The highlight of today was the scheduled meeting with my supervisor, which went quite well, as per usual. In addition to exchanging ideas on the topic, the result of the meeting was that I've decided to adjust the flow of work a little, on Staffan's advice. In particular, I should try to focus less on “width” and more on “depth” for a while, and more on closer personal NPC interaction than worldwide variety.

Earlier today I was working on setting up a world map, thinking that the best way to make sure we create a system that is general enough would be to provide a large enough world for variety to thrive. A single village can only support so many bands of adventurers, shady crime syndicates, death god cults, pirates, ninjas, and other adventurous elements. However, as Staffan put it, doing so would be taking the easy way out, at least at this stage.

While I still intend to look at this later on, for now I will refocus on looking at NPC interaction, or at least feigning a semblance of NPC interaction. In short, the hypothesis is that interesting narratives can be created by exploiting perceived relationships and states that exist in the game world independently of the player; for instance, a butcher might be friends with a baker and sends the player on errands to such baker, or perhaps the candlestick maker has fallen for some local girl and wants the player to help him win her favor.

We may also have found a solution to the problem I mentioned a few days ago relating to quest archetypes, and the risk of them becoming either too limited in scope or ending up having to practically write them all manually anyway. In this area, we both agree that thinking about modelling NPC motivation might lend fuel and thematic coherence to otherwise arbitrary and mechanistic quest objectives. In other words... we know have a fairly good idea how to model what the player is sent to do, but the thematic flesh comes from modelling why she is sent to do things.

A quest sending the player off to fetch a valuable gem, while it allows the player a few minutes of activity, is ultimately not very interesting if you receive no additional information about the gem-fetching and have no chance to invest yourself in the reasons surrounding the whole situation. It just becomes a mechanical go-to-place-pick-up-object exercise. A monkey could do that. However, if you add to it the idea that the NPC has a reason for asking for a gem, it becomes more interesting; now it's suddenly a quest you are sent on by a rich nobleman seeking to complete his collection of valuable gemstones, or the above-mentioned candlestick maker wanting a precious gift for the target of his affections. The addition of the why to the what has the potential to instantly imbue an otherwise drudgelike task with opportunity for narrative investment, and I'm looking forward to looking into this in greater detail.