Developing Stories for the Frontier

[MrFURB]

This is a topic spawned from one of the recent dev streams where they were discussing how to implement premade storylines seamlessly into Starmade's ever-changing universe. In this context story is different from lore; Lore is information on why and how things are the way they are while stories are active plots that the players become a part of. Similar to the proposed procedural faction missions, but are instead handcrafted and always present.

The wording of the devs suggested that they were planning on having certain missions and stories crafted that would be active on every universe, singleplayer and multiplayer. They were then hammered by a storm of 'what if's' and 'how the hell's'. This would be the place to voice those.

These premade missions or stories would need to be relevant in universes with vastly different NPC factions (as even the Trade Guild may be destroyed in future updates). They would also need to be scalable to any number of players both friendly and hostile on both singleplayer and multiplayer games.

Phew, that's a lot of foreword. Anyways, here are my thoughts on the topic.



One thing that I learned from DM'ing a few D&D parties is that stories set in a sandbox where anything goes should be treated like temporary mini-lores. That is, you are setting up a scene and a stage where the players are the primary actors. The 'story' is just the progression from one stage to the other; the setup. Never have an actor whose precious lines could be destroyed by a missile, magic or otherwise.
In simpler terms, let the player(s) be the dynamic characters or have the important characters off-screen NPCs communicating with the players via handwavium.

I think a storyline would be one of the best ways to give direction to exploration and PvP, among other activities that are currently lacking proper risk/reward. Having an objective like 'capture this rare object/creature/ship' broadcasted to multiple players would definitely ensure some fights...
And of course that brings up the topic of progression. How does a server-wide storyline progress? How does it affect the server when some players may decide to ignore it while other wish to pursue it for hours each day?

 

[Criss]

Essentially, if we give StarMade a story, a few things need to happen.

It needs to scale with the players present.
It needs to be dynamic.
It needs to be optional.
It needs to only progress if the player(s) want it to.

Any sort of short story lines we include for the individual factions are easy. If that faction is gone, then you simply don't have those missions anymore. It could also adapt, giving you other ways of completing or starting missions, even if the original source is gone. Short isolated stories are not really an issue and will be prominent throughout the universe as missions or a series of missions given by factions.

IF StarMade was to have a larger, server-wide story, would you guys want that if it was optional and if we could pull it off?

This is speculation. This part of development comes far down the line, as we have yet to introduce NPC factions. I personally think we have an opportunity to introduce a worthwhile story for players to engage in, in a sandbox style game. Something not seen too often, if at all. I think this is where the PvE side of things fall flat with these types of games.

 

[Reilly Reese]

At least having the framework would be extremely helpful. An integrated system like this even barebones itself would, with the proper tools give server owners a way to give their own server it's own lore and universe stuff.

 

[Valck]

IF StarMade was to have a larger, server-wide story, would you guys want that if it was optional and if we could pull it off?

I'd prefer the lore, back story and storylines for my universe to be unique and emergent.

Concentrate on giving players and admins powerful and accessible tools to create their factions, lore, and back stories. If you make it modular enough so these stories, or individual storylines ("story blueprints", if you will), can be plucked out of one universe and plugged into another, the community could provide those stories, and servers can either create their own background, or cherry-pick from those player created stories.
Akin to localization, the names and places could be variables that can be randomly generated or handcrafted as each server sees fit.
This could even tie into the mission system, where players could create missions using those tools, that could then - at the discretion of the server admins, of course - become part of the server's NPC mission pool.

The Saga of Ryzom is a game I happen to know that has a similar feature ("The Ring") where players can create complete adventures within their personal, instanced space. Players can share their adventures, cooperate in their creation, and build upon each other's works. If you haven't heard of it, it might be worth a look.
Ryzom is a MMORPG with one single universe, so they had to have it instanced so as not to affect the world's lore, but this wouldn't have to be the case in StarMade.

 

[reptillianstew]

It needs to scale with the players present.
It needs to be dynamic.
It needs to be optional.
It needs to only progress if the player(s) want it to.

I think that a good way to satisfy all of these in a server wide story is to focus on the main three factions of the universe you've already teased and a grand conflict between them. Have the TG, Scavs, and Outcasts be very well established across the universe such that left alone will fight with one another but never truly destroy each other without outside influence.

Player and procedural factions in contrast start small and expand but are always in contact with and have to deal with these main factions (unless they're deliberately avoiding them) allowing opportunities to align with and perform dynamic and meaningful quests for them which would increase your standing with them. It should be inherently more difficult to contact and align with the scavs and outcast as in you have to seek out the outcasts or destroy TG stuff to get the Scavs' attention while the TG may offer new players quests right off the bat.

While this isn't really a grand story or plot, I don't necessarily think that starmade needs one. While not really similar in terms of gameplay, planetside 2 also has three main factions that are constantly vying for control of the server and the only real storyline and objectives outside of preexisting lore develops naturally from the conflict of the factions and allows even the lowliest grunt to feel like he's contributing and impacting the balance of power by helping his faction.

This all would simply require quests to improve your standing with that faction and reduce yours with its enemies, feel meaningful within the great TG vs Scav vs Outcast war, and finally remain optional if someone would rather focus on PvP or dealings with procedural factions.

 

[nightrune]

Ok so where do I start:

After discussion with others after the stream. I think Criss is right in trying to provide a more story-like experience, but I really think it should break down into two very specific things. These concepts would allow you to build a dynamic universe.

First you need Quests -> These are things you do for someone. Highly encapsulated contained ideas.
Second you need Events -> These are things that can happen to a sector/system.

With these two basic stimuli you can create a very active universe and in doing so allow the NPC factions to react differently. This creates a very personalized story for each player as well as each server.

Lets walk through a specific scenario chat talked about:
Lets say a system was a nebulae, on some long time scale (I was thinking a month of real time). This nebulea has an event where it gets condensed into a star and planets. This event by itself could generate quests. Study sector for Faction Points, Help evacuate the stations that are there maybe the Outcasts are there and need help. Maybe more ion storms happen and if you have good sensors you could help someone navigate it. Things along those lines.

Lets reconnect with our first idea though. A brand new star. After our month new planets form. Another event could be life happens with the modular fauna system and could happen based on certain rules. This life could eventually take over the galaxy but that event could spawn quests in that sector/system to search for the life, or help an outcast ship that's been stranded and holding off one of them.

These events could act as stimili for the NPC factions. Say its more likely for scavs to show up during ion storms in nebelua or right when a star is about to go super nova. Creating quests that the faction tries to fulfil itself or publishes publicly.

The NPC's themselves could also act as triggers to events. Imagine a race like the reapers from mass effect getting triggered in the far reaches of space, and the players getting a notification that an unknown race has started travelling to our galaxy. Now they get to make a decision, Restart the game lol, go to another galaxy, or build up for the challenge. That's the type of story I'd like to hear about on servers.

It doesn't have to be NPC factions either. One suggestion that Saber should at least hear about as well was the idea of Space Whale migrations. Deceptively rare by themselves a whole pact would truly be a sight to see as you waft across the galaxy.

The analogy I would use is to make the universe a boiling pot. The player is just on the surface riding the waves and bubbles. That becomes their story based on actions they pick and areas they explore.

Technical side of it:
I'd be building most of this off a behavioral tree and treating the Sector/System as an AI as well. Most nodes of the behavioral tree would be in lua and could be added and the trees could be built outside the game. Allowing server admins to build new nodes and experiences directly in the game. Specifically building a new race/faction with the tree would be easy given the right tools.

 

[jayman38]

Another fun thing that could go along with missions is a Choice A or B mission, where you can do one thing or the other, but not both, with different risks and rewards for both choices. Even if it is highly encapsulated, it can give a player a sense of agency, to make even a small choice.

Examples:
You can rescue the slaves in sector A before they are moved underground for an increase in favor with a certain faction, or destroy a pirate ship in sector B before it moves on, to obtain raw loot and maybe a credit bounty, but you can't do both.
You can build a planetside house for a NPC for a credit bounty, or you can deliver the raw materials needed for construction for a slightly higher bounty, but you can't do both.
You can destroy the ship in sector A for a credit bounty, or destroy the ship in sector B for a smaller bounty, and improved faction disposition, but you can't do both. (Maybe doing both rescinds the bounties and drops the disposition for all factions.)

With choices, you can introduce moral dilemmas. Players with no moral compass or min-max play-style will always choose the more lucrative choices, but other players will find fun in making the choice. This is where the player actively chooses to think, fight, build, run, trade, etc. You'll find players "roleplaying" a specific kind of astronaut. (Pirates with hearts of gold, strict merchants, justice crusaders, royalty who can't be bothered assisting the "hoi polloi", etc.)

Another interesting quest item would be quests auto-generated from the actions of players themselves. "Nice" players make a comfortable gaming environment, but "mean" players generally shake things up and keep them interesting. So if you have a player that blows stuff up everywhere, you might have a server with a lot of trading and building quests to simulate the rebuilding process after something has been destroyed. (E.g. Delivering supplies to surviving trade shops in a system until a destroyed shop is "rebuilt" to replace one that was destroyed, presumably by a player or faction with ill intent.) This not only provides players with agency, but allows conflicting play-styles to interact beyond just faction warfare.

 

[The_Owl]

This kinda builds on what nightrune said, but it's also a tad different and also expands upon others. Mainly quests. . anyways,

Quests to Abandoned areas: This is almost self explanatory, but i'll explain anyways. These could be small - large side quests given either by
1. NPC's from factions on board stations
2. From log books found in other, possibly uncharted, wrecks also drifting in space
3. Crashed planetary things, Landers, Escape pods, planetary habitations abandoned for some reason
4. (Only possible if NPC's go onto planets) From NPC's in planetary bases
5. Randomly finding them while exploring sectors
6. Radio signals that have a limited area of radius, so when passing by scanners (depending on size/strength) could pick up some sort of signal, like a SOS or some sort of random signal broadcasting, like a advert for a station selling items that leads you to an abandoned station where another sort of mission/quest can be found


Infested/Infected quests: This too, is also semi-self explanatory, but again, Here's my attempt at explaining it. places like stations, planet colonies, ships, etc. could suffer from some sort of infestion. This could occur from several ways as well
1. Upon boarding an abandoned ship/station, and infestion of some sort of alien creature could make it's self know, kinda like genestealers on a space hulk.
2. Log books mentioning infested ships
3. SOS signals saying ship/station has been over-run
4. Planetary bases infested by local lifeforms, this would on occur on planets that have natural life forms
5. randomly finding abandoned infested planets
6. Infected stations, possibly part of a quest to deliver medical supplies, involving in having to help defend against some sort of infestation, or some sort of plague creations, although this is delving towards plague zombies

Faction related and specific quests:
Let me explain this. This could be something given from the trade guild, or some group of scavs/outcasts, Involving various, but not limited,
1. Supply runs: self explanatory, but some sort of reward given. Various degrees of difficulty
2. Bounty hunting: Self explanatory, again, various degrees of difficulty
3. Escort missions: Again, self explanatory and with various degrees of difficulty (noticing a trend here? :P)
4. Diplomatic messenger missions: slightly more complicated, but involves visiting another faction to deliver some sort of message. To do this something must be a requirement, and this most be met by the player.

Now, some thing else about this is how these would help build the story in starmade, but they really help to build the story the PLAYER has.
Right now you can do many things, but mostly these are fighting or building. Exploring isn't really done as much, because there truefully, isn't much, if anything interesting to find. You fly through a galaxy, see the same generic stations and stick shops, maybe planets and pirates, But the game just doesn't feel alive. Now, imagine you can fly through the same galaxy, but you can explore this huge abandoned ship to discover some sort of lore item, or helped ferry supplies to an outpost, or performed a diplomatic mission for your faction to another faction, or something else. This adds a hell of a lot more enjoyment to starmade exploration, fleshes out the story, and most importantly, grasps the players imagination. You can say how you just raided a huge abandoned station, fighting of these alien creatures to recover some sort of item, like a special weapon or defensive equipable, or a blueprint for something.

Now, we currently also only have 2 factions, with their being another in the works, to make a total of what seems like 3 factions right now + the community ships. This is a suggestion to split said factions (non-player made) into multiple different factions, different from server to server, world to world, etc. This could be with randomly generated names like "New Terra shipping and trading" for a Trading guild faction, to "The brisket bandits" for some sort of pirate related group. The reason for this is that it would make the universe seem more alive, Instead of taking down a generic pirate group, for example, giving them a name makes them more memorable, and can help make a player story more interesting. Complained, they make a story for a player a hell of a lot more interesting. For example

"I fought a pirate group and then built a station. Tomorrow i will mine asteroids"
Becomes something like

"I fought the brisket bandits, and then found a Signal on the way to a station on an escort mission. Tomorrow i will follow it and see what is there and potentially gain something of value"

The difference is the value the player gets from the game, and by adding things like this it makes a story line, for the player themself, and for each server.

Starmade isn't a game that really fits a fixed storyline in my opinion, so what would work better would be a fluid system centered around a core group of lore, where each player can create a story that is cannon, and yet isn't necessary to the game. Who says that another server's galaxy and factions don't exist in a game where practically infinite universes can exist at once?

Tl;Dr
Add a variety of quests and make the default factions potentially more with random names to help give players a more immersive experience and story. Said post contains examples of quests.

 

[StarWars1981]

This kinda builds on what nightrune said, but it's also a tad different and also expands upon others. Mainly quests. . anyways,

Quests to Abandoned areas: This is almost self explanatory, but i'll explain anyways. These could be small - large side quests given either by
1. NPC's from factions on board stations
2. From log books found in other, possibly uncharted, wrecks also drifting in space
3. Crashed planetary things, Landers, Escape pods, planetary habitations abandoned for some reason
4. (Only possible if NPC's go onto planets) From NPC's in planetary bases
5. Randomly finding them while exploring sectors
6. Radio signals that have a limited area of radius, so when passing by scanners (depending on size/strength) could pick up some sort of signal, like a SOS or some sort of random signal broadcasting, like a advert for a station selling items that leads you to an abandoned station where another sort of mission/quest can be found


Infested/Infected quests: This too, is also semi-self explanatory, but again, Here's my attempt at explaining it. places like stations, planet colonies, ships, etc. could suffer from some sort of infestion. This could occur from several ways as well
1. Upon boarding an abandoned ship/station, and infestion of some sort of alien creature could make it's self know, kinda like genestealers on a space hulk.
2. Log books mentioning infested ships
3. SOS signals saying ship/station has been over-run
4. Planetary bases infested by local lifeforms, this would on occur on planets that have natural life forms
5. randomly finding abandoned infested planets
6. Infected stations, possibly part of a quest to deliver medical supplies, involving in having to help defend against some sort of infestation, or some sort of plague creations, although this is delving towards plague zombies

Faction related and specific quests:
Let me explain this. This could be something given from the trade guild, or some group of scavs/outcasts, Involving various, but not limited,
1. Supply runs: self explanatory, but some sort of reward given. Various degrees of difficulty
2. Bounty hunting: Self explanatory, again, various degrees of difficulty
3. Escort missions: Again, self explanatory and with various degrees of difficulty (noticing a trend here? :p)
4. Diplomatic messenger missions: slightly more complicated, but involves visiting another faction to deliver some sort of message. To do this something must be a requirement, and this most be met by the player.

Now, some thing else about this is how these would help build the story in starmade, but they really help to build the story the PLAYER has.
Right now you can do many things, but mostly these are fighting or building. Exploring isn't really done as much, because there truefully, isn't much, if anything interesting to find. You fly through a galaxy, see the same generic stations and stick shops, maybe planets and pirates, But the game just doesn't feel alive. Now, imagine you can fly through the same galaxy, but you can explore this huge abandoned ship to discover some sort of lore item, or helped ferry supplies to an outpost, or performed a diplomatic mission for your faction to another faction, or something else. This adds a hell of a lot more enjoyment to starmade exploration, fleshes out the story, and most importantly, grasps the players imagination. You can say how you just raided a huge abandoned station, fighting of these alien creatures to recover some sort of item, like a special weapon or defensive equipable, or a blueprint for something.

Now, we currently also only have 2 factions, with their being another in the works, to make a total of what seems like 3 factions right now + the community ships. This is a suggestion to split said factions (non-player made) into multiple different factions, different from server to server, world to world, etc. This could be with randomly generated names like "New Terra shipping and trading" for a Trading guild faction, to "The brisket bandits" for some sort of pirate related group. The reason for this is that it would make the universe seem more alive, Instead of taking down a generic pirate group, for example, giving them a name makes them more memorable, and can help make a player story more interesting. Complained, they make a story for a player a hell of a lot more interesting. For example

"I fought a pirate group and then built a station. Tomorrow i will mine asteroids"
Becomes something like

"I fought the brisket bandits, and then found a Signal on the way to a station on an escort mission. Tomorrow i will follow it and see what is there and potentially gain something of value"

The difference is the value the player gets from the game, and by adding things like this it makes a story line, for the player themself, and for each server.

Starmade isn't a game that really fits a fixed storyline in my opinion, so what would work better would be a fluid system centered around a core group of lore, where each player can create a story that is cannon, and yet isn't necessary to the game. Who says that another server's galaxy and factions don't exist in a game where practically infinite universes can exist at once?

Tl;Dr
Add a variety of quests and make the default factions potentially more with random names to help give players a more immersive experience and story. Said post contains examples of quests.

Random group names would be awesome for pirates and TG. Look up Dwarf Fortress, see the forums on bay12forums, the random names generator has multiple threads to itself. They're hilarious, or cool, and they're more memorable than "I fought Goblins", it's now "I fought the goblin axelords of The Boned Spear in The Dampened Plains on the continent of Incremental Suffering". That's not a quote from it, but that's the sort of screwy name list you see, of the group, the region, the continent, and then sometimes followed by the world name, which is usually one word, but always a long and obscure one, lol.

I would suggest most of what you can find is semi-randomized logbooks and other lore items - i.e. multiple different possible messages for each scenario you could locate one in, accompanied by some with just totally randomized contents - i.e. DF again, the books written by scholars and their contents. They relate to things that have happened in the game, by use of stored legends. Similar things ought to be possible - "You found Logbook 3200089: Relating to the Destruction of Planet #328372948 in System #1889 by FACTION X while it was defended by FACTION Z" - or something similar. Or you could find charts, informing you of the permanent bodies in other systems (asteroid belts, planets, star itself), or detailing (for more recent events, i.e. random event shipwrecking something with current info while server runs) the defenses an AI or player had around X location at Y time. Now it's useful, or at least interesting to find this random item.

Also cool to find would be cryo-frozen NPCs that talk about technologies and factions from a different time (i.e. forerunners of TG and Pirates, also could talk about different local system details - planets in different positions, destroyed stuff no longer there, stations no longer present or now derelicts), or just stranded NPCs with a nice long story they are too traumatized to tell you all about all at once, developing stuff like that which continues coming for a while.

So, the main idea I'd like to throw out there is: The developers, if they go for this, need to focus on individual contact events. That is, running into someone several times, finding out more about them, getting depth and even a little CHANGE into the character, so that it's not you and a bunch of brainless NPCs running around, it's you and the guy who with a little imagination is a down-on-his-luck freighter pilot caught in a galactic war, or some farmgirl from an out-of-the-way sandbox on a galactic adv - no, let's not do that again ... and if you meet them again and again, in different locations in the same general area (requires more limited landmarks, or spacemarks, I guess, i.e. stations and planets, to actually find them), then you can begin to learn about them and see some changing things in their personality, their character traits, maybe even their physical appearance (with more 3D sprites, maybe lose/gain weight to reflect situation, or at least pick up scars and change outfits).
What I'd like to see is a lot of characters with some depth, and some with a lot of depth; for example, 200 deep characters, that respawn if killed with a new scar or whatnot and a grudge against whoever killed them (i.e. you); they have a big story to tell, both origin story and what happens around them. Out of these, 30-50 are spawned in every universe; it's randomized, so you aren't likely to see all the same ones, and it might take quite a while to find all 200 or so. Maybe more, as development goes on, if it's set up so that more can just be added to the framework in place every update.

Against this, individual randomized characters can have set "personalities" with sets of lines for that "personality". For example, lists of traits can be compiled (either opposites or a trio, min-neutral-max of a trait), then lines for those lists combined, and then utilized in a set of circumstances. For example, if aligned to (for an easy method of tracking it location) his ship, AI1 says "Nice day for a flight"; if on somebody else's, "I wish I was flying"; if on a neutral station "Not too bad, could be nicer"; if on a hostile station "I hate prisons"; if on an allied station "Prices are too high, but at least they won't shoot me for saying it"; if on his own station "Home at last. Maybe they won't blow it up this time". Something like that. Also, random events (sector-wide fleet shootout, poor NPC lost in space, etc.) can trigger different reactions, and change NPCs (shot to head creates scar, or just kills NPC, etc.). Player interactions, their politeness or lack of it, aggression or help, can also change NPC personalities and characteristics. Especially if we get NPC children who are very malleable .

Of course, all this is undoubtedly far in the future, beyond the mystical NPC update and probably beyond Beta too. The magical, mythical Beta ... lol.

 

[jayman38]

In the goblin example above, there are no less than 3 prepositional phrases. And the coding for making a random name generator is pretty simple.

Pseudo code:

Function GenerateAdvancedName (BasicFactionName, FactionID) {
NumAIDescriptors = DiceRoll ( 3, 1 ) // At least 1, up to 3 (roll a three-sided die once)
NumAdjectives = DiceRoll ( 4, 1 ) - 1 // Up to 3, could be none (roll a four-sided die once)
NumPrepositions = DiceRoll ( 3, 1 ) - 1 // Up to 2, could be none (roll a three-sided die once)

AIDescriptorList = LoadFile ( AIDescriptors.xml )
AdjectivesList = LoadFile (Adjectives.xml)
PrepositionList = LoadFile (Prepositions.xml)

For i = 1 to NumAIDescriptors {
  FactionAIDescriptor[i]=Random.Choice ( AIDescriptorList )
  SetFactionAIAspect ( FactionID , FactionAIDescriptor[i] )
  i++
}

IF NumAdjectives > 0 {
  For i = 1 to NumAdjectives {
    FactionAdjective[i]=Random.Choice ( AdjectiveList )
    i++
  }
  }

IF NumPrepositions > 0 {
  For i = 1 to NumPrepositions {
    FactionPreposition[i]=Random.Choice ( PrepositionList )
    i++
  }
  }

NewFactionName=Join(FactionAIDescriptor,", ")

IF NumAdjectives > 0 {
    NewFactionName=NewFactionName + ", " + Join(FactionAdjective,", ")
  }

NewFactionName = NewFactionName + " " + BasicFactionName

IF NumPrepositions > 0 {
    NewFactionName=NewFactionName + " " + Join (FactionPreposition, " ")
  }

return NewFactionName
}

With this, the word lists can be easily updated and modified, simply by changing files that are human-readable enough to be modified by the layperson.

AI could have descriptors like "aggressive", "timid", and all that good stuff, and calling out to an AI behavior modifier system could give the AI more detail and meaning, actually altering behavior.

Adjectives would be largely throw-away terms like "blue", "large", "chitinous", "sap-sucking", etc. Actually, terms like color and size could be used in the AI descriptor list to modify how the faction's NPCs look. (E.g. "Large" could multiply the NPC size by 1.25, and "blue" could tint the skin texture in GL code.)

Prepositions would work very similarly to throw-away adjectives. Terms like "of the Nested Nebula", "beyond the black hole sea", "at Tanagra", and so forth would simply add "flavor" to the faction name.

 

[Madman198237]

I really love jayman's post (And I swear it absolutely, positively, for certain has nothing to do with the fact that I play Dwarf Fortress)