Hey Exanimates,

We finally did it, the new role system is up and running, everything has been switched over to it, content is patched and we added enough backward compatibility to preserve arena saves. At this point we're just testing out the basics and putting a build together for proper testing, which is imminent. Once again the changes are very extensive, the entire platform for AI, behaviour and dialogue is new, with many fundamentally new features.

This is to say the least a huge milestone. The role system is what drives the world as we imagined it and basically the glue that ties together everything we've done. We spent years theory crafting it, trying to understand its possibilities and limitations, and what might be too ambitious and complex to develop and work with. Ultimately we went all in on complexity, including every feature we've considered that seemed useful, but the real challenge was how to design and structure it so that it's intuitive and easy enough to understand and navigate for content designers. The role system is first and foremost a content tool, for telling stories and creating characters and events with complex and dynamic behaviours and interactions. It needs to feel simple and intuitive to use, but as we expand our library of roles the goal is to achieve remarkable emergent behaviour.

As we've been finalising things and making roles on the new system we inevitably found more ways to improve things, sometimes in small ways, sometimes big. We plan to spend a lot of time using these tools, so it's important for us, but we also intend to release them to modders and players so they can create content too. They can be used not only to create characters and stories, but even mechanics. For example, something like the golem guards could be reproduced like this. We put a lot of effort into the tools, making a polished visual interface that is easy to navigate and gives lots of information at a glance. We put particular effort into our custom scripting language. Our goal here is something powerful but without bogging you down with technical details, leveraging specialisation, context and visual tools to remove low level tasks and verbosity. In short this means content designers and writers without technical expertise should find it approachable, and in general a workflow that isn't daunting and tedious.

Initially we'll be mostly testing the core changes to AI and other systems, and during testing we'll be gradually introducing more roles, more elaborate role setups, new interactions, expanding and updating dialogue and so on. Introducing the knight NPC will be next, and this will allow us to test many more features like dialogue between NPCs and multiple people and all sorts of complicated relational dynamics between more than two people. We'll continue to add and develop roles indefinitely, also applying more behaviours to less intelligent NPCs like the undead. A lot of what the role system is designed to do goes far beyond the scope of Exanima, but the more fundamental roles for driving behaviour, relationships and AI in general cover the most difficult and critical functionality and are the basis for the more specialised roles to come.

Meanwhile work continues on new content, including some new encounters, but as always we avoid content spoilers. With the crippling weight of developing the role system lifted we'll be focusing heavily on content for a time. We did also rework a few more pieces of armour and were able to make some smaller improvements to others thanks to the upgraded apparel system. We're also actively working on some very ornate weapon designs and some new weapon types.

Hopefully initial testing will go smoothly and we can open it up to everyone soon. Check out our discord for access to testing builds and all the relevant information.

Best,

Bare Mettle