Not a Talkie

I recently saw someone suggesting that King of Dragon Pass should have voice acting.

We didn’t want to use voice because most text is not known ahead of time, but is full of placeholders:

After wearing the armor for a few days, <e> said that <he/she> felt quicker of step and clearer of mind.

(this is actually one of the simpler examples). It would be hard to keep this from sounding like one of those bad voicemail prompts, because it would have to be assembled out of pieces. There’s also the fact that the same text might be spoken by a male or female character, and they might be very young or very old when they spoke it. So it would be difficult to get quality results.

Plus of course there are over 640 000 words of text. That would obviously be expensive to record, but it would also make the game larger. If audio books are 160 words per minute, that’s about 67 hours of speech. Depending on compression, that might be another 800 MB to download!

And voice would make it really hard to update the game with more content, since we would have to have any new text recorded.

So while it sounds at first like a good idea, in reality it’s one of those things that’s impossible with a game of this scope.

Scene Contest (and 14 other scenes) now available!

Some time ago, we held a contest for players to create new scenes. The winning scene (and another popular one), along with 13 other new scenes, are now in the 2.3 update in the iOS App Store.

One issue we faced was that we wanted to make sure players who have already played the game get to see the new scenes. This is potentially a problem, given there are now 575 scenes in the game, so in any playthrough, you have less than 50% chance of getting any particular one. It didn’t seem fair to tell people there was new content, and then not show it to them.

So we added special code that checks to see if it’s the first time you’ve run version 2.3, and tries to give you several of the new scenes. “Tries to” because one of them does have preconditions. And others only show up in a long game.

The first time check is so that you don’t get a predictable game, where the contest favorites show up every time.

Besides new scenes, playing on iPad mini made us realize that text that works well on the larger iPads might be a bit small. So there’s an option to enlarge text in many places (not all because some of the layouts are pretty carefully tuned).

Playing the game again brought up situations where it would have been nice to get advice, so we added a bit more. (We always encourage checking with your advisors, as they may comment about recent events that are not otherwise obvious.)

And we fixed various minor bugs and typos.

So we hope it has enough to be worth checking out for even experienced players.

P.S. Since updates hide old reviews, we hope you will find time to give the game a rating or review in the App Store. This really helps. Thanks!

“Slights make war, but favors make peace.”

In one of the interactive scenes, a warrior from another clan tells us, “Slights make war, but favors make peace.”

This is a reasonable summary of how relationships between clans work. But things aren’t quite that simple.

Certain acts are considered slights — stains on a clan’s honor. (Raids are annoying, but unless the context decrees otherwise, aren’t considered slights.) If you slight another clan too many times, it will declare a feud, which is essentially a statement that they consider themselves at war with your clan.

The exact number is affected by certain treasures, but usually it takes three slights to push a clan over the edge into feud. Of course, you already have a history with the other clans that emigrated to Dragon Pass, so you might start on the cusp of a feud.

Exactly what offends another clan is not always obvious, so this isn’t shown in the user interface. But your ring often incorporates the number of slights into their advice. Sometimes you can erase a slight, but in general the offended clan will remember them forever.

Note that slighting a clan won’t always result in an immediate feud. Tensions have to simmer to a boil, and they may want to make sure that they’re strong enough to prosecute a feud.

Ending a feud will remove at least some of the slights, depending on just how you managed to resolve it.

As far as favors making peace, the connection is a little less direct. You can be owed any number of favors. No one feels so obligated that they offer a treaty. But a clan that owes you is more likely to go along with what you want — perhaps you subtly remind them that they owe you, or on their own they would rather back you than pay 30 cows. At the same time, a clan that you owe will be less likely to side with you. Who are you to ask for a political favor, when you are already in their debt? Tribal negotiations are just one area that works like this.

When an advisor says, “Her clan will be slighted if we aid her, and obligated to us if we return her to them,” hopefully the meaning is clear. And now you know what it means in game terms.

Friends-and-Relations

Your clan is not alone in colonizing Dragon Pass. There are a couple dozen other clans, and you have complex and dynamic relationships with each of them.

In addition, there are groups that are treated as clans for convenience, such as the Horse-Spawn, Humakti, or Trolls. The most important factor for groups is usually attitude.

The map shows clan names in colors ranging from most friendly (allies are blue) to least (feuding clans are red). But no color really captures the complexity of how another clan considers yours.

Allied: Is there a mutual alliance?

Attitude: Does the clan think of you positively or negatively?

Captives: Do you have any of their clan members captive?

Favors: Do they owe you a favor? Or, do you owe them one? (Or many; the number goes up and down as obligations are taken on or repaid.) Favors cancel out, so you can’t both owe and be owed.

Feud: Are you in a state of feud? This is basically a declared war.

Proximity: Is the clan a neighbor, or a neighbor of a neighbor? (Rarely this may change.)

Raids: Clans track the number of raids won or lost (including how many consecutive wins or losses), as well as the number you have made without them counter-raiding.

Slights: Grave offenses are remembered for years, even by otherwise friendly clans.

Trade: Is there an ongoing trade route?

Tribute: How much we pay them, or what they pay us.

One important factor is not specific to any one clan.

Kingship: How well our clan is considered suitable for leading others. This is your reputation among the other clans as a whole.

Your Clan

Within the clan, the major factions are the carls and warriors.

Farmer Morale: How the farmers think they are being treated, especially relative to the warriors.

Mood: The overall attitude of the clan.

Weaponthane Morale: How the weaponthanes think they are being treated, especially relative to the carls.

Tribes

Clans form into tribes. Within your own tribe, clans track how fairly they think you have treated them (especially if yours is the royal clan). Actions of the king may also stir up royal jealousy. There’s also an overall tribal mood tracked for your tribe.

Attitude: Does the tribe think of your tribe positively or negatively?

Other Relationships

During play, other relationships might be tracked, such as who you sold a treasure to. This depends on the story.

Keeping Them All Straight

This is obviously a lot to track, and the game does it because the Orlanthi do it. Knowing who you can trust and who you need vengeance on is critical!

But as a player, you’re not expected to worry about every detail. The map or clan filters can give you a quick summary (so you can demand tribute from a clan you are not allied to). And the user interface makes sure you can’t call for a favor from a clan that doesn’t owe you one).

More importantly, your advisors will tell you, either in one of the management screens, or an interactive scene. Be sure to consult them!

And you can also refer to the clan saga, which records interactions with others.

It’s your relationship with the other clans that will ultimately determine whether you can forge a tribe, and then unify the tribes into a kingdom.

Still Judging Scene Contest

Various factors conspire to delay the next phase of the scene contest, but the biggest is that we received 22 entries, over half of which could easily be in the game. Thanks to everyone who entered, we will surely be inspired to add something thanks to your ideas.

So we’re still discussing which ones are funniest, don’t require too much stretching of the setting, etc. Some are good scenes, but are they special enough? Or does the action happen in distant lands rather than on-screen?

It doesn’t look like we’ll have a decision before I have to get on a plane today. So look for it next week.

Anatomy of a Scene

Thinking of entering the Scene Contest, but not quite sure where to start? Let’s look at the basics of scenes.

A “scene” is what we call the basic interactive situation in King of Dragon Pass. It always has an illustration and a choice of responses. In most cases, it also has advice, provided to the player by the most appropriate ring member.

Since the story arc of the long game can take multiple generations, many scenes are designed to repeat within a game. (For the farmers to be unhappy is not unusual.) Others happen only once (babies in shield don’t show up every day), or happen in response to specific situations (tribes only form once, so you only get news about this once, though hopefully in every game).

Here’s a typical scene that happens to occur in the tutorial, as coded in our scripting language. (It’s edited to show only the more interesting parts.)

scene: scene_48SoraWantsWhiteHorse
scene002, right, [sora >= 0 AND .horses > 5], mayRepeat

The second line indicates which piece of art to use (here we reuse the illustration of Sora Goodseller) and which side the text appears (in other words, usually the less interesting part of the art). Next is a condition. It doesn’t make sense for Sora to live forever, so the scene shouldn’t happen after her death. And it’s no fun being asked for a horse when you have none. Assuming the condition is met, this scene occurs randomly. Finally, this scene can repeat during a game (horses don’t live forever either). Scenes don’t repeat for a number of years, however.

Scenes start by setting the, well, scene. Here, there’s a little logic so the text flows better if she has been by before. Note that the situation is also written to the saga.

if [sora > 0] then {
text: Sora Goodseller, a trader-priestess of the talking god, Issaries, returns to trade.
} else {
text: Sora Goodseller, a trader-priestess of the talking god, Issaries, comes to trade.
}
text: In addition to the usual exchange of goods, she asks if we have any white horses.
saga: The Issaries priestess Sora Goodseller came to our clan and asked if we had any white horses to trade.
if [d3 = 1 AND .horses > 5 AND walkthrough = false] then {
w = true
h = "<d2:mare/stallion>"
text: We do have a single white <h> in our herd. Sora made an opening offer of 3 cows worth of goods.
} else {
text: Although we have some light grey horses, none can truly be called white.
saga: We had no white horses.
}

To make things more repeatable, there is a random chance of having a white horse (tracked in the variable w). (For simplicity, the tutorial never has one.)

music: "CouldBeGood"

Each scene has accompanying music relating to the situation.

And now to the responses. These may be shown depending on various conditions. In this case, whether we have a white horse or not. (Remember that the scene won’t run unless we have at least 5 horses, so the response doesn’t need an additional condition.)

[NOT w] response 2: Apologize for not having one, and throw her a feast.
{
text: Sora said that the lack of a white horse reflected poorly on neither our generosity nor our hospitality, and the feast was proof of both.
saga: Embarrassed that we had no white horse, we gave her a feast instead.
.mood += 2
.cattle -= 5
}
[w] response 3: Give her the white horse.
{
otherClan = RandomClan(KnownClans)
text: Sora inspected the horse closely, then insisted on paying for it. She seemed very pleased with the <h>, which she named Snowflower. After taking it for a ride, she told us about her visit to the <otherClan> clan, which had spoken ill of us. However, we realized it was due to a misunderstanding, and she agreed to let them know of this.
saga: We gifted Sora with a white <h>, but she insisted on paying. She helped clear up a misunderstanding with the <otherClan.plural>.
otherClan.attitude += 3
.goods += 4
.horses -= 1
}

These two responses are fairly self-contained. In response 2, we slaughter some cows for a feast, and the people’s spirits raise. Response 3 has some other consequences.

[w] response 9: Sell the white horse for a treasure.
{
text: “I have no magical treasures I can offer, I’m afraid.”
SceneContinues
}

This response doesn’t end the scene. Responses like this can make the scene a bit more complex, or allow the player to make multiple choices (such as sacrificing for magical aid before embarking on a mission).

Most scenes don’t have 9 responses! This one basically has twice as many because it needs to be interesting if you have a horse or not. Our original plan was that every scene have 5 responses. But 3 is enough. The main thing is that there shouldn’t be a response that is so obviously good that players would always pick it, or so obviously bad that they would never choose it. In the first cases, there wouldn’t really be a choice at all. In the second, we would be writing (and testing) a useless response.

Of course, it’s OK to mention other choices, as in some of the advice.

Advice:
[Animals >= 2] A horse is usually worth four cows. [46]
[Animals >= 3] A horse is usually worth four cows, but white horses are fairly rare. [4789]

[Elmal] White horses are sacred to Elmal and to his wife Redalda, the horse goddess. [0]

[Uralda] You can’t get cheese or cream from a horse. [36]

[Trickster AND NOT w] We could paint a horse white, I’ve done it before. [5]

[Daring AND NOT w] Let’s go steal her a white horse! [0]

Advice can be conditional as well. Note that the quality of the advice depends on the speaker’s Animals skill. In general, the game gives skill-based advice first, and then advice that depends on religion or personality. Also note that most of the advice includes recommended responses.

That’s the basics: situation, a few responses, advice. Scenes can be a bit more complex by asking for additional responses. Here’s one from a scene about a suitor.

response 2: “He must first prove himself worthy.”

{

saga: We required him to prove his worthiness.

NewChoices:

text: <l> asks you to name a test for <suitor>:

response Skill at arms

{

}

response Poetry

{

}

response Pig calling

{

}

response Plowing

{

}

Although the examples here are in our OSL scene language, we didn’t expect our authors to write code. Nor do we for the scene contest — just come up with the basic situation (and optionally a way to illustrate it), reasonable responses, plausible consequences, and some advice.

Scene Contest

With version 2.2.1 out of the way, it’s time to worry about the next update. We want to add more art and scenes, and we want your help!

Pocket Tactics has agreed to help run a contest. Basically, you come up with the basics of a new scene, and we commission the art and put your idea into the game.

We wanted to do something similar years ago, but since we couldn’t add new art to the CD ROM version, there were too many constraints. This time, you can go wild (as long as it fits the already established game).

We really look forward to your creativity!

Art Constraints

We always like hearing player suggestions. Several of them will be in the upcoming 2.2.1 release, and we encourage you to send them in via our bugz email. (Not only does this go into our tracking system, but we can ask for clarification if necessary.)

One suggestion came in an App Store review: “Illustrations depicting the existing special combat events where certain nobles receive the favor/ire of the gods.” This would be cool, but it really isn’t practical.

When we created King of Dragon Pass, we wanted to make a game with a lot of replay, and also a game that a small team could create. One approach to the former was to randomize player personalities. Each game, the woman with the hat will be a different person. One time she may be extremely pious but stingy. The next, a xenophobic poet. We figured part of the game’s charm would be learning about your playing pieces through their advice and actions.

So when your book-loving ring member makes an extravagant purchase, it won’t always be the same person doing it. It could be any of the 70+ faces. And of course, people age during the game. To keep that manageable, there are three ages for each face. We didn’t want to draw 210 versions of the scene (or have 210 overlays, especially since this wasn’t the best fit for the ink and watercolor art style). So the art direction was to avoid showing any of the clan ring. (There are a small number of exceptions, and if you’ve won the long game, you’ll know how we typically resolved this.)

Back to the suggestion: combat interactions are focused as much on the potential hero as the situation. It’s true that many of these would not require 210 versions (most of the women would not suddenly be blessed by Orlanth), it would still be impractical to do dozens of versions of an illustration.

Could we come up with art direction that would allow for the various situations to be illustrated, but not show the principal character? Possibly. But the situations weren’t designed to work under this constraint, and many would be hard to portray. Here is the prose from just one battle situation:
[x = 1] text: The <otherClan> warriors see their chance and prepare to rush <ourHero.null><him/her> in a group.
[x = 2] text: Several formidable enemy warriors converge on <him/her>.
[x = 3] text: The enemy warriors nearest to <ourHero> step out of sword-range for a moment and laugh at their chance to take <him/her> down with superior numbers.
That’s really three different images.

In some cases, there’s an obvious illustration (e.g. an enemy flying over the battlefield), but because we wanted to enhance replay, this is often not possible.

It’s certainly possible that with enough effort, we could come up with the right illustrations (or simply do more of them). But I think the word pictures that Rob Heinsoo and I came up with do a reasonable job. We varied the text to give a different feel than the typical interactive scene (which allows for reflection and discussion by the ring members rather than a snap decision).

So the good idea of illustrating battle situations is at odds with the goals of maximum flexibility and reasonable cost. Perhaps some day we’ll have a way to implement it, but for now, we’re going to apply our resources to adding new story content instead of enhancing existing content. More on that in a future post.

Architecture Redux

I’ve mentioned the game’s architecture before, but understanding it helps answer some common questions, so I thought I’d draw a picture.

The game has three main divisions. In the original version, different developers were more or less responsible for each.

The user interface (the 50 or so screens and dialogs) were created for the Windows and Macintoshes of the day (that day being somewhere between 1997, when we started the project, and 1999, when it was released). We used mTropolis, a powerful multimedia development system that was discontinued over a year before the game came out.

The interactive scenes (and news) were coded in OSL (the Opal Scripting Language, or the Opal Scene Language).

The game engine, written in C++, executed the OSL code, ran the economic model (tracking cows and the effects of treasures on them), and was responsible for saving the game. It was cross-platform, running equally well on Mac OS and Windows.

When we created a new version for iOS, the basic game code and the scenes didn’t need radical change. Both were enhanced (for example, the game had more advice and supported 7 new treasures, and there were 28 new scenes) but existing code continued to work. By contrast, none of the user interface code could be used. Not that it would have mattered much, the small touch screen needed a new user interface anyway. This was a very substantial effort, and it ended up being partly duplicated for iPad and again for the 4 inch display.

There are numbers in the diagram because they suggest why the iOS version is distinct from anything else. Saved games assume a specific number of scenes and treasures. Adding more would mean substantial reworking of the C++ code. But this code had to work with mTropolis, so it’s tied to 1998 era systems. The hardware and compilers I used back then are long gone.

So that’s why the GOG Windows version can’t be updated.

Some have asked about a new Windows or Mac version, or an Android version. Since mTropolis no longer exists and UIKit is iOS-specific, any version for any other platform will require reworking the user interface (possibly with some redesign, definitely a brand new implementation). Think of it was rewriting a third of the game.

The first iOS release took about 20 calendar months. Since the C++ code didn’t need significant updating, the user interface could thus be said to be about half the code needed for that project.

Actually, there was some new C++ code, because we wanted to add Game Center achievements. Most of this would work on Mac OS X, but not on other platforms.

So unlike the original version, where it was trivial to build for both Mac and Windows, there’s a daunting amount of work to bring the game to another platform.

What we’ve done instead is reflected in those numbers: reworking the 50 screens for iPad (and soon the iPhone 5). And adding new treasures and new scenes in an update we hope to release this month.

4 Inch Display

I really have to wonder when I see a one star review in the App Store that reads: “I have to give 1 star to any game that doesn't optimize for the iPhone 5... Its just to easy of a fix.” (sic)

One star? Really? The game is awful because it was created before the iPhone 5 existed, and has not been altered to use the wider screen? If the reviewer stopped to think at all, is adding 88 pixels of width to a landscape game really going to make that much difference? In other words, is this screen

really so incredibly worse than this one?

In almost every possible case, getting extra width buys you very little with a landscape application. Text lists still scroll vertically, and the landscape height of an iPhone 5 screen is exactly the same as the landscape height of every other iPhone. So a bigger screen doesn’t mean less scrolling.

As for easy, it turns out that we had to rework 31 different screens. In many cases, it was an easy enough transformation, like the one above. But there were cases where because we’d put in so much effort making sure the game worked on the original iPhone that it needed new design and coding to work on a different layout. In particular, for the one area where the game can be a little better on the iPhone 5’s 4 inch display. Interactive scenes always allow you to view the entire illustration, but during play it’s partially covered with text.

On the wider display, less of the picture is obscured.

(I suppose we could show more text instead, but as shown above, it doesn’t always need to scroll. It seemed like a better tradeoff to favor art over text.)

Obviously it’s better to fully support the new screen size, but we could have used the money to commission new artwork instead of new versions of the same user interface elements. And used developer time to create new scenes, instead of redoing 31 different screens to show 18% more pixels (18% more blank parchment in many cases).

As you might have guessed from the screen shots, we are in fact adding new assets and code to support the 4 inch display as well as the 3.5 inch display on iPhone and iPod touch. But it’s because Apple now requires this, not because this game really gets better because of this effort.

Troll Hero Preview

As you may know, we’re hoping to make a fairly large number of new scenes for a King of Dragon Pass update. We do have a constraint: there is no art pipeline the way there was in the original, so we are repurposing existing art. This isn’t actually a new thing — we reused artwork rather than commission art for the over 500 scenes in the original. (There are “only” about 420 illustrations earmarked for scenes.) After all, it makes sense that Sora Goodseller looks the same each time she visits (though she actually has a second piece of art).

One of the design goals for this update was to make use of artwork that may not be commonly seen, such as a scene that occurs as a direct consequence of a previous scene (i.e. a story branch). Here is one of them, a visit from a troll hero.

To write this scene, I consulted with the world’s foremost uzologist, Dan McCluskey. (I had to cut some of the finer points of troll behavior since you are seeing this from the human viewpoint.)

This scene has some internal branching, so it was a bit time-consuming to code, but it’s now ready, and got a good response from initial testing. Now we need to perform more rigorous QA, making sure each of the branches works.

This is the 11th new scene. Others are in progress, though I don’t know if I’ll really end up with all 29 I have ideas for.

Outtake

I was just looking at the King of Dragon Pass source code, and came across this table:

"Desperate",
"Impoverished",
"Adequate",
"Adequate",
"Adequate",
"Good",
"Excellent"

These adjectives describe the clan’s quality of life, which was calculated on a scale of 1 to 7. Factors included food supply, whether people had gone hungry in the last two seasons, adequate goods, and the presence of exotic luxury goods.

There was clearly provision to display this in the user interface. My memory is hazy, but I think at one point the Clan screen showed these.

Apparently some time during 1999 this got dropped, probably to de-clutter the interface.

Conceivably an iOS update could restore this as advice.

Just because the quality of life is not summarized on-screen doesn’t mean it has no importance. As you might expect, clan mood is affected by meeting people’s needs.

King of Dragon Pass Grows Up

The game celebrates its first birthday on the iOS App Store this week, on 7 September. We thought it was time it grew up…

…from 480 x 320 pixels to 1024 x 768. After longer than we expected, King of Dragon Pass is now a Universal app, and fully supports iPad as well as iPhone and iPod touch. It took two additional UI artists, and we had to rework each of the 49 screens, but it was worth it. You use an iPad slightly differently than an iPhone or a computer (even a laptop), and it really feels like reading an interactive, illustrated book.

The game does support the Retina Display on both iPhone and iPad, though most artwork looks just fine at standard resolution so that’s what we used. And we didn’t want to add another 500 MB of art (an estimate how big the 436 event illustrations would be with 4 times as many pixels, for both iPad and iPhone screens).

So the iPad illustrations are the same resolution used in the original game (upscaling inevitably introduces distortion, even if it’s barely perceptible). This left enough room for a reasonably sized column of text. You can see both the art and the accompanying story at the same time, and in most interactive scenes, you don’t need to scroll. And there’s enough space that we can show the info that was hidden behind the graphic on iPhone, and add a Saga button. Again, this really seems like the perfect platform for this game. I can’t imagine playing it on my 30 inch display.

Since the iPad UI is different, we also had to make a new version of the tutorial (most notably because there’s a single Sacred Time screen on iPad), and the manual.

We know a lot of people have been waiting a long time for this version. And we didn’t want them to have to pay a second time. So we made the game a Universal build — it adapts to the device you’re playing on. And we made it an update, rather than a new title, so that it would be free to existing players.

The downside is that you need to download the assets for the device you don’t own. So to make sure there was something for iPhone owners, we added a new illustrated encounter. We also followed up on a suggestion to show deity icons in the lists of blessings, which help identify them. And there were the inevitable bug fixes.

Enjoy the update!

(And, since all reviews and ratings reset with a new version, consider going to the App Store and rating the game.)

How Many Scenes?

A long-time player recently commented about how he had just gotten an interactive event he had never seen before. This is not as surprising as it sounds, even for a player who has had the game over a year, because many events are conditional, and the raw number is such that you won’t get each one every game. But I was curious about the exact odds.

Counting

The game calls interactive events “scenes,” which is biased towards the illustrated events. There are 1624 in total, but they aren’t all story events (scenes). They can be divided into:

code: A chunk of OSL script used to set state or conditionally trigger scenes. These have names like code_InitialTribalAgreements, fragment_BeSureToHaveElection, or code_R115MiddlingPenaltyOver. None of these have any player interaction. There are 464 of these.

news: Some sort of report, given by (or relating to) a single leader. These have no illustration. Most have no interaction, but some do give player choices. A notable subset of interactive news is heroic combat during a battle. Battle results is treated as a special case, and is shown with two illustrations. News scenes have names like news_TradeRouteEnded, news_R45aGrainHeFound, mission_EmissaryBanditAttack, or battle_HesGoneBerserk. There are 462 news scenes.

scenes: Interactive events are the core of the game. They always have an illustration, and at least one leader giving advice. They have names like scene_2Trader, scene_R194WeddingCelebration, or mission_ProposeAlliance. There are 614 of these.

quests: Heroquests are essentially a special type of interactive event, with no advice. There are 84 of these.

So there are 614 scenes defined in OSL, but it’s not really accurate to call all of those interactive events. That’s because when we designed an event, we sometimes wanted to show new advice in response to player choices, or change the background music to reflect a change in situation. This was implemented as switching to a new scene. So scene_R59TheChallenge might trigger scene_R59aChallengeResult, but that’s really just one event to the player.

Luckily, we were pretty consistent about naming scenes, and by looking for that pattern (R59a as opposed to R59), there are 70 scenes that are followups within an overall event.

That leaves 544 distinct interactive events. It’s worth noting that 28 of these are new in the iOS version (25 were in version 2.0, and one is new in the upcoming 2.1).

Calculating

But, what are the odds of not getting one of the 544? All scenes are not created equally (we kept the amount of branching in the game to a minimum, but some scenes directly depend on earlier choices), and many have specific preconditions. There’s no good way to figure that, so we’ll assume each does have an equal chance of showing up. If there are 5 random events each year, the odds of not getting a specific one each year is 99.1%. How long is a game? That can vary widely, but looking at two sagas of complete long games that are in our bug tracking system 48 to 58 years. For this quick calculation, let’s call it 53. So the odds of not getting a particular scene during a game are over 61%. Now we have to figure how many games. King of Dragon Pass is highly replayable, but even a hard-core player might not play more than 12 games in a year. The odds of not getting a random scene in a year of play are thus only around 0.3%.

A (thankfully) rare scene

It turns out the scene in question was not random, however. It related to the harvest, so it could only occur in Earth season. That means each game has over a 90% chance of not getting it, and thus he had a 31% chance of not seeing it in 12 games. Except that there was another condition on the scene, so the odds of getting it plunge even more.

(The odds would be slightly different for the original Windows version, but I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.)

Conclusion

So what does this analysis say? I think it verifies our design goal of replay, since you will not see many scenes your first game. (And this is only talking about events, not your responses to them.) And even if you have played a dozen games, you have a pretty good chance of getting something completely new if you play one more.

Also, our marketing copy of “nearly 500 interactive scenes” is conservative, and we should have done the math before.

iPad in Beta

Last month I mentioned that we were still converting screens to use final iPad-sized artwork. That process is complete, and the game has gone out to a number of beta testers, to make sure everything is good on a variety of devices and versions of iOS. (We’re making a universal release, so the same game still needs to run properly on iPhone and iPod touch.) We’re testing here too, and have been squashing a number of bugs.

It hasn’t been in testing long enough to have confidence in the code quality, but things look pretty good so far.

As a developer, most of my testing consists of looking at specific parts of the program (either something I just changed, or to investigate a problem someone else has reported). But I finally got a chance to play a complete short game from beginning to end. This did reveal some issues that needed to be fixed. But it also felt like the game is finally on its native platform. You hold the iPad much like a book, and this meant that King of Dragon Pass really felt like an interactive story (and less like a computer game).

The iPad layout was actually constrained by not having artwork at any higher resolution than you see here. But the results are that text never covers artwork, and you almost never have to scroll. The text is super crisp (on a new iPad) and the iPad screen is bright and gorgeous, so the art looks great. It’s all a really good experience. And as you can see, we don’t need to hide the extra information (the list of clans was behind a button even on the Mac/Windows version), and the manual is available from within a scene.

So if you don’t have an iOS device and want to play King of Dragon Pass, get an iPad.

Gone Missing?

A recent App Store review (five stars, if you were wondering) wrote:

I have noticed some things are missing from the iPhone version (this one) that the old PC version had. Like allotting magic points to children and hunting and the ability to slaughter sheep, pigs and horses for food when the clan is starving. I can only guess what else is missing, though I hope it's not a lot. I'm not sure exactly what is affected but I personally am something of a perfectionist and would love to have the entire full game same as before.

I’ve written about this before, but in summary: I disagree. The new edition is better. A lot better. It removes a lot of fiddly bits that made little difference (Children magic, for example, was very rarely used), and we added over two dozen new scenes and a bunch of treasures. We improved the maps and added Game Center achievements. There are new advisors, and a lot of new advice. And you can play the game via VoiceOver.

One thing that was removed for practical, rather than design reasons, was the Tula screen. It was certainly a fun screen, but it really didn’t impact game play a lot. (And to answer another App Store review, no, it will not be in a Universal update.)

Fixed Bugs

We also made a lot of bug fixes, many of which were impossible to fix for the original.

Oh, and you can still slaughter horses if you’re desperate for food.

So, I too am a perfectionist, which is why the game is not the same. I believe it’s a much better game than the original.

---

For more details about what’s changed, see these articles:

What’s New
Crafters
Livestock
Treasures
Map
Automatic Save
Choices
Back-Patching
(Or search all Design articles)

Skills, Expanded

I wrote before about the seven skills a leader is rated in. But we wanted to support OSL code such as

test Deception(expeditionLeader) vs Crankiness d6

In other words, like many roleplaying games, people have all sorts of abilities. But seven was already a fairly large number. So we came up with the idea of composite skills. Deception is the average of Bargaining and Leadership.

Including the composite skills, a leader can be tested in

Animals
Bargaining
Combat
Custom
Deception (Bargaining + Leadership)
Diplomacy (Bargaining + Custom)
Exploring (Bargaining + Combat)
Farming (Animals + Plants)
Hunting (Animals + Combat + Plants, special for Odayla worshippers)
Leadership
Magic
Plants
Poetry (Custom + Leadership)
Prophecy (Magic + Leadership)
Strategy (Combat + Leadership) 

Note that not every attempt to compose a poem is automatically use of the Poetry skill — it would depend on the context. But without some obvious reason to do things differently, that’s how we would have coded the scene.

A Skilled Leader

I’ve seen a few questions about the named leaders, so I’ll amplify a bit on what’s in the manual.

By the way, named leaders are considered nobles (thanes), and are counted as such in the Clan screen.

Each leader is rated in seven skills. These are actually numbers, but rather than report them as 3.3 or 5.12, they’re categorized

Fair

Good

Very Good

Excellent

Renowned

Heroic

Normally any skill less than Good isn’t listed, to make things easier.

In the normal course of events, leaders gradually improve, until age 50. Elders may lose their Combat edge as they get older. (Once in a while characters can lose — or gain — skill in other ways.)

So what are those skills good for?

The quality of the advice someone gives depends on their skills. For example, Vordessa (with Very Good in Animals) can probably give reasonable advice about situations involving cattle health. But someone with a Renowned skill will probably have additional insights. The game favors the best advice, so depending on the situation, Vordessa will more often be giving Combat advice (since it’s Excellent) rather than Animal-related advice.

Leaders are sometimes explicitly tested in their skills. For example, the “Uralda’s Blessing” heroquest is hard because the quester must have a good enough Combat skill to survive the biting things. Or an interactive scene may let you pick who fights a duel or acts as an emissary. Depending on the situation, the game may only let you choose from characters who are likely to succeed. For example, if you won’t succeed unless you have a good bargainer, the “pick leader” dialog will only show characters above a certain level. (What skill is tested is not always obvious, and in fact more than one skill may be important, so you might want to sort the list several ways before picking.)

Leaders are also tested when they act as the clan’s agent. When you pick a response, somebody actually has to perform (or lead) the action. For example, this OSL code

Response 5: “We will go with you, but your clan will owe us a favor.”
{
… # Calculate clan relationship bonuses
test Bargaining vs. Bargaining d5 + 1 + n, bonus: b

means that the leader with the best Bargaining skill makes the test on behalf of the clan. (The second “Bargaining” indicates that certain treasures or magic come into play.)

So the skills are quite important. You want leaders on the ring who can give you good values in each of the seven skills.

On the other hand, you also want seven different religions represented on the ring. This matches Orlanth’s first ring, and thus gives magical benefit. There are also times when a leader’s religion gives you additional options, like in this OSL code

[UroxOnRing] Response 6: Conduct a ritual to sense Chaos.

So picking a clan ring is a tradeoff.

Finally, no discussion of clan leaders should leave out their personalities. Everyone is an individual, with an aptitude for poetry, hatred of elves, or a solitary streak. This will color their advice (as they can’t resist from promoting their agenda), or drive their actions. Check out any statements a leader makes when you tap them in the Reorganize dialog, or watch for trends in their advice.

A Big Game, Visualized

I’ve said before how King of Dragon Pass is a big game. My graphic designer wanted to get a sense of the game flow, so I put together a collection of iPad screen shots. This gives another sense of how big the game is — there are 49 screens here. (This doesn’t include the long game victory, because it doesn’t need additional layout or updated assets.)

This is basically the same number of screens that the iPhone-sized layout uses (there’s an additional annual recap screen, a menu screen, and interactive scenes have different sub-screens).

This is the complexity involved in a port to any platform. Even to iPad, each of these screens needs to have layout. Most of the code is the same between iPad and iPhone, but not entirely.

Pelaaja Interview

Before the iOS version was released, Janne Pyykkönen contacted me to request an interview for Pelaaja, the Finnish video gaming magazine. Janne’s article was published last month (in Finnish), and Pelaaja has allowed us to post the original English-language interview.

You were the producer, designer and one of the programmers of the original King of Dragon Pass. That’s quite a lot of titles, so how much was the original King of Dragon Pass ‘your’ project? And did you yourself originally come up with the idea of a Glorantha based computer game like KoDP?

The advantage — or curse — of being an independent developer is that you wear many hats. Luckily, I enjoyed all of those.

King of Dragon Pass was indeed an idea I dreamed up (though obviously many others helped bring it to completion). I actually came up with a different sort of game about the colonization of Dragon Pass as part of my tabletop gaming in Glorantha. It took a very different approach, but it showed that the setting would work for this sort of game. A few years later I figured out how I’d use this in a computer game.

The other designers were Glorantha creator Greg Stafford and another famous PnP designer Robin D. Laws. What kind of aspects of the game did each of you focus on?

Before development began, Greg and I bounced ideas off each other. Our thoughts were surprisingly in sync. As the project progressed, he approved artwork, and offered useful advice. We adapted the initial clan creation questionnaire from one he’d used in a paper & dice game.

I asked Robin to write the hundreds of interactive scenes, but he ended up fleshing out much of the game framework I’d come up with.

The original structure — management screens, advisors, scenes — ended up pretty much unchanged, though we added interactive battles thanks to Rob Heinsoo. Elise Bowditch and I wrote a few of the scenes. As far as design, I was responsible for the economic model, and tried to make it interesting and workable.

Why was the Orlanthi culture picked to star in the game of all the Gloranthan peoples? Was it because the viking-y warriors were seen as one of the more relatable ones, or was it more due to the setting of the Dragon Pass itself? It seems like a good choice at least from my own perspective, as at least many Finnish roleplayers were familiar with the setting from the translated RuneQuest material published back in the day, like the Snake Pipe Hollow adventure (which I don’t remember anyone ever surviving).

One answer would be simply that in the fictional world, there already was the story of the recolonization of Dragon Pass by the Orlanthi. This gave us the most material to draw upon (such as Snakepipe Hollow). Of course, if it wouldn’t have made a good story, we would have picked something else.

The fact that KoDP takes place around 300 years before the published RuneQuest material also seemed like a nice twist on the setting.

Was it hard to design a truly Gloranthan fantasy computer game? The way the setting handles stuff like myths, magic and tradition (or even the titular dragons) is quite different from classic D&D-ish fantasy which dominates the gaming scene. And what is it for you personally about Glorantha that most captivates your imagination?

I think in most ways designing for Glorantha made things easier — so much detail already existed (even though we ended up filling in a lot more). Robin and I respected the setting, so it was easy to work with its creator, Greg.

And yes, Glorantha does have a different feel than other fantasy games. I was drawn to it by its strong mythic sense, and the fact that its cultures actually seemed plausible from an anthropological sense. In KoDP the trolls are antagonists, but in Glorantha as a whole they are just another type of people, and you can play them equally well.

In addition to your work with KoDP, you’ve been a pen&paper Glorantha contributor as well. Do you still play roleplaying games on tabletop these days?

A lot less than I used to, thanks to the iPhone project...

KoDP is one of those games which doesn’t fall neatly into any usual computer gaming genre. Is it a strategy game where you don’t even see any 'units' and the of the most important thing is your number of cows? Is it roleplaying when you control an ensemble that dies of old age and is replaced by new generation? Is it multiple choice interactive fiction? So, how would you descibe it yourself today? How would you personally describe it to someone who hears about the game first time now? What is King of Dragon Pass really about?


I’m asking this since because the the critical consensus on the game was really mixed when it was released back in -99 (the Mobygames review index is hilariously polarized) and it seems many reviewers didn’t know what to make of the game at all, and it still might be a ‘hard sell’ for a new generation.

Hmm, Mobygames seems to have ignored a lot of reviews, such as Pelit’s 94/100.

It’s true that the game doesn’t fit neatly into the standard slots. I think that’s a plus — the genres are useful for marketing, but they aren’t the only ways to have fun. If I have to describe it, I usually call it a "storytelling strategy game," because I think the stories are the key element, and because the rest of the game play most resembles the turn-based strategy genre. But what it’s really about is telling an interesting story that takes a generation or more to unfold.

Looking from the outside, King of Dragon Pass seems one of those games that really divided gamers but at the same time created a very enthusiastic cult audience. Is that true, and do you get lots of contact from eager fans still today? Can you comment on how the game was back then as a commercial success?

I was a little surprised at how well people liked the game — we had a money-back guarantee and only two people ever took advantage of it. Just this week I was wearing a King of Dragon Pass t-shirt, and a coworker (who didn’t know I’d created it) commented that he liked the game. The game’s been out a while but even so there’s still a residual community, and I hope it picks up again with the new release.

I’m told the game was in the top 10 in Finland, but in the rest of the world it didn’t do as well. We did have to make a second printing, but it wasn’t a commercial success.

How did the project to bring a new 2.0 KoDP to iOS start for you and where did the idea come from? I personally always thought of the game as a hardcore pc title but now realized it’s been out on Mac as well and you seem to have lots of previous experience on iOS platforms as well...?

[Oops, I somehow overlooked this question! Sorry, Janne!]

What kind of improvements have you done for the game? Did you have to drop any features that just didn’t work on an iPhone?

The elements I dropped weren’t so much because they didn’t work, but because reimplementing the clan overview (with the little herds) and the clan rock (with the glowing runes) were way more effort than I thought they were worth.

So you had Olli and Jani helping you on the conversion. I guess they’ll be able to tell me also what they’re actually doing, but how did you come in contact with these two originally, looking from your point of view?

When I worked at GameHouse, our sister studio was Mr. Goodliving, where Olli worked. Olli was a fan of the game, and pitched a prototype to Mr. Goodliving, shortly before they were shut down. As the game got more complete, we needed an artist to work on the new user interface, and Olli put me in contact with Jani.

I feel a bit sorry for Jani because he came onto the project fairly late, and I had to keep saying “no” to his suggestions, because the game design was already in place. But despite the constraints, he came up with some elegant ways to have a touch UI that was both functional and attractive.

The original art was one of the selling points in King of Dragon Pass. How much of it did you retain and how much did you have to get done again due the size constraints?

The original artwork (such as the ink and watercolor scenes) was the property of the artist, and they sold much of it over the years. I now have the remaining scene art, and people can buy it at http://daviddunham.etsy.com/.

We scanned the original artwork at 640 x 480, and then did retouching and color correction using Photoshop. The iPhone has a smaller screen, so we could just use the digital art. But we no longer had all the originals available, and wouldn’t have the staff to rework them in any case. So there’s no version of the game optimized for the 1024 x 768 pixel iPad screen.

Do you think it’s possible the revival of the game might also bring about some sort of digital distribution deal on pc or even console direct download shops? In fact, I guess many fans of the original are wondering why we haven’t seen it yet in a place like Steam where many eccentric games seem to thrive today... I think I read somewhere (RPG.net discussions maybe) that some sort of trouble did  prevent the republishing at least in some point...?

No, it is not possible to distribute the original game digitally. I think people don’t realize the difficulties of trying to use a 10 year old development system — which had been discontinued before KoDP’s release — to change the game so it wouldn’t require a CD. We spent a fair amount of time on this but were ultimately unsuccessful.

KoDP can be quite daunting for a beginner due its complexity and the fact that things don’t work quite as same as in ‘normal’ fantasy games. Do you have some words of wisdom to offer new players who would like to become clan chieftains in Dragon Pass? What are the most important things or principles to remember? (I might personally say ‘Don’t piss off the ducks!’)

First, listen to your advisors. Second, read the manual! If you don’t read the manual, at least read the Info available from the starting screen. We’ll be posting a series of tips on our Twitter feed, @KingDragonPass.

On the other hand, perhaps pissing off the ducks leads to an interesting story (and there’s always Restore if you decide to change your mind).