Hey Exanimates,

While we're making good progress with new content and a few other things besides, development is still very much focused on AI and the role system. We've been particularly focused on searching and looting behaviour, as it uses many different things that have other applications, the building blocks for being aware of and interacting with the world, and it's a really good case for highly complex role interactions. Importantly, looting is also a really big part of the core gameplay loop, which gives NPCs plenty to do outside of combat and makes them more active participants. We also recognise that searching every container and inspecting every item really becomes one of the more tedious aspects of the game long term.

Companions that can be genuinely useful in searching and looting alleviates a lot of the work from the player and adds a lot of value. If NPCs are also able to equip themselves they become much more self-sufficient and capable, for companions it means it saves the player a lot of micromanaging their equipment and inventories, particularly in the early game where upgrades are frequent and temporary. Another benefit is that companions can help players navigate and learn the complex equipment system, by pointing out useful items and upgrades that the player may have missed or not recognised. There's lots of good practical reasons to flesh out these behaviours, but we think it's also one of the most important steps to making the NPCs feel alive and intelligent, not just as companions, but in general.

Probably reading that you've raised your eyebrows a few times and wondered how it could work and what sort of problems it might cause. Indeed we've been navigating the many difficulties and complexities of all this and there's a lot, more than those that immediately stand out. We've been adding many features and improving a lot of core AI behaviour and interaction to support this and make it feel right.

Companions need to be able to move around somewhat independently now, and promptly understand when it's time to leave to not get separated. They need to see and recognise objects around them, understand what items might be useful, or interesting to the player, even what combinations of items might be useful if worn together, or make matching outfits. NPCs should not easily spot hidden or hard to see objects, remember what they already searched, know when something was discarded, be able to discard items that are no longer useful, not spam the player with insignificant finds and so on. They must also be able to name or describe any object in dialogue, with correct grammar and ideally varied and contextually appropriate dialogue. There's lots of details to consider to make this behaviour seem believable and natural.

We want NPCs to behave much like a human player, show awareness and interact with the world at a very high level. A lot of this comes from dynamic and narrative roles that can be played by anyone, and a lot comes from complex natural behaviour like this. With more AI and role features in place we can keep expanding the AI's capabilities. Our goal is to make them lifelike and create an emergent narrative that feels like it's actually happening, not predefined or scripted. This is often in direct conflict with conventional player-centric design, and we do need to find a delicate balance and make some concessions. It's a difficult and now familiar line we tread, but it's something we really miss in games and we want it.

To completely change the topic, we've also finished our new round of overworld and arena items. We've added new items and plan to better distribute some things across ranks, and we've completely overhauled some older items that weren't up to our current standards, which has been a point of feedback from the community. We've also made some notable improvements to the most prominent procedural materials like metal, leather and cloth. For the time being we are still limiting how many brand new items we add, as we are slowly working towards an overhaul of our characters that will improve the fidelity of all character assets and greatly improve our workflow for them, as well as introduce new features like dynamic cloth to them. When that happens we will add a large number of new clothing items in particular, but that's still some way off.

That's all for now. We are always working on a few other things and longer term goals, but we can't cover everything we're doing in our dev diaries. AI and roles are the current focus and a great big complex thing with many facets, we've been laying a lot of foundations which is always a process riddled with difficult problems decisions, but now we're seeing the results and soon we should be able to start testing and polishing the main features.

Best,

Bare Mettle