Dev Diary: Deep SImulation

Hi! Lucas here.

This will be another more general dev diary.

I am currently making a lot of fast iterating on the design of Historia Realis, and as such I don’t want to ‘commit’ to those design decisions by writing about them. It somehow feels like I would be obligated to stick to a design if I share it on a dev diary, even though this is not really the case, as games change a lot, especially these days with patches and updates. However, these dev diaries are basically the only way for you to know more about how the game works, and I wouldn’t want to mislead you by saying something only to change it later.

One solution might be to write ‘design exploration’ dev diaries where I make it clear that what I’m talking about might change. I’ll try that sometime and see how it goes.

For today, though, let’s talk about the next design pillar of Historia Realis. There are 3:

Pillars

• Emergent Stories

• Deep Simulation (you are here!)

• Historical Realism

Last time I covered Emergent Stories. Today is Deep Simulation day!

Deep Simulation

These are two words that I find hard to explain if I try. That said, you know exactly what I mean when I say “deep simulation”, and so it is at my own peril that I will now try to explain the concept, like trying to explain a joke. We’ll see if it’s still funny by the end.

Depth vs Complexity

This is a common discussion when talking about depth. I’ve seen complexity described as the price you pay for getting depth. Generally, we want complexity as low as possible and depth as high as possible. This would mean that there’s a third ingredient to this formula, since they’re not an exact correlation.

So what’s the element that turns a little complexity into a lot of depth?

That’s a much harder question than it seems. I believe it’s good game design, the elusive Holy Grail. And that's a whole other thing! I don’t believe it’s worth it trying to elaborate on how to achieve that here. Theories and generalities won’t help; one can only make a good game in practice.

Stay tuned for upcoming dev diaries where I talk more about specific design implementations! I'm sure there's a Follow button somewhere.

Yes, the Romans did their exercise in the Campus Martius either naked or wearing very little!

Simulation vs Player-Centrism

To me, a simulation game has two necessary elements:

• The representation of some aspect of reality.

• Interactions between elements: the representation is systemic.

Of course, you might argue that all games have those things. I would agree. It’s just a matter of intensity. To the degree that a game tries to be more of a representation of some aspect of reality, it is more of a simulation. And, to the degree that a game has more interactions between elements (that is, it is more systemic), it is also more of a simulation.

There are also more static, player-centric games which are still called ‘Simulations’: flight, driving and farming simulators, ‘life sims’, ‘immersive sims’ and so on. These games try to simulate an experiece from one point of view only, that of the player. The result is that, while the player might still get a very fun experience, NPCs feel very flat.

NPC Agency

There is a critical element missing from those games: multiple sources of input. In them, the player