[2.17.22] Fata Morgana DEV log 0

This is the first dev log for a game I have been working on for a while, tentatively named Fata Morgana after a kind of sailor’s mirage that makes landmasses appear to be floating over the ocean. In future dev logs I intend to document my thoughts and process on handling the small ideas—the moment-to-moment gameplay and polish—but for this first one I will go over the project’s main design principle.

Fata Morgana is, fundamentally, a town simulator.

Character Art by @JiskeyJasket, a fantastic pixel artist.

There are 32 NPCs with likes, needs, desires and goals. They endeavor to achieve these goals and, with the help of the players, they may very well. They stumble through the game world like newborns—just as the players do—and explore their environments, trying to find the right mechanisms for advancement of their personal goals. The traditional failings of hill-climbing AI approaches, local maximums, are delivered to the player in the form of quests (or, if ignored, may be achieved by more drastic means). The NPC’s effort towards their own ends are dotted with bespoke content at certain thresholds and world transformations, providing the narrative backbone for the players to engage with.

Many PCG games generate a large quantity of content and it is only by sifting through that content (either manually or via a Max Kreminski Story Sifting method) that the narrative signals emerge from the noise. In Fata Morgana, narrative DNA is baked into content generation and the context in which the content is presented.

This is, of course, only the “big idea” of the game and the concept is far from proven. The balancing act between the combinatorics of the state space and the wonderful surprises of generative content is something I grapple with daily. The world around this core principle also continues to expand with plenty for the player to do outside of interacting with this system—more on that later. The story, the audio/visual design, the architecture, the other features will wait for another time to expand on.

I hope to make something engaging with Fata Morgana. Something that changes the way developers think about generated content and how it can be used to great narrative effect—more than just content padding or an element of randomness.

—Rainfrogs