[previewyoutube=OGOsgFJWrv4;full][/previewyoutube] [h2][b]Salutations, Industrialists![/b][/h2] In today's Dev Diary, we are excited to share a first look at the Events System in Gilded Destiny! This video is an informal question-and-answer style chat among four of us. We start out with generic questions about Events Systems in grand strategy, then get into more detail about Gilded Destiny's own system, and specifically its Editor and ease of modding! Also, Check out our seventh Alpha Roadmap Update: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/2189430/view/4443457098120954106 [i]You can find the full script for the Dev Diary below.[/i] - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Let us know if you have any questions or feedback over on Discord. And be sure to wishlist us to stay up to date! [b]Join our Discord community today![/b] https://discord.gg/3d77T9gxDF Speaking of Discord, we have started rolling the Discord roles to our Kickstarter backers! If you have not yet completed the Kickstarter survey we sent out, please do so. If you have filled it out, and are not yet in our Discord server, join and say hello in the main channel to let us know you're there to claim your role! Our Kickstarter officially ended in April, and brought in a total of £31,974 GBP, which is 159% of our goal! We offer the most gilded appreciation to all of our backers and our community. Your support, positive feedback and encouragement, and our growing vibrant community of industrialists motivates more than ever to make Gilded Destiny the most moddable, immersive, fun, and grandest GSG out there. You can access the survey on the Kickstarter website: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/gildeddestiny/gilded-destiny-a-grand-strategy-game?ref=bjurrh Finally, if you are interested in what we do and want to join us but do not see a relevant job, send us your resume at jobs@aquilainteractive.io! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [h2]Script for Dev Diary 22:[/h2] Salutations industrialists. It's Marc, your host for today's gilded destiny Dev diary. I have a surprise for today's dev diary and that I am joined by some of our team in our London studio. We are joined by none other than Kenneth, Gilded Destiny's executive producer. Hello. John, our lead content designer Heh. And James who joined our team a few months ago, as a content designer. Hi there. Welcome everyone. Before we get started talking about today's topic of the event system, I wanted to update everyone on the Pre Alpha. As many of you are already aware, we have launched the pre Alpha of Gilded destiny into a small group of about 100 testers chosen from our Kickstarter and Modi and backers at random. So far we have received lots of constructive feedback, suggestions and bug reports as we continue to develop certain systems of gilded destiny. We are also beginning to transition to a more feedback based approach to development. We recorded a Q&A section with questions from members of our community. However, this video with only the discussion about events ended up being nearly 30 minutes already, so we will post another video with the Q&A at some. So, James, before we start, tell us a bit about yourself and your experience in gaming. Right, so I have been playing games, especially strategy games for, you know, the past 10 years started with, you know, Sid Meier's civilization going into many Paradox Studios type games you for that kind of thing, which also kind of led into how I started making games. Because I got into modding EU4, I joined the Anbennar team, a very large team. And I was part of that for several years, eventually working my way up to the lead of the New World Aelantir. After that, or taking a bit of a break, I moved to Seattle, where I worked at Nintendo as a debug tester. I did that for about a year. Hmm. And then from there you know, I was still trying to really get into the industry. Because debug is a nice stepping stone, but it wasn't my goal. I wanted something more design focused and so I was very happy when I sent out a cold application thanks to one of the calls I saw on your YouTube videos and here I am now. Hmm. Perfect. Well, we're happy to have you. Yeah. Happy to be here. As we are a small but growing team, we are always looking for new talent. So if you're listening and have relevant experience, please send us your resume and cover letter as James did. OK, without further ado, let's get on to today's topic, the event system. So this section will mostly be question focused, so I will ask some questions to our three panelists and we'll go from there. [b]So first question, what were some of the inspirations for the events system and the editor in Gilded Destiny?[/b] I think in terms of inspirations, we we ultimately want the system that will allow us to try to create as much. Kind of events that we can have that reflect the kind of history people will expect in the game, so to to do that, we kind of need a quite robust system to sort of allow different events to. Work the way they do. As I recall, what you also said, I remember this from quite long time ago you said. One of the driving principles of the event system is, in fact, that it enables us to represent history, that our own, that the rest of the game mechanics can't do. So that's kind of also another major purpose of it is to is to be able to show that side of history that that the core game mechanics don't cover in quite the same way like an assassination for instance. Right. Yeah, of course. And one of the beauties of a very robust event system is that it allows monitors to create kind of pseudo systems that don't normally exist in the game. That was something I mentioned very early on when I joined was the idea that we should be able to fire an event from as many different places as possible, because then anything an event can do. That system can do to certain, yeah. [b]What are some of the most important elements to consider for an event system in a grand strategy game?[/b] An event system, I mean. Some of you've got the basic building blocks right, so conditions and effects are the two basic building blocks and those need to be comprehensive enough that you can both ensure that the event doesn't fire when it shouldn't. For instance, if a country has been destroyed, well, events relating to that country needs to take that into account and events related to other countries. That would involve that country. Also need to make sure they can fire without that country existing or that you know when conditions are in such and such a way that that that it shouldn't. That it shouldn't fire if or if the. Yeah, that sort of thing. It's a yeah, bit of a messy, terrible way of explaining, but the general idea is that it needs to be comprehensive enough to cover lots of. Different conditions, right? You'll seem to be able to target several different kinds of objects in the game. You need to be able to say like, oh, if this leader if it has this trait. Do such and such to different leaders or you know, do any kind of other effects you know you need to be able to target countries, provinces, possibly even like a global kind of event as well? Yeah, exactly. Hmm. Right. And I mean, of course you need the event system to be fun. You want it to reflect, to be able to reflect what happened in history. And you also wanted to be able to model kind of an alternate history, I suppose, and through all of these things that we mentioned, I think those are those are the main goals, I suppose, right. Yeah. Also, it should be very easy to make events. It shouldn't be a tax where you have to go through several different files just to figure out just to make one event right? I'm I'm I'm just a little concerned that these these two questions are things where players can find a lot of issues with. It's like you didn't consider this. Uh, your, your your entire focus is wrong. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, that's fine. Consider cutting these ones as you want, yeah. So they're so general that. Well, what do you? Mean when it comes to missing or. So basically, we're talking about a lot of different. We're trying to give a very generic answer, which I don't feel like it really answers much about what event system really is. Because for people who are watching this, they kind of have a good idea on what it should do. For us to sort of explain that, I feel like it would kind of almost feels like it's. Yeah, of course. Yeah. So I think the point here is we're not trying to give an exhaustive list about everything that goes into the event system. So if we didn't highlight something you feel as important, chances are we have considered it and may already have a plan to implement it. But do let us know. Yeah, yeah. Great. [b]So next question, tell us about some of the details of the events system and the editor. What are the main features?[/b] Well. As you'd kind of expect, the main sort of building blocks are you have conditions where those conditions are met. Certain effects are triggered. You also have. Events that pop up and you as the player have options. You pick one of those options. It triggers certain effects when you pick that option and and that's kind of the basic sort of structure you would expect for an event system of this kind. In terms of the how you actually work with that, I mean it's kind of fairly similar to the sort of if then statements that you'd expect from coding, but but for the most part, it works in blocks. You don't have to write any actual scripting to get that to all work properly. But that's that's the kind of rough outline. Of it, it's. It's a lot of drop down menus, a lot of option selection, not much actual writing is necessary. Except when you're trying to specify, say, a certain country or, and even then, actually, that's a lot of drop down more often. It's when you're writing the body for an event text or or or an event option. Yeah. Great. [u]So in terms of writing events, what are some of the main principles for writing?[/u] Well, one of the major principles we've kind of been trying to stick to is that and I've mentioned this another one as well, but a general principle is that we want to give the player the freedom to make bad choices, so in general. When we give them options, some options will obviously be bad ideas, but they should still be there and and obviously sometimes the bad idea is the historical one as. Well. So that's one of the driving principles. Another one is that obviously we're a small team and this is our first project. There's a limit to how much we can cover. And so instead of trying to cover. Instead of kind of trying to spread ourselves way too thin, generally our main principle has been we'll try and do a few things really well. They're trying to do lots of things, kind of not so well. So that's another major principle there. Yeah, I'd, I'd say those are probably the two of the main ones we've been using to to drive us forward in terms of, you know branching, we do want the player to have choices and for those choices to be meaningful as well. So the idea is that options will have. Most of the time, we'll have a significant effect. You know, and and if they won't, then we question whether it's worth. Including that at all. [b]OK, so how will certain events be portrayed in the game?[/b] Certain events. Well, there's a major distinction between events and decisions. For one thing, in in terms of the fact that essentially decisions are events that you as the player or the OR the country in general, can trigger themselves. Usually the AI will choose to trigger them when they're available. But essentially a decision is just a case where. Like an event, certain conditions need to be met before it can be triggered, but then the player chooses whether or not to trigger. It other than. That it's pretty much like an event chain you it's just one that you as a player start an event chain. On the other hand is a decision that happens to you as it were it you're it's forced upon you rather than you getting to choose to. Get off. So that's so a lot of examples for, you know, decisions would be things like the at least from Prussia side, the Austro Prussian War or the Franco Prussian War, both things that Prussia decidedly instigated. Admittedly, it needed certain conditions to to be. To apply before it could actually kick off both of those wars. But in general terms, they still did choose to do so. Whereas from Austria's perspective, that's not a decision, that's something that happens to them. That's an event that is caused by a pressure choosing that decision. Another major thing, of course, which, as I'm sure you can imagine. There's never a case where a country has something happened to it that that was as a result of an event choice that a different country made. So say you're. Prussia and you, you can't unilaterally declare an alliance with Austria. That Austria also doesn't get an event for which says to Austria. Do you want to have an alliance with Prussia? Austria also has to make that choice. So in that way, even though obviously when you single player you're the AI is what's gonna be making that choice. But each country will still get an event when it's relevant to them. When if you were playing that country, you'd get a choice. So the countries are still getting those choices. So yeah, that's another major thing. Obviously for specific events, you'd have to ask me about the specific event and I could go into details about how we're representing that, but bear in mind that a lot of them haven't been done yet and we're still working on a lot of them. Very good. [b]Well, what happens when you make the ahistorical choice? How much alt history will be portrayed in the game?[/b] Well, as I said before, there's going to be a limit to how much we can do there purely because I mean, you could have entirely different history timelines at at major break points throughout the 19th century and and to a certain extent those and you're never going to be able to cover them all. Part of the point part of what we've been aiming to do with. The event chains in this regard. It's to sort of leave these buds in various places. If you imagine, like the kind of entry people talk about branches, a lot of the time, well, certain buds here and there where it's very obvious that that's where an old history timeline would start and we might venture into that a. Little bit and then to a certain extent we'd have to kind of go and then you're free to to explore that in any way you want. Sometimes, of course, it depends on your view of history and and causality and chaos theory and all that sort of thing. But in a in a general sense, in the as as you'd expect with any scripted game, right? But but the history has to snap back into position, or has has a greater propensity to snap back into position. Then maybe in the real world it will otherwise do doesn't mean that there aren't some cases where it absolutely can go off the rails, but obviously don't expect a huge amount of content in that direction because we kind of need to. Again, there's limitations to what we can do with the team. On the other hand, part of the whole point of trying to make this easy to mod is that we sort of leave these buds there and and if people want to explore those and equally we might explore in future, they're available for that. But yeah, that's that's the general principle in terms of how we're dealing with all history. Obviously, in some ways actually one of the major things we're trying to do that's a little bit different is do a little bit more exploration of all history than a lot of other historical games have tended. Do because we have the freedom to, in a way, and also you know, I mean, for those of you who to pardon the Kickstarter, you might have noticed some of our merch. We definitely want to do something with Ernest Augustus. Yeah. Yep. And of course creating the creating greater Austria as well. We have a medal for that, so. Yeah. And we, we absolutely we should have. Some sort of. Decision there too, yeah. Exactly so. All right. [b]So in terms of the editor, what's been completed and what remains?[/b] Eek. Well, there's been quite a lot of iteration on that as we've been so as we've been creating more events and decisions, we've noticed things that the editor is lacking and then we've had to talk to the programmers and then they make changes and then we come back to it and we find more things. And as you'd expect, there's a certain amount of iteration and improvement that's been constantly going on there. What is currently being worked on at the moment is. Enabling certain if else statements in effects and nested or statements in conditions. So for instance in a condition you might say if. Hanover is Ally or Hanover does not exist. Is a condition that that's obviously. You can make that in two separate events and then sort of make them both happen at the same time, and one of them will be true and one of them will be false. But that's a lot of excess events kind of popping up and needing to be tracked. It's much more streamlined to just have a nested or statement within a different within a different or statement. We had some extent ability to do that, but not as much as we needed really. So ultimately there's an extent to which what is being worked on the editor now. Is actually just streamlining stuff that would otherwise take a lot of time to input. Yeah. I mean, just keep in mind that we we are a smaller team and we are building this from scratch and we are discovering a lot of things that in other games that might be something that's taken for granted for us. We we do need to make them from scratch. So it it, it is a iterative process where developers will have to. Programmers will have to design it and then for us on the content side, we'll have to. Sort of experiment and try it before we find out what's missing, what's making our job more difficult? So it's definitely will take time. It's not perfect. What we have is definitely not perfect, but it will take time for. Us to get. There, yeah. Right. We're still recording? Right. Yeah, we can use some of that and and also what I what I can add on top of that of course is that. Yeah, yeah, absolutely, yeah. Yet we're there's an extent to which as well. There's the attempt to streamline 2 processes right on the one hand. If you just enable the editor to do everything that coding can do Then, ultimately there's no point having an editor right? You kind of need to find that happy medium between having a tool that facilitates all of the functions on operations of coding without actually requiring you to code. And so ultimately, there's an extent to which the programmers and us need to find that middle ground, which is ideal for doing the things we want it to be able to do without requiring additional skills to do those things. That's it. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you did take a little bit of what I was going to use for my explanation, but no, it's fine. Yeah, I'll. OK. Well you can say. It as well. Say different things. Yeah. Did you have anything to? Add or not. For that? No. OK, cool. Yeah. So next question. [b]Why don't you guys walk us through the process of writing an event?[/b] Right, so it. Will begin with a good amount of research. You know there is a lot of history that our game covers. We can't all be experts in every little bit of it. Of course not. So we try not to get bogged down in too much detail, but we do need to have a general understanding of the. The different interests that were vying against each other at the time. Yeah. So you know, for Prussia, for example, we might have. How the potato famine affected them? You know, we need to figure out generally which parts of Prussia were most affected. You know how they responded? Like the different parts of society you had, the nobilities response, the peasants response, the bureaucracies response. These all come together in a conflict. With different people wanting different things, right? So then taking that general idea like these. Forces going at each other and trying to simplify them down into decisions the player can make. You know, what are the, what are what is happening in their country at the time at the current point is the air Stocker very powerful. So you want to limit their ability and you can use this event to do so. Alright. That's kind of the approach we take. It starts with research, then we need to figure out how to make that useful for the player. It's a bit like a form of translation, in a way translating sort of real history into the Straightjacketed forms of conditions effects 100 word text boxes, that sort of thing and yeah, conversion, as it were, yeah. Hmm. [b]What are some of the different ways that you can create conditions for an event? What are some of the different ones?[/b] Oh, like something I've come up across a couple of times is, you know, if you have say. Going back to the potato famine, you know that affected specific provinces very heavily because that is that was the dominant crop in the area. You might not make a specific country event, you might just make a province event so that whoever owns that province, they are the one affected. And given that we are currently focusing on pressure, we will still tend to tailor those to their perspective. But you know there is a certain extent that we want it to be generic. So that's any country that currently controls this, what their response would be of course. [b]What about when it comes to deciding on effects? How do you make that decision?[/b] Well, as I said a little bit earlier, in general we'd like it where it makes sense to do so for. Options to have meaningful effects if you pick them. Obviously. Sometimes the meaningful effect can be not selecting the other two options and their effects or what have you. But yeah, the the general idea would be that. It might apply modifiers for a certain amount of time. It might apply a single thing that happens. It might give you, give you certain things, take certain things away, you know, all sort of things you'd imagine of of changing the numbers, changing the the the variables in the system. Hmm. Also something that's interesting is that you really had this push and pull. Between the our developers and our modern community, once they have established themselves. Because a modder would want as many effects as possible, they want to be able to tweak as many variables as possible, but that obviously takes development time, and so the extent to which we open up our game to have effects for any little detail. Monitors would be very happy about that because it lets them. Create effectively new systems that we couldn't even thought of and, but it just also just takes time and money. Yeah. Of course. I mean. To be honest, I I want to be able to tweak every variable in the game as well, but it's more. It's more about what we can convince the programmers. Yeah, yeah. To do so, yeah. Because ultimately there's not too much difference between, you know, making content and and modding a game, right? Yeah, exactly. Well, as we've said many times, the tool we use is the tool that we'll. Be releasing. I mean that's kind of the the point, so yeah. Yeah. So that actually leads perfectly into my next question kind of aimed at you, James. So as you've just come on board in the last few months and have a background in mode. [b]How easy was it for you to learn how to use?[/b] The editor? Yeah, absolutely. So there were things that I really liked about the editor. For example, when it comes to modding a game, the documentation could range anywhere from just several wiki pages. You have to troll through to nonexistent. And you have to maybe go to discord or something like that, just to find any information you can. What's nice about the editor is that. It's all block focused, so you will set a condition you want. It gives you a drop down menu and it tells you what your options are in this context. Currently I do think it has some limitations in its learnability because it gives a bit too much information. It doesn't. It gives you options that don't actually. Do anything because it's not filtering out what doesn't apply to the current context as much as it could. At least uh, but you know that is something we're still working on. And uhm, the point though is that well, John, as you mentioned earlier, there is a push and pull where it's an editor will have less flexibility than a scripting language will. But it's so much easier to use than having to pull up. A wiki page of what are all the effects that exist? How good is the documentation? Did this change to the last patch? When you have an Editor that's already updated for you. You know what is there? You know what you have access to. No. And and to. A certain extent it also removes, at least to, to a greater extent than a coding language. It removes the sort of scope for error, right? Because obviously there's only so many places you can make mistakes if you're not actually allowed to make those mistakes by virtue of the kind of functions you're able to perform. Now, now there are limitations to that though, because something I've learned from modding is that you can force these the script into areas that the developers do not intend for it to do, but do actually work, and those can lead to very nice results. But you know it that's probably from from a game. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Stability standpoint or a mod stability standpoint, you know the. Cons are probably not worth the pros. I mean, to be honest, I'm sure that models will find ways of... Like what's the word... not... jury rigging? But you know the the messing with the editor in a way that will enable it to do the things that we don't intend for it to do. But they'll they'll get it to make to do those. Oh. Things, I mean, I've been amazed by some of the things models can do and ultimately it's in Unity. So people who know that engine very well will be able to tinker with it. But. In ways that will, I'm sure, will surprise us. Yeah. Sure. Yeah. One thing that I think we should talk about is also the map. Yes, so the map editor is. I mean it's kind of fun to use going through and just sculpting your terrain and making. You're not. You're not gonna be having fun. You're. Gonna be doing your job. No, no. Of course in in my spare time. I I play the separate game that we have. No. I mean, you're actually not the first one who told us this, where some people have suggested we should just push the editor itself, the map editor, as in the kind of an independent thing where people can just have one. I believe it. Yeah. Yeah. And you know it, it is pretty cool. Like, it's good fun to muck about. With yeah. And sure there will always be a little bit of tedium, especially when it comes to creating an entire world. There are so many provinces you have to make like. But like, I'm very excited to make the Anbennar world in it, for example. And yeah. Yeah, definitely. And of course, you know there. That we're aware that there are split opinions about hexes, but obviously the big advantage of using hexes is of course the mod ability. When I was spending a couple of weeks fixing the coastlines, it it didn't it. It was something I could do simply by adding more hexes in certain places and taking them away from others. You know, that sort of thing. Is a lot more straightforward to do than if we had to draw everything, so yeah. And it helps that we have enough hexes so that we can get that more fine grained detail. Fairly well, yeah, yeah. And otherwise get. 1.6 million hexagons and I think 5 pentagons. Mm-hmm. Or 12, some 12 Pentagons. That's it. Same. I've looked for them. Yeah, I've never been able to find them. Keep looking. They're right at the corners of all of the icosahedrons. Right, right. Yeah. The one I tried to find was at the at the Poles because I figured that that's got to be where some. Of them are. Yeah. You know one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Interesting. Maybe that could be a community challenge once. You have to find when the game comes out actually. I really hope we can have more exciting challenges. Yeah. All right. So that actually concludes actually, no, it doesn't. I think another point as they kind of pointed out earlier where you have it's kind of work in progress where we are kind of talking to the programmers to decide on kind of what are the things that's needed in the editor. But at the same time, the work doesn't stop there. In fact, once the game is out, our intention has always been this editor will not just be used by us, but it will be used by the community as well. So kind of as the word goes on, it will as we go further into alpha. This will be something the Community will sort of begin to sort of influence how the editor is done as well. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Great. So anything else? OK, OK. I don't know. Like and subscribe. Yeah. Yeah. No. As always, if you have not already subscribe to our YouTube channel, please do so and wish list us on Steam. So that's all for now. Have a gilded day. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - [h3]Also:[/h3] Be sure to listen closely to the backing tracks in all our videos—they are the pieces you will come to hear in the game, composed by John Skoog. Also, the solo clarinet on this track was performed by yours truly, Marc. Listen to some of John Skoog's other work on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/3PGd3lmURa72oFasqK3N7N?si=nDl4DUTRQGKKLaDtGcHBJw John Skoog Music: https://www.johnskoogmusic.com/