The main thing that is customizable is chunk scripts:
Chunk Scripts: YesThe way that the world population works is based on a huge hierarchy of what we are calling "chunk scripts." These scripts as just small xml files define things such as how a building is constructed, or a certain way of arranging a blob of trees, or even a larger arrangement of a snowy landscape. The various screenshots so far were all created with just three variants of one "chunk population script," and a ridiculously simple office building script.
Each of these chunk scripts is actually a vehicle for intelligent randomization. One office building script can actually lead to dozens or hundreds of different office buildings, depending on how many randomization points the script design has.
These scripts all rely on a library of in-game code methods for actually wiring up these components in a new way. That's a fancy way of saying that if we haven't designed a general "building" template, you can't make in game buildings. But if we have a general "office building" template, you could use it to make factories, or gas stations, or whatever. More likely we'll have it broken out by broad categories of buildings for seeding purposes, of course -- that way there aren't gas stations cropping up downtown when people don't want them to.
Anyway, this sort of thing, depending on the type of chunk script, can define anything from building interior variants to tree seeding variants, to overall type-of-map variants. The game organizes these xml files into simple folders, and when seeding it chooses randomly for each type of element in the appropriate folders. It starts with the overall chunk definition, and then various other kinds of scripts get chained from that in a chunk-definition-defined-way.
So to add new office building types, for instance, all you have to do is just add a new xml file in the appropriate folder. Designing your own or just altering one of ours is fine. Then anytime an office building should show up -- city sections or whatever -- your new design would show up from time to time, with variants where you let it randomize your design (defined in your script).
The best of these, which players choose to share, will be put into the game proper, so that not only do you have hopefully hundreds of Arcen-provided scripts all told, but hopefully we'll have even more from players. For my part, I'll do my best to have a massive enough selection of art components (and growing), so that script writers can really exercise a lot of creative freedom there, which in turn leads to more varied worlds and regions in general.
Depending on how much players get involved, and if the income of the game is supporting us well enough to do this, we could really get an
insane amount of intelligent variance with this sort of thing.
Art: NoThe art itself is not customizable -- well, not any more than AI War is. You can replace any images you want in any of our games, but you can't add new ones. If players do create art that we like and that fits with the game, then with permission we would add it to the game proper and then it could be used (this is basically what some artists like eRaSer and HitmanN have done for AI War, in other words).
New Functionality: NoThis game isn't going to be mod-able in the traditional sense. No changing stats, or designing new functionality, etc. We're looking to make a game ourselves, not make a platform for folks to make other games on top of our game. But, as with AI War, once we pass a certain point we'll definitely be considering ideas from players, etc. Right now we're all tied up with our own ideas, and we may even mostly remain that way through 1.0 of the game, but player ideas are always finding their way into our games in general, as of course you know,
Dialogue and Place Names: YesThe place names will be generated through specific kinds of adjective-noun pairings from various lists stored on disk. More robust and interesting than the planet names in AI War. Players can replace or customize these as they like, and with permission we'll definitely be integrating the ones we like into the main game proper. Having oodles of variety here will only be a good thing.
These would be broken down into categories, of course: things like town names, city names, forest names, mountain names, whatever. So you won't get a mountain named "The Woods Of Despair" or whatever.
Story Elements: Probably, If PossibleHonestly, a lot of the storytelling aspects are something we haven't fully figured out yet. As with a Zelda game, to some extent the story takes a bit of a back set. But we do want to have a lot of various scenarios with bad guys that pop up and threaten groups of regions, etc.
There's definitely going to be way more story here than something like AI War, but we're hoping to keep it to that sort of poetic brevity from the classic SNES games. No walls and walls of dialogue from NPCs. "Say what you mean and get on with it!"
Anyway, we're going to try and have as many scenarios as we can manage over time, but the actual mechanism for setting this up has only been loosely designed at best, and is one aspect Keith and I haven't really nailed down yet. To a certain extent this is just too far off, and we need more of the underlying game mechanics in place before we can best decide how this will layer in.
My goal is definitely to have this aspect to be as customizable as we can, but since a lot of these sorts of elements ("my father was murdered, I must avenge him!" or "Baron Von Villain enslaves everybody in Town X") require coding functionality to really wire them up, I'm not sure to what degree that will be possible. It's also definitely a problem that the more generic you make a story arc like this, the less interesting it gets.
So this might be something that we have to take suggestions from players on, implement ourselves, and then take custom dialogue variants to keep things fresh between multiple versions of essentially the same storyline as it comes up in parts of the game.
