hi everybody this is Charles Hoskinson broadcasting live from warm sunny Colorado I see if anybody's on the livestream oh we got a few people all right I wanted to make a video talk about legends Valar and other things not related to car Donna we're not talking about car down at all so if your car down oh stuff and you don't to hear me ramble about other things you can just go do something else but what's the news today oh yes a few things first off I posted a video on my Twitter feed that had a department of Illinois a state of Illinois Department of Health official talked about the definition of a corona death and there's something great about the way they're counting these things so basically let's say that you are an asymptomatic corona case you walk out into the street and get hit by a bus and the bus kills you under the way we're counting deaths right now that would be a corona fatality you know that's direct words from the state of Illinois so obviously this is not exactly the most accurate of counting mechanisms especially when you actually start dissecting people who died if you look at reports out of Italy of the death toll there the vast majority of people who were sampled had some form of comorbidity usually a serious one like congestive heart failure diabetes you know hypertension all kinds of terrible stuff and I had the fact that they're old and decrepit that's a side thing I posted on Twitter and we cut I got a lot of crazy replies everything from Rand Paul is not a doctor that's a new one if you're an opthamologist cuts people's eyes out for a living apparently you're not a doctor in this logic land it's getting crazy it really is I read an article on Forbes says it's gonna take four hours to get on an airplane and travel four hours because you're gonna have to go through quarantine stuff and defect and they're gonna have to defect you disinfect you you're gonna have to have an immunity passport and all this stuff and I'm just thinking to myself oh my god I spent last year 200 plus days traveling and living on a plane how much more time is it going to take Travel so that's a fun article as well all right let's get the meat and potatoes Neff Corona stuff I'm done with Corona it's just all-around a horrible situation for us all especially given that this has become a political issue when it's really a data issue in a fax issue in a science issue and it's so so sad that people can't see things clearly but it is what it is and we're already seeing resistance against it like musk reopened his factory here Colorado on Castle Rock gaol opened her restaurant up she's lost her business license she's still keeping it open people are starting to rebel against this and it's going to get more prevalent and more violent if this continues all right so let's talk about Legends eval are the other project I'm working on you know Cardno is doing its thing and they're having fun pioneers are getting enjoying the organ trail effect I've informally been calling it the Lovelace trail and you'll see information trickle out throughout the week and next week about their experiences they're already starting to make videos and so forth and developments on track things are chugging away code is being written that's neither here nor there lots of blog posts the legends of valor on the other hand I'm the only guy around it can give you updates on that because I bought it for me and there's only one person working on it it's me so here's my direct community report there so we're still dealing with them paperwork technicalities apparently the contract I signed need to be read ated so I had to resign so the entire IP transfer should be handled probably this week or next week it's it's been a weird process that one what's interesting is the source code was lost and so I've been spelunking and trying to figure out what the source code looks like and we actually managed to find one of the old developers who worked on it legends valor is almost like King Tut's tomb were strangely large proportion of people that have worked on that project somehow died of various causes so her are difficult to find like in the mountains of Nepal or something like that so I've been hunting these people down and we found Ian and apparently he may actually have some of the original source code so we're looking for that we also have some meetings this week secretary and I if with some people who are experts in disassemblies so if we can't find the original source code perhaps we can perform some code archaeology and discover some things so I took the time last night one o'clock in the morning before I went to bed to boot up dosbox and actually turn on legends of valor it's been the first time in eight years as I've done that just to see if the state of the game and I was like wow this game is batteries not included there's a there's a lot of stuff that needs improvement so its first got a fixed perspective first person camera angle you can't look up you can't look down you can go right left forward back those are your navigation options the resolution is dreadfully small I think it's 640 by 400 very small pixel density there and the map system is terrible when you go below ground you can create a map but then when you go above ground that map gets erased and there's no way to recover it I suspect it was because of memory limitations with the game so we're gonna have to figure that out no Journal system worth a damn I was actually going through the clue book as well I pulled out my old coffee at the clue book and I went through all the quests and they're fairly simplistic and some of them are very non-intuitive and I was like wow that's that that's pretty crazy so I said wow we're gonna have to redesign this whole thing so a little bit of update on technology we reached out to people in the pier script project and we reached out to people in the Babylon Jas community to ask them basically about pier script bindings for Babylon Jas and if anybody's done a game that way and so it'd be really cool to write a game and pier script for those of you who don't know about pearce grip pier script is a functional programming language that looks a lot like Haskell but it's designed to compile to JavaScript so it can be used in the browser and Babylon j/s is a graphics framework that's javascript native that allows you to build native applications iOS applications VR applications and so forth are using that framework and then both of them are very mature ecosystems and they're they're quite good there's a lot of these transformation JavaScript languages that exists like reason ml for the ochem community and CoffeeScript and typescript that compile into JavaScript so that's a very well understood process and it's just a question of how do you get Pierce group to play nice with babylons yes and have a a good game development environment and experience there so we've started the process of having a conversation along those lines and what we're gonna do is probably a two phased approach for legends of Valar so one phase is the enhanced edition so that's kind of like Baldur's Gate enhanced edition where I'm gonna try to have as faithful as possible representation of legends of valor command and conquer also did this when they updated the game as faithful as possible representation of the original plot game experience but updated so that it's actually playable because if a modern kid plays legends of valor today it's like like descending into the depths of Mordor it's not going to be fun it's not going to be a really enjoyable experience for the vast majority of people because we just simply learned so much about game design mechanics since 1992 and if we were to try to do a faithful representation it really does require some things just make it easier to play a great example it just like really tiny example would be the evolution of the gold box game engines during the 90s and 80s when they went from pool of radians to treasures of the savage frontier so if you played those just over the arc of the gold box engine which was for the original a D&D I before second edition it was first edition in the original pool of radiance you did not auto cast healing spells when you rested so you had to manually click cure light wounds and other things to cure your characters to bring their health bars up in gateway and treasures of sin frontier which came years afterwards using the same engine it would auto cast those spells which had actually over the life of playing the game save you literally hours of repeating the same thing over and over and over and over and over again so these are examples of small improvements that dramatically improve the flow and usability of the game the same situation for a journal system and updated map system so in what to expect in the enhanced edition in addition to trying to make this browser friendly eye and to support things that can be natively supported babylons yes like ammo the physics system that they have so that you can have realistic game physics and so forth and potentially even having a vr version event is that a lot of gameplay mechanics will be updated the combat system was also extremely primitive there were only three options you could swipe your sword cut down or you can jab and I guess you know that said and certain enemies perhaps you do more damage than others it was never clear to me when I would I played it but you know it is what it is what can you do so that whole system has to be completely reexamined and reanalyzed and we have to think carefully about those game mechanics of how do we actually want to do combat so throughout all combat it's gonna be redone also there was no notion of experience or character progression in legends of valor even if you're playing recent games that are just not even in that domain like Warhammer Inquisitor for example a quiz etre martyr that's an example of where you have a class system and you have a leveling system and a progression system so as you do stuff more stuff you gain experience and then you can apply that experience to feats skills levels these types of things so it opens up an opening interesting question of if we were to bolt a class system onto legends of Allah or how would we do that and so you know we have to think you know we could borrow a game system like one I really liked with monty cooks Arcana evolved which was a variant of the d20 gaming system which in itself was the open-source version of third edition Dungeons & Dragons was a very well thought out system but I don't know if it would port well into game environment if you look at games like Pathfinder for example they've had a lot of difficulty doing a faithful representation of third edition DD rules in a computerized setting another example would be Temple of Elemental Evil which was the first third edition port and there's been some other attempts like with Neverwinter Nights for example to do a third edition port and it just has a lot of failings especially in the multi-class system and so forth now the other side of the spectrum you get rid of a class system all together and you do with something like Steve Jackson's group's if you guys remember generic Universal role-playing system that's a really interesting thing and if you do some archaeology in the history of groups there was one attempt to digitize it that was really meaningful interplay tried to license groups for fallout way back in the day so if you're a fallout fan it could have been groups and it didn't work that way there's some stuff fell through and they decided to to pass on that so there's a lot to think about of the game system to do do we do an in-house game system and do we do or borrow a game system and adapt that game system to fit in you know there's another thing about experience you know there's a lot of opinions on this so the Elder Scrolls series was really innovative in that your experience was connected to actions a moral wind was a really good example of the system so as you ran your athletic skill came up you jump and do things you do alchemy you gain alchemy and by that algum alga nation of non combat in combat related experiences you gradually gain level progression which would increase your health mana and stan mow which were the resources of the character and the HUD so there is a question should we create an experience system in the game that you can get experienced from non-combat or will be strictly combat and there's some games that even don't give you any experience at all for combat so it's it's going to be a lot of fun to kind of figure that out and decide what to do there and then there's a question of it should just be actions you physically do or should be connect to the in-game economy for example there are many games that actually you can pay in-game currency to gain skills like the elder scrolls and later versions you had concepts of skill trainers so you say you want your heavy armor skill to go up you pay gold to get your heavy armor skill up and so forth so these are kind of things to think about in the game design mechanics as we build a class system but that's going to be a major endeavor for the enhanced edition is it's missing and the fact that it's not there is a major detriment to the playability of the game because while there's a role-playing element to just running around the game and doing things the reality is you can join every guild you can plea a request to the game you can do everything in the game and your character is identical in its power to the character that just started the game you know that's that's unfortunate that really is a less than optimal game design mechanic so we have to think carefully about that and that's going to be a lot of fun to design other things to think about the magic system in the game was quite primitive and it was actually quite regressive in legends of Valar so you know if for example there's two spell systems there was the divine and the arcane the divine system it was uniform so there are four temples the temple of Freya there was a water temple the name escapes me for the moment temple of set in the temple of Odin and those four had five promotion quests and if he went through all the promotion quests you get a access to four different spells so the first rank you would get no magic and then you progress your way through and it didn't matter if here the evil temple upset or a good temple of Odin you would still have the same spell set and the minute you left the temple you'd lose all your magic just all that's gone you four completely forgotten so very simplistic spell system and one combat spell in the arcane sense it was a fireball spell you get about three of them off before the spell expired and then the divine sense you'd have a lightning bolt and you get two of them off if you were lucky before the spell expired particularly good for hunting werewolves and vampires because it killed one shot I think you could one shot a troll with it as well so all that has to be scrapped it's gonna have to be completely rethought but then when you think around that that's intimately connected to the skill system in the game so it's there's going to be a relationship then between the magic system of the game and the character progression in the game though there's an open question if well what does guild membership even mean that then there were two other types of guild membership there was the Thieves Guild and then there was the Warriors guild in the game it was never clear to me if the Warriors Guild did anything and actually will be able to discover this in the code forensics when we actually start doing the our key we'll see if membership in the Warriors Gil actually increased your combat skills or not I have a suspicion that at level five it did but we don't know so the enhanced edition obviously we'll have to figure that out and obviously for redoing the combat system then there's going to be a lot to say there a lot to do there so there's going to be a boatload of a boatload of things to think about in the combat system on the thieving side now really the only things you could do there were twofold one there was a burglary skill so the game mechanics had an indoor-outdoor above ground below ground those were the domains that you could enter and you could in the game this was really revolutionary in 1992 you could look at the window and peer into that structure inside that room so you could actually pre-render what the zone would be entering into that zone now with the burglary skill if you looked at the window and click enter on your keyboard you could actually open the window and go into the home which was super cool so you could breach you know those those artificial walls that existed but you required a you know a thebes guild membership to do that and I believe was level 2 when you gain that capability the other thing that would scale as you gained experience in steve's guild was the pickpocketing ability so when you hailed somebody and they came to you there would be a pickpocket capability you click the pickpocket and then you'd be able to potentially steal money from them it only worked I think a hundred percent of the time if if you were guild master of the Thieves Guild and again you lose all these abilities the minute you quit the guild they don't stick with you so I apparently developed alzheimers or something when you when you quit the guild it just like become super forgetful so that's a that's a very bad game mechanic that has to be completely refined and carefully thought about then on so those are the four core guild types and all those quests have to be completely modernized and updated but the spirit of the quest has to be maintained now as a DOS era game there were significant limitations on particle physics significant limitations on sound and actually those were the days when we had things called sound cards so many of you older people myself included well remember soundblaster and the dedicated it wasn't even a PCI back then it was an ISA if you remember is a those ports not PCI parts I'm not PCI Express we're talking like pre that and there was also I think an IBM em aside port but is a was the standard for that and it was Sound Blaster and there were several other like turtlebeach and so forth vendors for sound cards and there was no standardization the drivers were very wonky and because this was a cross-platform game from Myka and others sounds super hard it's been a huge amount of time of that as a as a game developer to think about these particular things and and so we have kind of think around well what are we gonna do with sound here so we have a lot of music heads at IOH K you know and we actually there's cool projects like Euterpe for example and one thing that would be super cool to do is to take utopium which is a haskell library for generation of music it's even get a working in pier script and actually do generative music algorithmically generated music inside the game one of the great consequences of something like that will be that you have an unlimited soundtrack because music is generated on the fly as you're doing things and what's cool about the you trippy framework is that it can emulate any instrument piano viola and all these other things so you can create a compositional range and then you can algorithmically generate random music that fits those than a melody set so that would be super super fun to try I don't think any game is really pulled that off and it's something that could be in potential scope for the enhanced edition of the game not just the full remake because look at the remake in a minute so we're gonna do some research on specifically the sound effects and what to do there are probably only 50 or 60 unique sounds in the game so the question is how do you take that set up date it modernize it add depth to it and make it really fun and exciting and the question is should we do just algorithmically generated music or should we actually hire a composer to do things it would be a lot of fun to work with Jawad e on this project he occasionally does game soundtracks ramen you probably don't know the name but you know the work if you've ever watched Game of Thrones or if you ever watched Westworld he's a guy who did the soundtrack for both of those but he actually does game soundtracks as well and there's a there's a lot of cool stuff that could be potentially done there and I'd have a lot of fun Trent Reznor occasionally does game soundtracks as well and we have some connections to him so we'll kind of budget out what we want to do on the sound department but it would be really cool Oh Sebastian is here for us has a really good automatically generated soundtrack see that's the cool part about the archaeology is that this is my understanding today but by doing these videos you guys are gonna share cool things with me and I'll go back through them and we'll be able to kind of look at it so that sound side of things the sound design and all those mechanics and so forth now one of the cool things about Legends of Valor that was really revolutionary in 1992 was the random generation of NPCs and so when you were exploring the city walking your way around you just see these random people generated on the fly so as you got within a certain radius your character was traversing middle dwarf you you'd have these characters generated and they were real in that you could actually talk to them they weren't just placeholders when you talk to them and they came up to you the computer would have a Bank of static data and it would randomly chose which parts that wanted to go so it would randomly assign a name from a set of names a profession a religion a purpose like it would literally build that character on the fly and even decide if they have resources or not so what was really nifty about that was that it was one of the first games to ever do that but then it also means that if we're gonna do an enhanced edition we have to preserve faithfully that concept but modernize it into the 21st century so in the 21st century you'd have to ask yourself well what does random character generation actually mean so this is something where the NPC and the PC are going to share the same experience in a certain respect so if you play Skyrim or any modern game when you create a new character you go and do the whole thing you make the face the eye color the beer this gender all these kinds of things and then of course if it's a really deep role-playing game you can add things and like with kirk's you can even be addicted to drugs and all kinds of crazy things so there's gonna have to be a common element between the random NBC generator which has to be preserved and the PC generator and if we do a really good job of it then you can have very realistic beautiful NPCs so and no two people will have the same play experience because the play experience will be randomly generated in that particular respect and then it's a open question of well when you randomly generate these people what do they do you know where do they walk around and you know what can they interact with in the game world so in the original legends of Valar the interactions were limited to just basically walking around they had no purpose and they didn't interact with each other there's been a lot of attempts in modern games to actually have reasonable interactions with NPCs the the first attempt I remember that was somewhat meaningful but very puzzling and sad was the I think was the radiant AI system in Elder Scrolls for oblivion where the NPC's actually had cycles they would go to their homes they would walk around town they would interact with each other and talk with each other and there's hundreds of YouTube videos floating around of crazy interactions or nonsensical interactions as a consequence of the radiating eye system but what was nice about the system was that people had real jobs and so they would actually go to those real jobs so if he generated a Smith the Smith would go to the forge and Hammer stuff and do things so it had to you know what we call the mill gear of this of the world it made the world slightly more realistic or interesting NPC NPC interactions can also be very interesting because you have to make some decisions of do they just talk to each other with pre-generated trivial dialogue like a great example of this would be the Hitman franchise especially after absolution including solution and beyond the the NPCs would actually go and interact with each other in meaningful ways to give you context not just to help you figure out how to get around them or interact with them so that you can get to your mission but in some cases actually making you feel somewhat sympathetic like an absolution there were a certain dialogue trees where they talk about their kids or something and the hope was that you would emotionally empathize with the character and say maybe I shouldn't kill them because they have children wait a minute it's just not real right so so anyway there's a lot to think about there as well as you know how do you handle the AI system once you've randomly generated an NPC so you're going to generate an NPC and then there's going to be a state of that NPC from their religion their work and these other things and then there's a system of like ability now this was very crude in the original legends of Valor game to the extent of they don't like you they'll insult you in pick a fight if they do like you nothing happens you don't really get any more information occasionally there was these responses like where are you going what is your profession they'd see things like none of your business or I don't know just to with you and actually this mechanic was used with the vampires at night when you talk to a vampire vampires will give you random information and they would never be honest they'd always lie to you it was cool little mechanic of vampires so there's an open question of how does the interaction system work so obviously like is like so if there's a dwarf generated by the random generator system your PC character is a dwarf when they interact with each other does that create a situation where there's a potential for you to have a more favorable interaction one of my favorite games that actually really push this mechanic to the logical extreme is from troika games and it was Arcanum guys ever played that and Arcanum was so involved in this that if he were a beautiful female in the game that some NPCs would actually try to sleep with you I mean this is how far they pushed that envelope and alternatively if your intelligence score was too low or you were too ugly people would actively insult you say you smell or use different dialogue trees like break things down in very simple terms that you like terms you'd use for forrest gump or something like that so anyway there's a lot to think about there too is it's not just about randomly generating the npc then there's NPC to NPC interactions and there's n PC to PC interactions and how are those interactions going to work and so the gameplay mechanics one of my biggest gripes of legends of Valar the original game when I played it as a kid was that there were two gills the Warriors guild it was a mercenary guild in the men-at-arms it was I think implied that the men-at-arms was the guard guild so the the actual guards in the town were part of the men of arms so and they patrolled the men-at-arms barracks for example well here was my problem with that you could advance to be the head of the guild so basically you're the chief of police you're the head of the guard but then random guards would just come up arrest you but is there any reality where you're the sheriff in some County and one of your deputies comes up to you and just arrest you for a random thing it's like no no that that does not happen you know so I was like what the this is crazy the other thing is that in those random generation of NPCs let's say that one of them has a religion I follow Odin and you joined the temple of Odin and you're the high priest of Odin you're like the Pope and this guy follows your religion and he still treats you the same way than he treats you before by the way there's not exclusive to legends of Valar even triple-a game designers like Bethesda screw up on this a great example would be Skyrim so in Skyrim you can join the Legion and become head of the Legion general right up there was general tall you legged and then you run into randomly Legionnaires on the side of the other road and they treat you exactly the same as if you're a regular human being that's like being in the army and you're a general a four-star general and you run it to a private and they don't even salute you it's like it's not realism it breaks all the immersion so that's going to be something that has to be carefully thought out in the NPC generation is your race your class your guild affiliations and then yet our thinking around physical attributes like is there a measure of beauty or charisma in the game all those mechanics have to fit in in a way to actually allow that person to like you or not there's been a lot of really cool game mechanic attempts Deus Ex has done some cool things in that respect you can even get implants to help augment that given this is a game where there's magic in the game world certainly could imagine magic being used to influence people's reactions to you there are two magic guilds in the game the Brotherhood of Loki and then the fellowship the fellowship is kind of the good gil the Brotherhood of Loki's kind of the evil guild given Loki's portfolio to expect illusion magic and manipulation to be a big component there so that would certainly have a big component with these types of things so lots to think around there and game mechanics to design there so that's gonna be a lot of fun and we'll kind of look into these things you know a few other things too the food system the game was quite fun especially for 1992 it was one of the few games where you could eat him a deuce of pie one of the few games were you could drink blood wine and actually I kudos to the legends of valor design team there were some really cool stuff that they did with the game mechanics like for example if you became a vampire normal food and water had no impact on you but if you drank blood need in the game bloody ale or whatever was called you'd actually restore your health have food and water so this example of what clever game mechanic you say was a vampire like only drink blood and there was actually blood in the game to drink and you as a player didn't think too much about I think it's ox blood actually was the the blood inside the game so little things like that which were quite clever and actually the game was smart enough to include other mechanics too like there was a disease system the game in 1992 it was very revolutionary so you basically could get rot you could you could smell bad you could be possessed by an alien spirit you know you could get combat wounds all kinds of things and there's two ways to get healed there was a lore based way of getting healed where they mentioned the game manual and occasionally I think there's one or two mentions in the game of this a surgeon the woman in a very specific area and if you kill her she's gone forever no consequences that other than you can't have access to her and she could cure your wounds for a very small amount of money or you go to a temple and the temple could fix you people along to the temple you get a discount otherwise it would be very expensive to cure your wounds but it was very clever you get food poisoning in the game so you could eat your Medusa pie and get your food poisoning and actually it was really clever is they can accrued poverty system inside the game so if you rented a room because the only way to sleep safely was to rent a room at one of those hostels they had very cheap hostels in the slums of the city of middle dwarf and all the way the worst rest which is in nearby the castle which is the most expensive if you slept in a slum you had a chance of being robbed and you had a chance of getting a disease but if you slept in the high-end place you would not get robbed and he had a very low chance of getting a disease so this is just a great example of like 1992 the scarcity is the mother of all invention and apparently I know apparently they actually thought of a system like that and I was like wow that's really cool so that's definitely mechanic to think about and then there's a question of how much influence should the player have over the game world as a whole so because of design limitations resource limitations you as a player of Legends afoul are are you know just not going to be able to meaningfully change anything there this was long before the age of customization long before the age of destructible terrain triggering events he said so little that you'd have impact over there are games that have come out like for example the fable series where not only can you have an impact on the world you can buy homes and you can rent stuff and you can like own shop so you can do all this crazy stuff so there's going to be a great example of can you have an influence over the game world and into extent how much of an influence of the game world can you have most games these days include some form of customization even vanity custom is a and you know also do you want to be able to have macro environmental impacts on the game world there aren't many games that actually show these gameplay mechanics but a great example would be are there going to be long-term consequences of the behavior that you have there have been some games where if you do consistently bad things it actually impacts not only the game world but the the graphics of the game like the camera it's darker you're it gets more gritty you actually see like like homeless people in the streets and poverty starts accruing for example if you kill a prominent member who's doing stuff then maybe it destroys the local economy and then also and everything just goes in hell so then it brings in to a temporal component as well so you look at for example the game mechanics there was no notion of time outside of day night and there was midday noon evening these very not so granular time accounting parts and the calendar was just seven days a week but there was no year candy or seasonality inside the system because there's no weather mechanics remember this is 1992 okay so you have to ask yourself if you introduced a time component then when you do stuff in the game you can create a memory within the game and then as time progresses it Cascades and creates issues but you go around killing lots of these peasants it'll have some sort of impact on the economy now another thing that is mentioned in the clue book and in the Wikipedia page of Legends of Valor not reflected in any of the gameplay mechanics and this is an example of where we have to keep you in a single location so we can't let you leave they said that the game takes place ironically during a plague you know the times of Corona you know if there's a plague okay so what does that effectively mean for the the game world nothing there was no bodies in the street there's no nothing if you play the original never winters nights game there was a magic plague that Calvin black staff eventually cured and that game world and actually had a very meaningful impact on the gameplay mechanics and there's even actually games built around plagues there's one that's escaping I never played it but I saw it through Steam while doing some research there's certainly mechanics you could have with the plague so there's an open question for the enhanced edition should that plague mechanic be preserved because if we're enhancing the game then it actually has to go from just some convenient excuse they use to keep you within the game world but it's never referenced to a very significant black death level component of the game world mechanics so that's a that's gonna be a fun debate because if you don't include the plague then there's an organic question of how do you keep the player character confined within middle-earth what prison what compels them to stay there that or otherwise there's been some really cool attempts to keep the player on a narrative arc there's even things like curse of the azure bonds that was another one of the gold box games and the dragon Lance universe we actually had these tattoos in your arm and if you behaved against the narrative arc of the game it would force you back on to the narrative arc of the game you can even think of analogies to cinema or to televisions like the the Farscape series for example if you ever watch Farscape on TV where you know they're trying to extract from Crichton's brain the wormhole technology and so Scorpius put like a variant of himself in in the Crichton's mind so Harvey kind of started influencing or controlling or you know having control over Crichton's behavior so you can look at a little narrative elements like that but what was the key driver when the game started the key driver was that you're looking for your cousin Sven that's pretty much it now here's you know spoiler alert Sven basically got turned into a vampire somewhere along the way and he's just running around but when you ask about him they say left town at the end of the game that probably has to be thought out and fleshed out more and then there's a question of how much additional content should be added so in a faithful enhanced edition should we take the position of preserve as much as possible or should we take the position of a spiritual successor and that we add a lot of content to it and we're then as the boundaries of a three from complete remake of the game so that's a lot of stuff to think about you know play around with and so forth you know John Ben Craig havens one of my favorite game designers yeah and John created the might magic series and Heroes of Might Magic series and he created a company called New World Computing and for its time was great company and the the the occasion these game developers they get interviewed and they talk about like where they'd like to see these things going and he was really being into visual context like rewarding the player for noticing something so in your HUD and your camera when you focus on something if you tend to focus on the right thing for long enough maybe that should actually give the player something and these visual Easter eggs or narrative Easter eggs they're very meaningful and powerful because 9 out of 10 players will miss that that Easter egg will miss these things but the occasionally when you find it it's pretty magical and you know sometimes it's just stuff that never happens again like in the game Arcanum this was one of my favorite moments of my life and gaming's I really loved it so much they had this thing called a Stillwater rabbit so basically you're looking for a passageway through the mountains so that you can get to a secret elven city and there's this elf that knows where the elephant cities at and he says he'll only tell you if you bring him the pelt of the Stillwater giant now the Stillwater giant was like an in-game analogy to Bigfoot and they kind of played it that way where there was this crazy Bigfoot lunatic who's looking for it and he says the reason why no one's ever seen it is because the Stillwater giant is actually turns itself into a rabbit and then he says you can capture the rabbit it's in some cave and then once you bring it back to him he you can go ahead and give the rabbit to some zoo Society and try to convince them that you actually have this till water giant but then they imply that the guy's crazy and it's you've covered yourself in rabbit pee for no reason to capture this rabbit and it's not real well my complete serendipity in accident while playing the game the first time I was walking around Stillwater and I had a random encounter and I was at this little rabbit was floating around and that transformed into the Stillwater giant and it actually attacked my character and so I I defeated the monster I skinned it and took it back to the elf thinking oh that must be the quest never in my life through any other playthroughs or online tutorials have people said that that actually happens it's a very rare event and I - this days is pretty bizarre but there's a dialogue tree and Arcanum specifically for this type of stuff so this is a this is a great example of just rewarding to play with a random thing and how you're supposed to complete the quest as you recognize that there's a fake still while or giant belt in torrent which is the capital of the game you buy it from the guy who owns it and they give it to the elf and he is like I you call me on my bluff okay I'll tell you what the city's at but you literally can bring in the real pelt and it blows his mind it's like this is not real it shouldn't exist and it's there and it actually means the crazy lunatic Bigfoot guy was right hah so there's some gameplay mechanics to think about there - like how do you add Easter eggs and puzzles in these things that really reward players especially for multiple playthroughs so they can come through and yeah that's gonna be fun to add in there is also a question about race in class and language so basically legend the Valor had no component of language some games have very aggressive language components to the extent that if you don't speak the language of an in character you can't interact with them effectively so there should be a question of should in game languages be constructed for the major PC races and NPC races and those be brought into the gameplay somehow a great example of this would be Skyrim where you're the Dragonborn and literally by speaking the language of the Dragons you have a big impact on the game world it gives you special powers this very same thing could be constructed within the game world but then this goes into lower building so you know we have to think about you know how do we build the lore around the game world middle dwarf clearly was heavily inspired by English floor in Scandinavian lore in some Irish lore it was net they never built a mythos for the town above and beyond saying we're gonna take middle-age England and add some to it and that's magic to it and there you go so it was very 1990s 1980s world building in that respect if the game is to be modernised there is an expectation of the player to to add all of that back-end you know add some some proper extension of lore and if you're taking lore from real-life cannon sources there's a question well what do you do with those gameplay mechanics for example there is a temple of Odin and there's a lot of Norse mythology inside that game world if you guys have ever played God of War the latest one they did a really good job with Norse mythology it's pretty amazing so there's an open question of you know what the hell do we do with the with the north mythology inside the game do we preserve that add to it extent to it theological extrapolations of that elves at north mythology are very different from Tolkien selves and so forth so there's a lot to think there dwarves in north mythology are also very different from these types of things then it's a tyrannical government in the 1992 version of Legends of valour it was very clear that the existing government was pretty horrible there was some lore in the original book that came with the game basically telling you that value societies up its standard survival of the fittest power hierarchy really terrible medieval despotic government and everything is just really bad for everybody so there's an open question of well you know do how deep down that rabbit hole do you want to go the point of the game was to rescue the old king who was supplanted by the new king and then somehow you know this makes everything better so it was a very simplistic narrative in that particular respect and you the enhanced edition you kind of have to make a decision like what does this mean like if you say it's a despotic government how do you show it's a despot there's games like dishonored and other things that really show a lot of this a great game where they show you the really evil government was half-life 2 half-life 2 and you're actually living in the consequences of alien rule where they're like drugging people and sterilizing people and you know doing all these these crazy things you're like holy God this is a really bad government Deus Ex also did a great job with like a New World Order conspiracy theory government style thing and you kind of dig through that entire plotline so it's not good enough just say evil government replaced with a good government it's very simplistic narrative storytelling in games has gotten much much better and there's an expectation on the players side that evil can't just be evil and good can't just be good you have to kind of explore around some philosophical concepts and make it a little bit more difficult for the player to understand what's really right and wrong one of the greatest YouTube channels for this stuff is wisecrack if you guys ever want to listen to that stuff so wisecrack does a great great job of breaking down shows like Westworld or video games or shows like Rick and Morty and actually talking about them from the perspective of a philosophical school of thought so what would Albert Camus have to say about this or what would this particular philosopher have to say about this because guys who run the show like philosophy majors and PhDs and literally this is what they do for a living so yeah is if you know if you're trying to stay true to the original intent of the game that you're in a medieval story and you're basically overthrowing a bad government and replacing it with a good government there has to be some expose of well what makes that government bad and what makes the old government good and then you have to ask well why did the old government fall out of power was this a Black Swan event or or was there more to that story there and how do these pieces fit together so that's going to be a lot of fun to think about with with the gameplay mechanic and then there is kind of a question do you have an alignment system in the game so fable the alignment system was so engrained into the game mechanics that when you did enough evil stuff you grew horns your skin turned black he got fangs and you're like evil evil dude and when you did good stuff you literally got it in gentle I can't halo above your head if you did enough of that so that's a very explicit alignment system game systems like Dungeons & Dragons they create static alignment categories and if you fall too far out of that alignment category then your alignment category changes in certain classes you actually become fallen and then second edition Dungeons & Dragons which covered Balderas gate the two classes that were alignment dependent were paladin and Ranger and if you feel too far out of that scope you guys should come a fallen paladin or fallen Ranger but those nine alignments from chaotic evil to lawful good there's not a lot of you know goodness to that that's a very debated system it's it's it's a 90s way of thinking about things so it's an open the question of when you do stuff how does that stuff stick to your character and doesn't create a consequence of karma inside your system so as you accrue lots of evil actions there are lots of good actions what gameplay mechanics change inside this system there's even like in the dawn of war series Dawn of War 2 they introduced a corruption mechanic and as you did missions you could accrue corruption and it would actually change the ending of the game if you were corrupted or not you'd either be exiled or executed or you'd be able to stay with the Bloodraven Space Marine chapter just depending on what you did so there's a lot of stuff to really think in there like how to do an alignment style system and then you actually have to take a position on ethics that's a fun part about games is that you become a philosopher because your world builder so you have existentialism exit you have utilitarianism you have data logical systems like the categorical imperative these types of things you have to know I can take a position or everything relatives like is your absolute is what is your moral codes your ten Commandant's according to Odin your ten commandments according to Freya these types of gods and said this is who gets to fight decide what is right and their concept of justice in the game so there's like you can get arrested things can happen and so when you say there's a miscarriage of justice the best games make that debatable where you can kind of actually understand the position of why the state is behaving the way in bames for example right now here the world there's coronavirus people are being arrested for doing things i have constitutional rights in the united states but if i try to exercise those rights i'm being told well they don't apply right now cuz danger at what point does that no longer become lawful that will point to the police no longer enforce the law some sheriffs are actually saying it's not legitimate to enforce the law they're creating facebook videos about this so that's a real-life example a crisis has occurred the code of law has changed ethics and morals are a little malleable here you know my mere existence creates some small risk to other people I get in the car I can spread disease to them that's a baseline and as long as if we operate in that baseline society's okay but then when we go above a certain baseline society's not so then it becomes okay to restrict certain people you literally could apply the same standard into a gameworld mechanic and explore that in different ways for example regulation of magic use instead of a game so we regulate guns should we regulate magic baldur's gate to shadows of all invented a narrative device called the cowled wizards specifically for this purpose so to use magic in the game world you had to have a license and if you didn't have a license the Celt wizards would actually come over you could come after you and actually attack you and you're actually spending half the game trying to get your friend back your sister back Emma one who's been kidnapped by the kelp lizards for unregulated use of magic so should there be a regulation mechanic inside the inside the game world basically that'll allow you to you know use magic lawfully or not and then even if there's a regulating mechanic for magic you can actually get into the question just like with guns uh handguns okay but a bazookas not so what magic is okay and who's not and then who gets to regulate the magic right where do you buy that license from so so there's a lot of really cool things to think around it said that that mechanic for the justice system of the game this was an original gameplay mechanic in 1992 and again credit to the legends valor team for recognizing that that is a unique gameplay mechanic it did not exist in the gold boxes they in the gold box systems except for very specific story driven elements where you get arrested and example treasures of the savage frontier when they accuse you of kidnapping the Waterdeep ambassadors so it's like it was a very very very small thing it was part of the narrative but this was an actual built in gameplay mechanic and had a very significant impact on the game so it would be super cool to build a law justice system then there's the concept of racism so it's another one of those real-world things think it's important to a game racial and species divides will only be exacerbated when the differences between people aren't skin color but actual physiology so in the original legends of Valor game there was implied racism against dwarves in the game they even mentioned dwarf-tossing and other things as had the game but this was never really fully explored in any capacity or meaningful way there was no for example if you're a dwarf you couldn't join a guild or something like that so so anyway it's really interesting to think about well how do we go about introducing tension between races a great example in historical context would be when the Black Death broke out so if we were to preserve the plague mechanic that legends of LR had the premise on during the Black Death in the Middle Ages many communities blame Jewish populations for spreading of the plague and so this led to exile and pogroms there were actual mass execution of Jews or segregation of Jews because they felt that they were spreading it with witchcraft and other things like that so if there was a plague inside the game would it be natural for the dominant classes in the game to blame an underclass as a scapegoat especially if they didn't have a proper solution like the humans would blame the dwarf so the humans would blame the elves or particular use of magic or you know these types of things so that's a that's a really cool game mechanic to explore especially if the player character is of that race because you actually get a reward for two playthroughs the one where you're on the dominant class and the one that you when you're not on the dominant class and there's great storytelling route great storytelling mechanics that you can put in both of those situations and you can really have a lot of fun with that so that's that's certainly going to be very interesting mechanic to explore a crafting system no crafting system no idea of a crafting s'en no concept of a crafting system I mean the closest thing you could do is like like trap a spirit in a bottle I mean literally that's that's it no crafting system whatsoever inside the game massive gameplay mechanic and all modern RPGs every RPGs got some form of crafting mechanic and alchemy system almost all of them from the divinity series to you know Skyrim all and there's always something there's some skill tree to do this because it's a great gameplay mechanic it's a it's a reward for the player finding ingredients interacting with the environment but then there's a very interesting question of okay what can you do with that crafting system and what are you trying to achieve from a narrative so one of the things that really bothers me I'm a farmer I grow stuff you know I'm building hydroponic stuff and things like that I love the concept of a living biome within the game world itself so it's not just plants but they're somehow it can be collected and interacted with and so forth this has actually always been one of the strengths of the Elder Scrolls series because you walk around these big open biomes and you literally can harvest plants to a certain extent so it's a really cool interesting gameplay mechanic to ask about well what does a natural world looked like including the zoology of the natural so when you kill a troll you can extract troll blood when you kill a dragon you can strike this and that and those then our feed stock usually into a crafting and by extension enchantment system inside the game and what does an enchantment system mean in role-playing games like Dungeons the Dragons especially in the third edition you actually had to spend experience points to enchant things others actually required to put life essence and are trapped Souls like the Elder Scrolls series you actually had to trap a soul to put the soul into a pillars of eternity has an ax man see these types of things so there is a there's a lot of things to think about you know for a crafting system and what's a meaningful crafting system one of my biggest pet peeves in gaming and I hope it is yours too is this idea that the NPC could do something I couldn't do they had the ability to build an item or spell cast a spell wield something that I as a player character theoretically could not construct it's uh that's just such a cop-out in a certain respect it's one thing if it's like lost knowledge or something like that but he happens all the time in tons of gameplay mechanics and you're thinking yourself oh that's not fair why can they do and I can't do it you know what's that thing so there's gonna be a lot of thought that has to be put into you well if there is a crafting system what does that actually mean and actually well this crafting system be part of the in-game economy or not many examples in gaming history where you can utterly destroy the economy with a broken crafting system one of my favorite examples of that was whirling potions stacked so what you could do is create potions to enhance your attributes you could enhance a particular set of attributes by using these potions over and over again and then the effectiveness of your potions was scaled with your attributes so I believe it was your intelligence attribute if you made that go way up you'd have exponential scaling of the effects of the potion so you get your intelligence core way up and then you use that to create godlike potions and potions were valued based on their effectiveness so you can use very cheap crafting materials to make godlike potions and then you could resell those godlike potions for enormous sums of money and within just a few minutes literally destroy the entire economy of the game make yourself the richest person ever there's some other clever examples of that for example it might magic 7 & 8 those games I had an enchantment system and if you were a grandmaster in the water school or the fire school you could permanently and actually dark magic for vampiric weapons you could permanently enchant a weapon to have that capability and then it would massively increase appreciate the value of the weapon so one thing you do for infinite money in those games is you could go to a low-cost store and buy out all the unenchanted inventory you can enchant it for free and then resell it at a massive profit so again unlimited money inside the game so you have to be really careful with your crafting mechanics cuz you can completely destroy your economy inside a game and it's kind of interesting question you like what do you do there now there's an open question once you've you know you've implemented this system as well of can you do customization so this is something we're in the Elder Scroll series they originally liked a lot of customization and they game by game by game completely took it away from the player for example in morrowind total customization of any spells you wanted mix and match effects total customization of a chant mints these types of things and then in Skyrim you can't even make your own spells so I was a gameplay mechanic totally thrown away so the question is she'd be able to create custom magic should you be able to create custom enchantments custom things instead the game world it's the little things to think about so anyway process we're gonna follow is we're going to do some archaeology and then on my personal blog until I get a website set up for legends of LR I'm gonna need some periodic updates of things we've been doing and gives them probably I start hiring some people to to start exploring various different elements if you guys have any suggestions or pretty clear favorite games that you really love to play we'll create a forum specifically for legends of valor and you can start putting those suggestions and the gameplay mechanics you've always wanted to see in a game things you'd be really excited about seeing inside a game if you're game developer I'd love to talk to you especially if you've had some experience with open-world RPGs just about things that I'm not thinking about that you should think about and there's a lot of like stuff that just has to be thought about carefully like whether the camera angles so hard to get that completely right to what extent we want to innovate on the AI side and what's available on the open market I'm aware that a lot of these game engines make some of these things preach you'd like unities a very powerful framework as is the Unreal Engine and the CryEngine so of course there's that to think about in terms of distribution of the game likely will be PC only I can't imagine doing the enhanced edition on a console that said baldur's gate did a great job with the port to the iPad and a port to the Android devices for ballers game and actually it's playable I was on a plane booted up a copy of ballers gate on my iPad and played it for a few hours while flying to Tokyo and I said wow this is a really good experience I didn't expect that at all so it's it's really cool yeah young answer your question earlier on and we are examining Babylon Jas as a lightweight game engine because it would be really cool to also bring this experience into the browser and I'm debating whether or not to do this as an open source game for the enhanced edition or to actually charge for it or not I'm right now leaning towards an open source game experience and that'd be a lot of fun to do the remaster will be a sold game and actually the remaster probably will have a cryptocurrency component to it as well but that's long down the road the remake remaster the enhanced edition is probably going to be an open source project and a fun passion project with Pierce Krypton Babylon yes that's what we're looking at right now I might change my mind I've also looked at closure script and closure and unity there's actually some bindings through a framework called arcadia for that and you know we could do something more traditional like c-sharp and unity for example but I prefer keeping the functional space because we just have so much experience in that domain in realm and if you fund trained people up so that's my thoughts on Legends of Valor I has nothing at all to do with cardano's so if you're sitting this entire podcast being like Cardinal Cardinal to be fair I warned you I said in the title for not talking about Cardinal outside of some very very tangential stuff and I thank you for sharing my passion with me you know games are important not just because they distract us from life they're significantly more meaningful because they connect to something that makes us truly human the reason we're here and we exist is because of storytelling and narratives were products of these things we built society on the back of stories we built religions on the backs of stories we'd build governments on the backs of stories and human beings were wired through evolution because the people who really good telling stories remembering stories recalling stories modifying story they got ahead in society they got to breed the ones who weren't they died quickly and so games are our ability to create a story that has a point in a purpose if your goal is just to distract somebody it's a drug if your goal is to tell a tale inspire somebody teach a lesson help people explore things it goes so far beyond that and it preserves itself through the fabric of time so to me it's super important that if I'm going to involve what finite time I have in this world on a passion project that it has to be more than just a game it has to be a narrative and it has to tell something and inspire people and if I've done my job right those who come after me will be inspired to build something or think a certain way based upon the experiences that they had there for me as a young kid what was so exciting about Legends of valor was it was an open world and it wasn't the things you could do in the game that made it exciting it was imagining the possibilities of what a game could do you know it was imagining the festivals that could have been had as imagine the gameplay mechanics that weren't there and it inspired me to dream and think and imagine the way things could be oh that's super empowering for being a seven-year-old kid and I took those lessons into my career and I said could we apply the same principles to rebuilding society why can't I build a voting system why can't I build a currency these types of things that in many ways that game liberated me very early on to the concept that everything is malleable in a certain respect so I'd love to be able to tell a great story with Legends of valor and both the Enhanced Edition and the remaster II remake of the game that does something the other thing is I'd really love to do some cool work with open source technologies in game design and make those available to everybody so it'd be super cool to do something like algorithmically generated music super cool to do something like with a actual algebra for a magic system like some sort of you know set theoretic way of looking at magic and making it compositional so there's a mathematical mathematically consistent framework behind magic that would be so cool you know because then in a way to understand the magic system we actually have to learn a little bit about algebra or set theory or something like that and then actually it makes it much easier to build spells or things like that because you talk about composing groups or things like this it would be super super super cool to to go down that road and then I I just would love to have an exploration of things like seasonality botany because when you think of a game world you're free to do anything so why can't we design plants one of the things I most loved about the Elder Scrolls series in especially Skyrim they have all these beautiful plants that glow on the dark I love bioluminescence in fact I'm probably going to fund a company at some point in the future to genetically engineer plants to do to be bioluminescence so you can actually have two biomes you can have your day plants and your night plants and have two completely different ecosystems there's even a company in Russia that's doing this bioluminescent plants for commercial agriculture like for hotels and things like that so I just love that concept but then you say well I'm free to create a plant or biome that I want what would the existence of mad or these things due to the environment and how would that impact things and how far could you take that and so forth creation of languages I'm a big fan of a language called Lodge bond it's a logical language an engineered language so linguistically it'd be really cool to actually invent languages for the game world tokine did this to greatest effect and writing elvish and other things because he was a linguist in addition to an English professor so it'd be a lot of fun to do that and then in a race conflict you know that's another thing to explore our differences with us as people are not as significant as you'd think and it's important to have a narrative to demonstrate that that despite the fact that we think we're so far apart and in a fantasy setting it's quite easy to do because you don't really feel very racist when you're attacking the orc or the lizard man or the dwarf because there are different species right but on from another perspective they have children - they have emotions - they have gods - and they're not universally ubiquitously evil and I so rarely explored in any of these game mechanics and it'd be really fun - so you know how do you explore that and try to create a situation where you can somehow develop empathy for the other side something we're completely lacking in today's society if you disagree with me you think I'm a monster you have to be disagreeable you have to not be able to understand the other person's position it's just obviously wrong and that person is evil and they must be destroyed this is a mindset that's big infecting people as a consequence of social media it would be nice to break out of that narrative loop that we live in every single day in our political reality and explore it from a game context and just see how crazy it actually is because you can see both sides and because you don't have emotional investment and then it can teach you a lesson and say well if that's the case perhaps that ports on to everyday life and the people that I disagree with I can do that without being disagreeable super important to really think about especially that in the context of good governance so this is a great passion project and it's gonna be a lot of fun to do it'll take me years because I'm so busy with Cardno and IO HK and other projects that but it's something I'm gonna keep returning to again and again and I'll try to update you guys as I mentioned infrequently so you're not gonna get a video like this every week probably much much more infrequently and occasionally a blog post or two and then every now and then I'll surprise you I'll actually show something cool like the game world running or stuff like that and I'd love to do it for K but but anyway thank you so much for listening and sharing this experience with me it's its privilege of a lifetime to be able to take something yeah you played when you were seven and revisit it and actually be able to have an influence and turning it into something that can inspire the seven-year-olds of the future Cheers
