life of your character, and exist in a "realistic" world. Your actions should have a real impact upon the world, not one based on smoke and mirrors. Outcomes should be permanent - a destroyed town should remain destroyed until it is rebuilt. A dead NPC should remain dead. In this lies the key to true immersion and emotional attachment.

Guild Wars 2 is a good example of this, in a very basic form - specifically its Dynamic Event system in which chains of events can be triggered, with results that temporarily change the surrounding area in ways both good and bad. If you were to simply run through each area once, everything seem to work really well, however the idea doesn't hold up as well if you choose to remain in a single area for an extended period of time. The events run on a cycle, and the outcomes are always the same - there's no true, permanent impact on the world, only a temporary one. Now I don't intend for this to be a criticsm of GW2 - I'm sure that the game decisions that the devleopers made were made for good reasons. But I'll use the game as an example here since it's a good starting point to illustrate some of the ideas I want to present.

In one of the low level areas, there is a constant struggle between centaurs and humans, which involves a number of recurring skirmishes across the map. In one of these events, a centaur force attacks a town. If players fail to defeat them and force them back, they will take over the town, and remain there until players drive them off. This is were the first issue arises - as far as I'm aware (and I could be wrong), the humans won't be able to drive the centaurs off unless a player initiates the event and helps them. And the centaurs will just sit there, doing nothing.

If the centaurs are driven off, they retreat to their camp, and players are given the quest to launch an assault. If successful, the centaur leader is driven out, and players are given the task to find him and kill him. The Humans take over the map, and all is well... until the event cycle completes and the centaurs start attacking again 20 minutes later. It's certainly a fun and exciting twist on traditional MMO questing, but it's all very artificial - the centaurs attack in the same waves each time, and you end the cycle by killing the exact same centaur boss each time. There's no variation.

GENESIS

What I want to do is create a living, breathing, persistent world which operates on its own. A Centuar-Human war such as in the example above could play out on its own with no pre-determined outcome, progressing based on a series of "random" events. Players could influence these events in any way they see fit. I believe that it should be the goal of the game engine to provide the player with the tools to play the game the way they want to play and create their own story, rather than be a limiting factor.

As a wealthy player, perhaps you could choose to fortify the human town, making it a lot harder for the enemy to penetrate its walls. A greedy merchant might see the war as a good opportunity to make some easy money by selling weapons and armour at inflated prices. As a stealthy or deceitful player, you could attempt to gain the trust of the centaurs, work your way through their ranks, and take down their leadership. As an aggrieved non-human player, you could choose to fight for the centaurs. Alternatively, as a player devoted to chaos, you could sabotage both sides of the fight. Killing the centaur leader could force the centaurs to regroup and elect a new leader, but this doesn't have to be a static process - perhaps they will become enraged and launch a suicide attack, or they may retreat further back into their lands for an extended period of time to increase the size of their forces. It could even be possible to completely obliterate the entire centaur population, permanently changing the course of the world.

TECHNOLOGY

Fully explaining all of this would take an essay worth of words - something that I don't have the time or desire to write right now, but the key to achieving this is in the concept of procedural generation. I will definitely post more information on this in the future, and my own thoughts on the future of this technique, but for now, Google it to gain a basic understanding of what it involves.

THESE ARE JUST WORDS

Yep, but everything has to start somewhere. In terms of development, my philosophy is: start small, build big. Rather than attempt to put all of these ideas to use in a single, massive project, I have decided to attempt to develop a number of small "games", each of which will be an experiment involving one or several of these ideas. The first of such projects is a fairly quick and simplistic example, but it should still be fun. Its format is similar to that of a Visual Novel or Choose Your Own Adventure type game, though I do have to stress that it's very simple (no puzzle solving or anything involved). The themes are pretty dark, and the story revolves around a central concept, which I'll let you figure out as it progresses. It's called:

'SEVEN'

The game will start when the timer at the top of the page reaches 0, and will continue with daily updates for a few days. If you aren't around for this time, don't worry, it's not necessary to play through it in "real time" - you can always do so at a later date.


- Dave