Soulash 2 Devlog #1 - What's it going to be? Procedural World & History introduction

Greetings fellow gods,

Today we're going to start a new series of devlogs that I plan to release every other Friday, describing progress on Soulash 2. Since this is the first one, I'll start by describing my vision for the game, what I would like to accomplish, and what my plans are to get there, and we'll look at the effects of the first stage of development - the Procedural World feature.

What will Soulash 2 be?

I've thought about this for a while, initially looking at Soulash and expanding it to add more depth and replayability to the game. Unfortunately, the longer I thought about what I wanted the game to be, the more obvious it became that some things cannot be implemented without removing up to half of the existing game and reworking it to something completely different than what we have now.

Soulash 2 will be a game with a similar premise but a very different execution. At its core, it will be a game where you'll play from a single character's perspective, just like in the first game, and the main storyline will be about conquering a procedural fantasy world. However, this time the world will be bigger and mortals more plentiful. It means killing everyone on your own and destroying the world would take too long if we go about it the same way as in Soulash. This is where I hope to use some inspiration from Mount & Blade and introduce armies to Soulash that you can send or take with you to conquer cities and other locations. This will open up many possibilities because we can go even more overboard with things like necromancer summons and run around with an undead dragon or other more powerful creatures. And also, gather different types of armies under your command when balancing part of the game around army plays.

But I want this to have these army battles as an optional path for the game. The ideal game I have in my head would combine Soulash, Mount & Blade, and Dwarf Fortress Adventure mode to create something that I would call a Directed Sandbox. What I mean by that is that you have a procedurally generated open world with procedural being in it, offering a sea of possibilities to interact with however you like. Still, at any time, you can pick a goal, an accomplishment that you would like to reach next, and have listed activities that would move you toward that goal to give you a bit of direction. One of those goals would be to follow the story that unfolds after the events of the first Soulash, but I would like this to be more than that.

Let's say, you would want to be a renowned herbalist who traverses the wild parts of the world searching for unknown plants and documents them to become a famous expert. Or maybe you'll build a tavern on the road and become a broker of information, gathering as much as possible about the world and paying people to spy for you, directing groups of adventurers or trained assassins to deal with anything you consider to be a problem. Maybe create an adventuring party of your own and hunt down beasts and monsters, or become a famous band of mercenaries able to change the outcome of any battle.

The possibilities could be endless, but it also means the work needed for this is endless as well, so we'll see what kind of restrictions on this vision I will have to impose as the time goes on and the resources at my disposal dwindle. One encouraging thing is, that a lot may come down to creating good systems that can be expanded through mods. As long as proper systems are in place for dialogues, trading, building, skills, and goals that can be expanded further, adding extra paths and potential for said paths is very much within reach at an acceptable cost.

Soulash 2 will still have a lot of traditional roguelike elements. It will still be a topdown, turn-based game with procedural content. From the description I gave, though, you can probably see that the actual game will lean more towards an RPG since you'll be assuming a role in a fantasy world and playing through different unfolding stories while not necessarily involving combat.

Phase 1 - Procedural World

The first step toward creating Soulash 2 is to have a procedural world generator. This would be the overworld without the actual traversable terrain yet. We have that in a first working form so far, with prime biomes - grasslands, forests, mountains, deserts, tundra, and a couple more and we'll add some fantasy ones later on. We have rivers and the first human settlements as well, we generate some resources here and there so settlements are created on valid locations. You can see a couple of examples below.

It will need some fleshing out, for example, the rainfall map could use some improvements, we could add some configuration to have more diversified maps with islands, or not always go from one Pole to the other, but at this stage, it's enough for us to begin the phase 2 - Procedural History generation. We also only have humans right now, which should be enough for a while until we can complete other systems.

Phase 2 - Procedural History generation

The purpose of procedural history generation is to have a lot of information about the world's inhabitants. The information that you'll be able to discover during the game and use to your advantage. We already have about 30 simulators that produce and consume resources, simulate births and death, assign people to work in different roles and to military companies, create new settlements, and advance settlements when the population rises, turn settlements into ruins as they starve. We also have caravans set up for inter-settlement trading simulations. The important part of this simulation is that it needs to work in two different situations, one, to generate the initial state of the world before the player first enters it, and two, to be able to continue simulating the AI engagements on a worldwide scale during the gameplay.

As you can see I like cats. It's a placeholder for children, but later on, entities will be able to advance to different professions and change their icons. Different entities, locations, and factions will gather events that will be discoverable during the game. Everything is very raw looking for now, as the main goal for a while will be to see what's happening under the hood and create basic systems that will make up the game, to see how they will interact and if together they can create a compelling gaming experience.

The last big piece of the puzzle missing in this phase before we can move on is a simulation of wars, battles, sieges, and overall conquest of different factions, and I plan to continue tweaking this phase for a while before starting the next one. 

That's it for today. The next time I'll talk a little more about different challenges regarding the simulation and development traps I'm trying to maneuver and how things are going. Something is slowly starting to shape up! Are you excited to see where this will go? If you have any questions about this or you would like to discuss this, let me know in the comments or on Discord!