NPCs in the Din's Curse expansion now have three things that drives their lives: happiness, money, and their relationships with others. This is going to sound like the Sims for a bit, but don't worry I will get to the point soon.

Happiness is just how happy they are with their lives and with the town. When they get really happy they are labeled a local hero (I still need a better term) and get a large bonus to combat. If they get really unhappy, they will eventually leave town or go renegade. There are a ton of things that change the happiness of the NPCs: winning when gambling, talking with other NPCs, friends/family dying, gossip, flirting, etc.

Money is what it sounds like. NPCs now keep track of their money. When they give you a gift that costs them some money. They need to eat occasionally and that costs money. Drinking and gambling uses up money. They do have jobs and ways to make money normally to balance this out though.

Relationships are also pretty common sense stuff. Each NPC keeps track of how much they like each other NPC, anywhere from hate to love. NPCs can even get married and divorced now.

So far this all sounds like the Sims doesn't it? Well happiness, money, and relationships are just the way to get the NPCs to interact with the world and the player more and in fairly realistic ways. All of the little daily things they do isn't too important. What is important is what it leads them to do. Note: all of the previous stuff works so far.

Now here's the parts I haven't fully implemented yet, but here's my thoughts about where we are going to go. When NPCs get really unhappy they will start doing riskier things like gambling and drinking. They are also much more likely to betray the town in some way or another. When they get into debt they will start acting more and more desperate. Some might be fairly honorable ways like trying to solve quests in the dungeons, but some will take more evil paths by betraying the town for gold or even stealing from their fellow NPCs. When they run out of money they can even starve to death. When someone really dislikes or hates someone they might even get into fights with them (or maybe they were just drunk).

This last part is where the player starts getting involved. You might need to figure out who poisoned the town's water supply (and then fix it) or who stole all of George's gold. Fixing Sham's starvation will be easy, but you probably don't have much time to do it. You might even need to break up fights to prevent them from killing each other.

I'm also thinking of a bunch of world modifiers that impacts all of this: poor town, rich town, seedy town, gamblers, misery, etc.

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The Arcen (AI War & Tidalis) guys have been having some financial problems lately. First they blogged about it and then PC Gamer posted an email from one of Arcen guys giving a lot of interesting financial details. From a developer standpoint this is pretty cool, because most people (including us) don't share much detailed sales/financial information.

I don't mean any disrespect for the Arcen guys, however I suspect that this is pretty much the normal state of affairs for most indie companies. Our expenses are pretty steady, but our income has really large spikes around release and sales and then they very quickly fall (actually retail works like this also). If you don't plan for the income to fall off the cliff and you let your expenses get too high, you will go out of business or at the minimum need to lay off people.

So basically Arcen's expenses are much higher than their current income and they are quickly burning through their cash reserves. We were very much in Arcen's state most of the last year. We even took out a small loan to stay in business. For us, it wasn't that I didn't expect the sales spike and drop off, it's mostly that our 2nd game (Kivi's Underworld) didn't sell nearly as well as our 1st (Depths of Peril).

Which brings me to my last thought, it sounds like they did exactly what we did, ship a fairly hardcore game first (AI War in their case, Depths of Peril in ours) and then as their follow up shipped a much more casual game (Tidalis for them and Kivi's Underworld for us). It sounds like that worked out just as well for them as it did for us. As in, not well at all. I haven't really said this publicly, but Kivi's Underworld was basically a mistake. I still think it's a really fun game, it's different from everything else out there, and I'm glad that someone made it. We even have some fans that think Kivi is the best game that we have ever done. The problem is that it just wasn't the right game for Soldak to make. I wonder if this was the same for Arcen and Tidalis.

Anyways, just some random thoughts.

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Right now I'm thinking of lots of cool things and quests that are very town and npc centric for the expansion. This part is great, however every time I try to think of quests that involve the dungeon or monsters I get side tracked and get back to the town and npcs. So to spur some ideas, what kind of dungeon related quests would you guys like to see?

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Here's some of my latest tweets from twitter / facebook with a bit more explanation.

I seem to be getting distracted by all sorts of things lately, but another Demon went into the Din's Curse expansion today. Basically at this particular time I wasn't getting much done on the expansion, but some of the artists were.

Working on seeing how hard it would to be play movies in the engine today (nothing fancy of course). -> Finally have my movie code working correctly, just need to clean up a little bit and get it working on the Mac. -> Got all of my movie stuff finished finally, including support for the Mac and all of the little details. :) I was investigating.working on movie stuff because we might add some kind of intro movie to the expansion. Nothing really fancy of course since we don't have an entire department devoted solely to cinematics.

Working on version 1.007 today, fixed some bugs, rebalanced some stuff, and added a Very Slow world option. This was just a small update about 1.007 work.

Doing a pretty major pass on elite and artifact items today (and probably tomorrow). -> Still working on beefing up the unique items, takes a while when there are 400+ of them (not including artifacts or legendary items). Version 1.007 had changes to most unique items in the game.

Now when you purchase Din's Curse from us you get the Windows AND the Mac versions. I have been thinking about doing this for a while now. I'm glad we finally got this setup.

I feel like I made expansion progress today by adding a new world map feature. I believe this was the feature that you can look at maps of levels that you aren't on.

Got a bunch of things done on the expansion today, mostly little things, but progress is progress. I hadn't been getting much done on the expansion before this.

Added Lost and Semi-Hardcore character options to Din's Curse expansion recently, more to come. -> Added Prima Donna, Only Hope, and Hunger advanced character modes to Din's Curse expansion today. I've added a lot of advanced character options since we shipped originally. We used to only have hardcore and cursed.

Announced today that we got a North American retail deal for Din's Curse with Masque Publishing, should be in stores early to mid October. Getting a retail deal is nice! Hopefully we will sell a lot of copies and we will see royalties.

Added Poor Town, On The Brink, Aggressive World, and Demanding Town world modifiers to Din's Curse expansion today. -> Added anti-magic areas and world modifier today to the Din's Curse expansion. -> Added Gigantism, Berserk, and Temporal Flux world modifiers today to the Din's Curse expansion. I think the world modifiers idea worked out really well in Din's Curse to make each town a little more unique, so I've been adding a bunch more for the expansion. A lot of these are from ideas posted by our gamers.

Added Two Handed Mastery, Magical Deflection, Breech, and Demon Armor skills today (so far). -> A few more skills added today - Terrorize, Shield Blast, Demonic Roar, and Blood Sacrifice. I now have all of the Demon Hunter skills working in the game. They still need a lot of balance and polish, but being able to play the class is a good first step.

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