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At last, our little game Chaos Chronicles found a home for its community!

Our official forum is hosted by the RPGCodex, one of the last enclaves for devoted gamers of turn-based cRPGs.

(Warning: initially, you could get a little bit embarrassed by some kind of  ’humorous’ alerts. But, as soon as you’ve registered your account, just stay in the Chaos Chronicles forums and you will be safe.)

Since the WordPress comment section is not really suitable for complex conversations, we would appreciate discussing future blog posts and any other topics regarding our game there.

Please enter the forum HERE.

(for german visitors/für deutschsprachige Besucher: in diesem Forum ist ebenfalls eine Sektion in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)

When we started out working on the Chaos Chronicles combat system we had a lot to do to lay the basic foundations. We had to get our character animation system running and implement stuff like combat logic, hexboard generation from physics, or hexboard queries for paths and floodings at runtime.

That left little time to care about something as high level as AI (Artificial Intelligence). As a consequence our first prototype for AI ‘grew’ with time. At first, all it could do were melee attacks. Then we added ranged attacks. Then we implemented an enemy spell AI for intelligent placing of area spells (trying to maximize hits on enemies and minimize hits on allies). Finally we included rather specific routines (like fleeing) for characters that suffered from spells like fear. We realized that AI has to be able to deal with script spells that are loaded at runtime (a feature that could be interesting for future modifications). To allow for that we coded routines that simulate spell executions and judge their effects in a more general way.

Thus our prototype grew and grew until we were sure that we covered every capability that could possibly be required. Then we started to build it from scratch to make it more flexible and debugable. And now we feel like we can finally talk about AI.

The headline for this article is also the paradigm we had in mind for development: What do we expect from a turn based AI? Well, technically, we expect a lot! A demon wizard that fails to choose his fireball spell over a magic missile, or who fails to place the fireball in a way that maximizes damage on the player party is a no-go. An assassin who simply attacks her closest target instead of trying to get your wizard in the back is not only little immersive – it also obliterates strategic bottlenecks like doors.  And a human NPC ally that is not able to plan her path avoiding enemy attacks of opportunity is an annoyance. So when we talk about expectations from a ‘technical’ point of view, one can say that we expect ‘a lot’. A good (OGC 3.5) AI has to be able to perform a lot of intelligent choices for enemies that we expect to behave intelligent.

Assuming that we built an AI that is able to live up to those expectations, it is time to consider a different connotation of our headline: What do we expect from AI not in terms of quality but in terms of personality? If every enemy behaved optimally the challenge would be maximized – and immersion would be all but gone. We want goblins to horde around their closest enemy. We want orcs to ignore attacks of opportunity. And an ogre might even be too stupid to leave an area that is affected by a damage-over-time spell. Even beyond ‘intelligence’ enemies should show personality in every decision that gameplay offers: While most races ignore unconscious or otherwise helpless enemies on the battle field and proceed to face those player characters that can still fight, certain foul creatures like goblins or gnolls should be known for finishing off their helpless foes. It’s those little twists that make combats immersive.

We hope that – apart from the challenge of making our AI capable of  ‘good’ decisions – we also do a good job to diversify enemy behaviours enough to allow you to detect patterns and become especially hateful of one enemy or the other.

Once again, allow us to mention Knights of the Chalice here. It is owing to that game that we had a very precise idea about what we had to do when we first started prototyping our AI. The AI of KotC (and, of course, its excellent encounter design) made almost all combats interesting. It may be prone to crowd in bottlenecks (a fact can be exploited a lot once you get the stone wall spell) but hey – weaknesses are something you also expect from an AI to have fun, another fact that we are well aware of.

Hopefully, we can soon present you some combat vids that display various AI behaviours. Until then, feel invited to tell us what you think about our ideas and what you consider important for a turn-based AI. And if you have a memorable story to tell about a combat against an especially cunning AI: share it with us.

As some of you may have already noticed, we haven’t posted many news here lately due to the tons of work we’ve poured into developing the game this month and the time this took. We promise to deliver a new major blogpost next week, but in the meantime please meet the first representatives of all playable character races in Chaos Chronicles (click image to enlarge):

The ingame character creation will offer you the complete range of classical RPG races: Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halflings, Gnomes, Half-Elves and even Half-Orcs.

Furthermore, we are pleased to confirm the following playable character classes: Fighter, Cleric, Rogue, Barbarian, Wizard, Ranger and Paladin. We hope you enjoy this little piece of information and, as always, please feel free to leave a comment below!

Over the past year, we have been working on a reliable engine, the OGL 3.5e rules implementation, hundreds of effects and thousands of assets for different scenarios which our level designers have put together to beautiful places that could be called ‘narrative’ on their very own.
Professional authors developed a world and story that are deeper than anything we (being non-professional in that area) could have come up with on our own. And now it’s finally time to sew all of this together by using the mechanism that beats as the heart of most RPGs: dialogue trees.
We are aware that dialogue trees have their shortcomings and there’s probably not a player out there who felt that any game *always* provided all the answers he or she would have come up with. But the sheer narrational potential of this mechanism prevented us from ever raising concerns about their final application in the game.
Over the last weeks we completed our own dialogue system that includes a powerful and comfortable tree editor to provide our designers with a tool to quickly create and modify dialogues for the game:

Apart from being good-looking it provides the power of lua-script that we already use to trigger stuff like levers, traps and secret doors. That means a designer can easily reward you with any object in a dialogue, or set an NPC’s faction to hostile if you insult him. Even better, the script allows for checks of the player character so certain dialogue options are only available if you char’s intelligence or charisma matches a certain minimum value, or only if he is an elf. They are even able to create easter eggs like, let’s say an NPC that only talks to you if your party consists entirely of dwarves.
Now, we are looking forward to use this mighty new tool to complete all dialogues in Chaos Chronicles and we are eager to see how it will help us to sew the story and the world together and provide all the characters (and especially NPCs that join your party) with an appearance that is both deep and real.

Of course, our budget and development time won’t allow us to replace Fallout New Vegas’ entry in the Guinness Book of Records (with 65.000 lines of dialogue in a single player RPG). On the other hand it is quite obvious that quantity cannot make up for quality and rather than having thousands of lines to read, it is more important that your conversations do in fact have an impact on how the world evolves and on the path your character chooses. For example, it is important that you have real choices rather than just being only provided with a couple of answers that all turn out with the same result. With the story almost finished and level construction coming to an end we will keep all that in mind when giving Chaos Chronicles the ‘finishing touch’ in terms of story-telling.

But now we will stop chattering and finish this entry with a fitting quote from Planescape: Torment, our all-time paragon for great dialogue design, before we give away too much.
Because, as the ‘Book of Pestilential Thought’ tells us

After some very busy weeks, we can continue on posting more information, news and media to our blog now. We feel sorry that we haven’t had the time to update this blog recently (as frequent as we did before). But meanwhile we’ve made progress in developing Chaos Chronicles.

Before we post another blog entry about game design related topics soon, we want to share those fresh screenshots with you. After quite a long time, we can show you new screenshot of the world map. Furthermore, you can get an impression of a village where the player can trade, rest or talk to villagers. If you like animals, the villages in Chaos Chronicles will be definitely your place to stay after returning from adventures! As usual, you can find all pictures in our Media Section as well.

First of all, a happy new year to all our fellow readers!

This blog post will explain one of the most important features in Chaos Chronicles: a game engine that includes both systems, turn-based as well as real-time.

There used to be a time when pretty much every role-playing and strategy game out there was turn-based. That was partially due to technological restrictions but also due to the fact that these games were derived from pen & paper rpgs and board games which are both usually ‘turn-based’.

In the early nineties, Dune 2 (by Westwood) created the RTS genre (at least on the PC, because Herzog Zwei was Sega exklusive) or, as some would say, changed strategy games to be real-time instead of turn-based. At the same time games like Ultima Underworld did the same for the RPG genre. In both genres the change usually implied the change from boards to analogous movement. And interestingly, in the RPG genre, it also implied a change from character parties towards single character games.

Yes, Dungeon Master and its imitators, i.e. ‘the subgenre of dungeon crawlers’ (revived by the great Grimrock) had a little headstart compared to the rest of the RPG genre and, yes, real-time-with-pause-RPGs revived character parties, but that didn’t change what happened next: With real time combat being new and exciting and turn-based being (or being said to be) old and boring developers ceased to make turn-based games. Not because all devs were morons but rather simply because no one – including gamers – was interested in turn-based games any more at that time. But even if we (and hopefully you RPG vets out there) are eager to see turn-based combat revived, we have also gotten used to the amenities of real-time, regarding, e.g., the exploration of the game world. For us that meant that we would have to feature both real-time and grid movement.

Marketing experts probably couldn’t resist using pretentious terms like ‘hybrid’ at this point, but we’ll restrain ourselves to saying that our levels have to feature *both*.

As already implied in this blog post’s introduction, (real-time) analogous movement is much harder to achieve than (turn-based) field movement.

Luckily, our editor already featured automatic navmesh generation from our last projects. And it was obvious that we could make use of that navigation mesh to automatically compute a game board for combats. To do this we basically just have to lay a 2d grid of potential board fields on the navmesh polygons, and use navmesh raycasts to test in which directions they should be connected to their neighbours.

We had a prototype up and running rather quickly and from there it was a long way of improving data structures and implementing algorithms to make use of the board data, i.e. path search, flooding with weighing of fields, etc. and to get the board (including combat animations and stuff) neatly visualized (neither being overly prominent, nor to technical, nor too hard to see and so on). Also there’s always a list of problems that you don’t expect in the first place and it took time to handle those. Especially party movement in real-time mode and immeersive examination of objects in the game world were tasks on their own which we will probably cover in blog posts to come.

By now, the logical stuff is mostly solved and we (even our level-designers) are pretty content with our auto-generated combat boards. Hexagons were definitely the right choice for this, as you can just build levels looking as naturally as you expect them to, and the hexes will mostly fit themselves into it like a charm.

As far as gameplay is concerned, there are still some open questions. E.g. a player moving his party around in exploration mode has little control over the dynamic movement of the party following him. However when a combat starts the characters’ positions suddenly become relevant as characters are simply placed on the closest board field. The resulting lack of influence you have in your party’s initial positioning is cool for surprise combats but might be annoying for a combat you already expect. We considered manual placing of the chars but found it too immersion-breaking. Depending on our polishing prioritization we might leave this as it is, but as always we appreciate your opinion or suggestions.

These days the development of RPGs – if you have a closer look at the technical side – focused on the graphics-part. Sure, music and sound effects are somehow important, too. But the main focus is definitely on the graphics side. That’s sad.

You know, the first real cRPGs had their focus not on the graphics. Graphics weren’t as good as these days of course. That wasn’t possible due to the hardware-limitations. People had to use the music, they had to use sound effects to create atmosphere. Nowadays you use some super hyper graphics, put in some epic music and think “well, that’s atmosphere!”. And in this case you couldn’t be more wrong.

Music is a very subliminal way to manipulate the mood of the player. Especially in videogames it can affect the mood in so many ways.  And that’s why we not only have a look at the graphics but also on the music (and on the sound effects, as you already know). We’ve given and we will give a lot of attention to the creation of the music for Chaos Chronicles.

Currently we are working on the different combat themes. You’re eyes aren’t foolin’ you: To achieve a deep atmosphere here we decided to not only have one, but several themes. We had the feeling that the players feeling should differ if he (or she) is fighting against different types of opponents. So we made the decision to go for unique themes for each type of enemy.

An example: Skeletons are different from human knights. They do not only look different, they do not only fight different, no, they also have to sound different. And you need another atmosphere for both of them. Or think about goblins vs. a diabolic demon. Shouldn’t be the same theme, should it?

What does that mean? We’ll explain that. Every type of enemy will have it’s own rhythm, harmony or melody and even it’s own signature instruments as an addition to the original Chaos Chronicles instrument setup (which consists of a string sextet, some large o-Daiko Drums and several more instruments that have a very unique sound that perfectly fits to the dark and gloomy mood of our game).

We guess you want to see (or hear) some example, right? Alright. Let’s have a look at the undead. If you fight against these you will hear (besides the mentioned instruments) a scary sounding Indian dilruba and anklungs which sound a bit like rattling bones.

Now that you’ve read so many words you’ll also get something to listen. Three examples. Each one standing for a different type of enemy. But please keep in mind: We have reduced the quality of these MP3s for several reasons. The first one being the traffic on the blog (as visitor numbers are growing and growing). The second reason is the fact that you’ll be able to enjoy the final quality in the final game (and keep in mind that some music parts might change during the process as everything is still work in progress).

• Combat Theme Sample (Undead)
• Combat Theme Sample (Demons)
• Combat Theme Sample (Story related human enemies)

As promised, we just released the first Trailer of Chaos Chronicles. Yes, it still does show a work in progress stadium, but we didn’t want to postpone the video again. The old grid is still shown in some scenes but we still hope that you like it!

And with the first trailer being available now we’d also like to confirm that Chaos Chronicles has been approved by Steam. So yes, the game will be available there once it’s ready. The product page itself should be available very soon however. And yes, we’d also like to confirm that we are in discussions with several other digital platforms as well.

Please keep in mind that all materials shown in the trailer are still work in progress.

It’s time for an update. The last days we’re pretty much full of work. Some of you may have noticed that we also posted some screenshots here and there on several forums or provided some sites with new material (e.g. the guys from RPG France who did an interview with our producer). Now we have added all the screenshots to our very own media-section, too. Yes, that’s an unusual thing for us. So far we just released a batch of new screenshots once per month. And it’s not yet December. So, why are we doing this?

Well. We’d like to announce today that there won’t be new screenshots in December. We’d also like to announce the reason for that. We promised a trailer several times before. And now we can officially say that the trailer indeed isn’t far away anymore. Instead of static screenshots you’ll see Chaos Chronicles in movement for the first time in December. And not at the end of December but much, much earlier. It will, of course, contain a lot of WiP-material. A short example: If you have read our blog for quite a while you’ll notice the old grid here and there. With the release of the trailer another small announcement will be made – just as a little hint.

Just a few thoughts: Isn’t it funny that so many games which are set in a somehow-medieval setting have so many futuristic gadgets included? Just a little example: Go into a dungeon and have a look at the map. Of course, a map is needed. Otherwise the player can easily lose his or her orientation. But often the maps are atmosphere-breakers.  This is caused by the way they are used. Usually they just consist out of a screenshot from the whole dungeon from far above. Some markers here, some markers there. Ready is the map.

That’s the easy way. But in our eyes it doesn’t fit in such a setting. There is no system like GPS, there are no satellites in such a setting. Yet the maps of the dungeons usually give the player the impression there might be such things. That’s why we chose to go for hand-drawn maps for each dungeon. This fits better into the setting, doesn’t damage the atmosphere. The maps do display the dungeon but it doesn’t feel like you are using some superhighend-technology. Here’s a small comparison-shot of the Map from above and the drawn map for it (still WiP).

UPDATE: Due to your feedback, we changed the style for our Dungeon Maps to a more hand-drawn style. Thanks for your contribution!