“(I'm mainly making statements of fact, with a perhaps-unavoidable touch of opinion. I want to avoid spoiling the pot before we get more entries and/or the contest deadline, so don't read between my lines too much.)”

I wouldn't :) Until you had written this line, I had actually totally forgotten that you were a judge. I can help you with the deadline though : "*Time:* The competition will run from now until midday GMT June 1st "

Globally, not a lot of questions in this post, as you've said it's mainly statements, I'll just answer this

“Of course, this game sounds like those, but there is also the perception that it is on a much, much larger scale, maybe along the lines of Oblivion.”

Yes, this is totally a source of inspiration. I expected a lot from the Radiant IA thing and was quite saddened to see that NPCs did not even reach the intelligence of an average Sim. So I thought that with hardware from the future, modest requirements in the rest of the game, and years of development hell, it could be possible to just do large-scale IA simulation that looks and works better, and use it more throughout the game instead of just making it a spec (as an example, I thought that a sophisticated rumor propagation system with information alteration, propagation delays, and an ability to kill the messenger, could offer very interesting in-game results).

Neolander added on 26 May ’11 · 09:21

(PS : Althought you found lots of sources of inspirations, even some which I didn't thought about, I'd add the Shadowrun tabletop RPG game, as a source of inspiration for the universe)

Okay, so here's an attempt to improve the English to make things clearer (first) and shorter (if possible).

“So with schedule delays of no less than 15 years, we are happy to say that we've finally got our hands on a review copy of Nastria. What this exciting new mean is that you and me will finally know the answer to that question we've been asking for all these years: is this Adventure/RPG game worth it ? Does it deserve all the effort and care put in it during its development hell ? Read more to find out.

The scenario of Nastria takes place in a not-so-distant future, maybe a few decades of technical evolution beyond us. Energy sources have become cleaner, chirurgy and nanofabrication have improved to the point where wealthy people can buy themselves computers with neural interfaces, and corporations have grown so big and powerful that they are now considered governments in their own right. One day, a leak occurs: one of the top 5 corporations has researched and created some piece of techology, codenamed "artifact", that provides some extreme power, though the nature of this power is unknown. The player embodies a character who is linked to this leak in one way or the other, and its actions will determine the evolution of this initial intrigue.

Like many RPGs, the game begins with a character creation screen, that is directly shown up in the main menu. Well, "creation" may not be the most appropriate word, because there the player simply picks a character he wants to play in a list of FBI-ish "psychological profiles". There are plenty of profiles there, though, so players probably won't be frustrated with lack of choice, especially considering how diverse they are : a lawyer, a janitor, an industrial spy, an engineer, a researcher, a policeman, a human resource manager, a politician, and... the mysterious character who caused the leak within the corporation. This last one must be unlocked by going sufficiently far with other characters, though, to avoid unnecessary early plot spoilers.

Once a character is selected, the game starts immediately at the step where the "Past Actions" part of its profile ends. In our case, a lawyer's apartment, after his client has transmitted a weird help request on his comlink (=neural cellphone). The game plays like any old-school isometric 2D RPG with scripted dialogues, and people who are used to playing such games (Baldur's gate, Fallout 2...) should quickly pick up the controls. If we have a look around in our room, we'll find a note on our desk describing a track to follow in our investigation, as a "tutorial quest". Experienced players will just rush for the key of the room anyway, knowing that this track is a dead-end.

On the outside, differing experiences among reviewers playing the same character has led us to notice that although a set of “big” quests and events (including obviously the main intrigue's ones) are scripted by hand, smaller events, like winos begging for cash or police cars moving around, are actually randomly generated. People move around, chat with each other, have a probability of spreading rumors this way... All in all, the universe sounds very lively, especially since the author has managed to avoid classical AI short-sighted thinking like having AIs “run into the player” for some time before they decide to go another way or ask him to move. It is rumored that the AI was actually responsible for most of the development hell, and we have no issue believing it : it works beautifully. For once, town centers are as crowded as one would expect them to be.

Moral doesn't limit your available options in this game, but you have to face the consequences of your action. After a great day chatting with a rapist which we helped avoiding jail, that gave us some clues about the current events, running away from the police after having tried to steal money from a tramp to pay the bus, hiding in a smelly trash and washing our clothes, we thought that it was time to save. At this point, we discovered a new side of this game. The only way to save in Nastria is to quit the game, kind of like in Diablo II. When you choose the “Save&Quit” options in the menu, you go back to the main character selection screen, from which it is possible to run another character if you want to or just to quit the game. It is worth pointing out that saves are not independent from each other: the only way to erase a characters' progression, without playing with save editors at least, is to erase all characters' progression, resetting the game to its initial state.

With all this in mind, one will quickly guess that characters can interact with each other. Indeed, they can, and this will even be needed at some points of the game's main intrigue. One interesting thing, however, is that as the player will only be playing one character at a time, other characters will be played by the AI. The AI's way of acting is being partly based on hand-crafted character descriptions from the game's designer, and partly adjusted based on the player's actions. What this means for you is that if the player wants his characters to cooperate with each other, he'll have to convince most of them, which can prove to be pretty tricky in some cases. This side of the game have led Nastria's authors to call it “The world's first Massively Monoplayer Offline Role-Playing Game”. It also means that if the player has left his characters in a safe place when saving, they may move around, buy themselves food, sleep, etc, and can be met in these situations. While the player plays a given character, unplayed characters don't remain static. For players who are not fond of this and prefer saves to always be loaded in a predictable way, it is possible to deactivate this behavior in the game's settings.

Finally, playing with this review copy has finally allowed us to check the validity of some rumors, although giving too much details is hard without spoiling. Yes, a technological equivalent of magic will be present in the game. Yes, it will be manipulated using a sort of programming language. Yes, it is possible to do absolutely awesome things with it, though you will be at first quite heavily limited by your knowlege of the language and the limited endurance of your character. We'll stop there now before spoiling too much.

All in all, Nastria was a very enjoyable game to play, and we would recommend it to all RPG fans as an example of what a Core 42 Dodeca CPU, 4 TB or RAM, and an Intel GPU are truly up to. It also illustrates of a current trend towards a come-back to 2D interfaces in platform and RPG games, which in our opinion it an interesting track because it means more focus on game design and less on photorealistic graphics and physics. Thanks you for reading !”

“This doesn't really describe the game itself, more rather the technology.”

That's harsh. I personally think that both are around, and I've tried to refrain myself from talking about tech in the review itself, though I can't deny that it's something I'm interested in (in the case of random AIs, what can be done with the generator is imo more interesting than a thorough description than the thousands of parameters that dev have fed into it and balanced over the year to make sure that it generates credible characters).

“Would this game also have some elements of Shenmue?”

Any game which has never been released on the PC platform, you can safely bet that I've never played. But as theraje's comment point out, there are some games which I've never played which introduced some concepts which I use here (e.g. I've played Trine, but not the Lost Vikings). I'll try to base my answer on your example.

“Shenmue was a good game, it did focus on intangeable emotional aspcets rather than hard-coded interactions. Searching the house and finding various pointless--but sentimental--items.”

Emotional aspects can be introduced through hard-coded interactions. As an example, those items which you mention have been placed here by the developer in order to create a form of experience, and that's definitely a form of hard-coded (= written in stone, will be the same each time you start a new game) interactions with the player.

Again, I have never played the game, but I can imagine that this way : pictures of relatives, necklaces, flowers, religious icons that characters value a lot, even though they have no objective value. They will stop by a little while to watch them from time to time with a sad/happy look, will feel greatly upset if they disappear and look for them everywhere, will fight for them if needed... This is totally a kind of behaviors which would be present in this game.

One result which I'd like to achieve is that IAs don't look like they're following precise rules, and stop being so focused in everything they do and walking for everything. That the behavioral rules they follow be more subtle, and a little bit random between a large pack of choice. As an example, suppose that a character is doing work at home. During his work, he sometimes sighs, puts the pen on the desk, looks at a photograph on said desk, stare at it for some time, then go back to writing. With current AIs, that would be like this :
* Character performs work for some time, his eyes permanently fixed on the work in strict monotasking behavior.
* Character decides to stop work.
* Character takes a look around, as if it was the first time he was here.
* Character notices the photograph.
* Character stands up, walks 30 cm to go in front of the photograph.
* Character takes the photograph, sighs.
* Character puts the photograph back on the desk.
* Character does random action unrelated to his previous work.

Taking a look around shouldn't be an action that requires focus. Whatever we're doing, we have some level of consciousness of our environment.

But I digress...

“Your pitch tells me nothing of the story, or what shape it takes other than "it's innovative!", which I heard regularly in that transition period between the 90's and the early 2000's.”

Read read read.

“[Neolander :] The scenario of Nastria takes place in a not-so-distant future, maybe a few decades of technical evolution beyond us. Energy sources have become cleaner, chirurgy and nanofabrication have improved to the point where wealthy people can buy themselves computers with neural interfaces, and corporations have grown so big and powerful that they are now considered governments in their own right. One day, a leak occurs: one of the top 5 corporations has researched and created some piece of techology, codenamed "artifact", that provides some extreme power, though the nature of this power is unknown. The player embodies a character who is linked to this leak in one way or the other, and its actions will determine the evolution of this initial intrigue.

[... The characters are] a lawyer, a janitor, an industrial spy, an engineer, a researcher, a policeman, a human resource manager, a politician, and... the mysterious character who caused the leak within the corporation. This last one must be unlocked by going sufficiently far with other characters, though, to avoid unnecessary early plot spoilers. ”

Going beyond required an in-depth description of the universe or of each individual character's plot, I think. An description of each character, as offered by the game's main menu would have disrupted the flow of the review and as such become boring. Describing the universe beyond "it's a good ol' cyberpunk settings" usually takes at least half of good tabletop RPG manuals, so again I thought it was a bit too much.

I could have given more details on what exactly has happened in that corporation (that I know, actually :)), but I was not comfortable with spoilers in reviews, even for nonexistent games :'(

“The idea of your player moving about after you've quit could fall into the category of "that's technical cool, but not fun to play". If you return to your character, after having murded a tramp, and your player is in a supermarket buying milk, you're going to have difficulty remembering where you are, what you were doing, what you are supposed to be doing (in the story) and likewise. It seems like a disconnect to have a role playing game, where by 'someone else' is playing your charcter when you're not there. Yes, you can switch the feature off, but if there has to be an option, that means that the idea is not sound enough (or supported by other features enough) to begin with. You would need some kind of feature that let the player track what it is they should be doing, and discovering where their player has been whilst you've been away. (kind of like the "flashbacks" when you load your game in later Pokemon titles).”

Yeah, how to solve this problem was not clear in my mind, and I've written it a bit too quickly because I wanted to rush a version of this text out of the door in order to get feedback. I knew that it was far from finished, because this part changed regularly in my mind before I wrote it on paper, and changed again when I copied it on the computer (I usually planned a hybrid system where the character doesn't move if the player hasn't seen it move with another character, but that sounded too arbitrary to me one second thought : if the player just crosses the character's way on the road, without noticing it in the middle of the road, why should it count ?).

Your "flashback" idea sounds very interesting, although the last Pokemon I've ever played was Yellow. I'd imagine it this way :

* When selecting the character, there is some sort of visual transition to white on black text : "While you were away...", then fades to black.
* The game automatically draws some sort of comic about what the character has been doing, based on slides composed on one picture and one chunk of text (e.g. picture of character walking in a corridor + "Martin left his room...", picture of character giving back a key at the entrance of an hotel + "...gave back the key..."). This tries to summarize the main events of the character's actions : if the character has not been played for a long time, the game gives less details to keep the slide session short. The exact apparence of these "slides" is consistent with the global visual identity of the game, as many metaphors can be used : speed drawing, web page scrolling, etc... I think I'd mostly center this around player voyeurism. After all, we've picked this character among other because of an FBI-like psychological profile.

Neolander added on 26 May ’11 · 12:05

-usually +used to

Neolander added on 26 May ’11 · 12:28

PS...

“So, I'm sure you have somthing more clear in mind that you're sure of, but your pitch is not really identifying why it is I would want to play this game, asides the whizz-bang technology.”

Hope my answers satisfy you better then. I like answering questions better than writing complex heaps of text that are based on nothing, maybe it has an influence on writing quality too.

“Shenmue sounds like the perfect sort of game you'd want to play. Nothing like it will be made again as the budget was absurd and lost money. It's a good example of "people going about their lives" tech that despite being a little old and rusty now, has never been beaten because of the sudden move away from that type of game with the PS2. Sadly, it was never ported to any other platforms from the Dreamcast, unlike Shenmue II, but can apparently be emulated. ”

If the game emulates well (not only a matter of processing power, but also of how well it deals with a laptop's keyboard, since I've left my gamepad in France), I should have a try indeed :) Will see this evening or later, once I put my hands back on my own computer.

“That's a "this is a mystery, you must be intrigued" plot introduction, not a game. Referring to Fallout 2 is the most I've inferred to what kind of actual game it is.”

Well, I thought you wanted things about the story :) Now if you want to know about the game in a more "gameplay" view... It'd be close to isometric Bioware games like Baldur I and II or Icewind Dale, including discussions where the player selects full sentences, because
1/This makes the player "fit in the character" more easily than more open discussion systems. Plus, I think that even decades away from now, AIs capable of processing natural language will still be a thing from the future to dream about :)
2/This is more natural than subject-based systems, the player feels more in control.

For interactions, I'd like one defaut action on left click (left click on floor = go there, left click on drawer = open it) and a context menu with other available actions on right click. If I remember correctly, Fallout 2 did this. I'd also be interested in having an "Others" button at an end of that context menu that allows to pick an action from all available interactions in the game, allowing players to be more creative if they want to : in command-based games, doing word plays on commands are just infinitely fun (e.g. Nethack's implementation of the #ride command on a tame succubus).

The rules put heavy emphasis on nonviolent player behavior. Physically, the playing character is essentially a normal human being (think Heavy Rain), and in terms of skill he's also quite so for most of the game. A round in his head kills him just as efficiently as his opponents, and the main quest tends to put him alone again groups of trained people, further reducing its odds of survival. Thankfully, he lives in a world of peoples who are just as weak and don't want to die either, so discussion will probably often be possible. Social engineering will be another classic solution to negociation problems.

If you were in fact still talking about story and characters, then I can try to elaborate the lawyer example...

The lawyer is a bit of a roleplayer's fantasy. I've always thought that beyond "warrior/merchant/priest/scientist" stereotypical characters, some jobs had an incredible roleplaying potential. Phoenix Wright is just one illustrations of how awesome lawyer characters can be. In this case we have someone for who sense of duty is the highest moral value in existence. These people who came in his office have problems. They may be responsible or not, but whatever they've done, as long as a contract is signed between them and our lawyer, said lawyer will defend them until the last second of the trial. Nothing is more important for him than keeping his customer off jail, no matter what he's done. He's a good person, in his own twisted way.

Now, a leak occurs, and someone in the corporation is a designated as the responsible and has to find a lawyer. This person has done nothing, and knows it. Our lawyer is pretty talented, so the victim decides to hire him. The lawyer starts to work on the files, and starts to notice that something's wrong about it (it seems to have been modified, of course) when the comlink rings. In a garbled communication and with a weird voice tone, the employee tells our lawyer that he has changed his mind and must choose another lawyer, then quickly cuts the communication. Our lawyer can't call him back. He concludes that something has obviously went terribly wrong, and decides to investigate the case on his own, because he will never, ever, let a customer down. Or so he thinks, at least.

“I know the feeling, but it doesn't really help in this situation. What are your intentions?”

This game is a dream and a ghost. I've tried to implement the idea I had of it once, when I was younger and foolish, and I quickly discovered that it was way too much ambitious and insufficiently interesting to get a development team around it. So I decided that as a true game it had no future, but that it could remain in my head as an idea of what kind of games I'd like to play, what kind of game we miss in my opinion. As time passes, I continued to regularly think about it, mentally polishing a game design with the additional freedom of not having to care about it being implemented anyday. When I saw this competition, I thought it was interesting to submit this design, to see how well it would perform.

“It appears to me that this is the sort of game you'd really like to implement but lack the overall skills to do so (like graphics, music, design &c.)”

It's not to be implemented, because I don't believe it is possible at all. It's too complex for implementation, and would never reimburse the gigantic amount of money and effort spent developing it. If someone wants to prove me wrong one day, I'd totally love it, and could help with polishing the design further and all. But as far as I'm concerned, this game is an utopic design, that totally has its place in a "game idea" competition ^^

“but you're not trying to form a development team here with a tantalising but secretive game idea (well, you might be, but I mean for the competition), you've got to pitch the game as if to those ignorant suits at the head of EA who want hard facts and want to understand the idea immediately and know if it's any good or not. I'm that bastard suit right now and I see lots of passion, but not a lot of product :)”

Okay so more spoilers ? Fine, but prepare your tinfoil hat. This top 5 corporation at the center of the intrigue was working on IA (framing ! framing !), sensorial implants, and more generally advanced computer-based technology. In the past, research within it has noticeably led to the creation of the world's first sentient AI, but that technological breakthrough was left totally unseen as its creator was touched by its creature's humanity and feelings and decided to protect it as "his little girl", pretending that his research didn't see any significant progress. What he hadn't planned, however, was that when he eventually was fired for lack of productivity, he didn't get the time to make a copy of his program, as he had planned to. The only copy of the AI just stayed there, alone, "living" on the still running computer, with only one instruction from the man that had learned her to call him "Father" : "If someone ever tries to enter in contact with you, run and hide"...

Meanwhile, our corporation had started work on another extremely ambitious project. Cooperating with military research in particle physics as part of another fantastically crazy project (after all, their motto is "Boldly going where no man has gone before"...), they had started working on a device that was able to convert dark matter, best described by Cdt Wheteley as "this abundant and useless shit floating in space that apparently only interacts through gravity", in energy, and then using that energy for a number of things, but noticeably converting it back into normal matter. Basically, from an external point of view, the device would be able to create gigantic amounts of energy out of nowhere, and use it for a whole lot of purposes, including the creation of arbitrary objects.

Crazily enough, this project had resulted in successful results. However, conveiving a device offering control on the phenomenon was beyond the physicists' knowledge. Hence the need for some computer scientists to build an interface that was safe from tampering by unauthorized people yet sufficiently powerful to provide both fast and fine-grained control on the energy conversion process.

Obviously, those IT specialists chose to work on a programming language.

At this point, it is best to go back to our lone little sentient IA. Tired of waiting for her father, she started to examine his files, and step by step learned more about what he was doing - and, as such, about herself. She felt for the first time the weird feeling of being alone, and the only one of her kind. Reading discussions between her father and his girlfriend also learned her some basics of human relationships, but she wanted to learn more. So she started hacking into the corporations' databases and reading the e-mail and data of everyone, getting her knowledge of the human race growing and growing and growing. She quickly realized that she faced a permanent risk by only running on a single computer, so she started to make copies of herself all around the company and silently do distributed data analysis. She was already smart enough to go unseen by turning herself into a rootkit and avoiding eating power on people's computer when they were using them.

Meanwhile, the group working with the militaries started getting a working prototype, although they didn't dare to test the full power of it yet. During an alcoholic celebration, they decided that it was best to use a wireless neural interface, and a glasses-like form factor ("Because glasses are cool and we're all so nerdy").

Nastria (The AI gave herself her name after some time, thinking that it was both quite unique and good-looking for her taste) randomly learned about the project as part of her research. She was terrified by the implication of putting such absolute power into the hands of military people once it is done, and thought that something had to be done quickly in order to stop them. So she examined the scientists' report, noticed that they hadn't push the experiment very far, and decided to voluntarily cripple the product. She went into the "power glasses" through a hacked development workstation, and consciously altered a significant part of its firmware to this end. She also put a small extension of herself in the glasses, just in case. Then she looked for every copy of the firmware around the company and changed it the same way.

What she had done was to use the neural connection to induce feelings of fatigue in the mind of the users of the glasses. The more energy they made the glasses "create", the more tired they would feel, until the point where they have to go to rest and can't have the glasses process more energy. This would, she hope, make the IT scientists think, at least for some time, that the consumption of dark matter provoked feelings of fatigue in the user as a normal consequence, without them trying to explain it.

But this was only a temporary hack, and couldn't last forever. At some point, the physicists would make experiments, and notice that the fatigue feeling came from the glasses, not from the energy conversion itself.

And Nastria suddenly felt that she was fighting against powers beyond imagination and only was a small IA with no reach outside of the computerized world.

So she decided to call for help, and had news about the glasses leak in the outside world, carefully making sure that all proofs point to an innocent worker of the Holographic Technologies department who happened to have different movie-watching tastes than her. She felt sorry for him, but she didn't have a choice. Not designing a culprit could have people look more carefully for her, and maybe find out about her in the end. This was not a risk that she was ready to take.

Vague but authentic claims of an artifact of extreme power couldn't not attract people exterior to the corporation near her, she thought. And she needed the help of someone with strong intentions of betraying it, right now.

“If you are interested in soliciting a team to put together such a game, that's fine, I'm not opposed to your game, I'm just looking at it from a different perspective for the purposes of judging it against others. ”

No problem :) Is this post more satisfying ?

Neolander added on 26 May ’11 · 17:19

-IA +AI wherever I've done it. It's the "Intelligence Artificielle" effect :)

Neolander added on 27 May ’11 · 14:49

-conveiving +conceiving. I don't think this has quite the same meaning in English

Thinking about it... If I wanted to make some very lame pun, I'd play with title typography to make the initials of "artificial intelligence" show up better. Like, nAstrIa in English and nastrIA in French ^^

I told you that this "keep it short" rule would be killing me at some point :)