Appleton

Artificial life, social/factional/economic simulation and procedural content generation and tools.

The general hope here is that I can generate something like a goblin village and its environs (probably leaning on Starfall for the latter part), run it for forty years, and provide the player with the resulting situation.

So we might use Starfall to create a planetary system with a binary sun and three moons and no axial tilt and see what sort of foliage and geology and geography we have to work with.

That can inform the sort of mythopoesis we are likely to deal with; the sorts of narratives, cultural obsessions, etc, as constructed in Goldengrove. Appleton and Goldengrove can thus work together; we have a concept of goblins, and we have concepts of other lifeforms that we throw into the mix (let's say that orcs are a no-go, but ogres and hobgoblins are major players), and then we can see how goblin society might evolve on this planet.

Linguistics is a part of this. I would like to be able to generate believable languages for different races, including a tree-like branching structure; hobgoblin and goblin might be very closely related indeed, with ogrish being a cousin, and trollish utterly foreign.

I would like to develop economic systems too. Perhaps goblins are enslaved by hobgoblins, and hobgoblins exist in an uneasy trading relationship with orcs. This would mean that goblins might be very amenable to trade with a well-equipped human, seeing immediately how even a low-level magical item could immensely boost their social standing.

Factions, also, should be a consideration. I would like this system to be intricate and multifaceted. For instance, a goblin would have some loyalty to their species and a different amount to their tribe, a different amount to the goblinoid family (in the taxonomic sense), a different amount to The Forces of Darkness or whatever.

AI, basically. I obviously can't simulate evolution on a scale that would lead to realistic civilizations, societies, species, etc.

What I can do is perhaps take a component approach to AI and build consciousnesses by gluing events and event handlers together. I might be able to combine this with GOAP to create some very versatile creatures.

The larger hope here would be to be able to create individuals and organizations that can interact with each other, discover and extract value from the features of their environment, etc. This approach unfortunately limits the amount of novelty I can discover in an interactive gaming session. But perhaps I can engineer this in such a way that I can start a random system and run it and see how it ends up, see what the winning strategies are, and then try to balance those out or at least complicate them.

The absolute pie-in-the-sky goal here is something that feels like A Song of Ice and Fire -- where you can go to a new town and find that everyone you talk to has their own personal and/or factional motives that they've been using to inform their actions for years. And you can talk to people and become embroiled in their schemes, and vice-versa, because they will perceive your potential usefulness to them and exploit that. And you can feed them information and control their actions, etc. Not as a scripted quest, but a simple consequence of motives and goals and priorities.

Obviously, that's a very tall order.

A step or two below that is my go-to vision, the living goblin village. A small goblin village in a clearing in a forest somewhere. The goblins don't do slash-and-burn agriculture because they don't really practice agriculture. They perhaps have a stock of pigs they've domesticated, but they roam through a small territory and let the pigs forage. They have a broad, flat hierarchy because of their reproductive rate, relatively short lifespan, etc. Their language is mostly mumbles and yips with some gutteral tones. They can't ride horses and know them only as the huge beasts ridden by mounted soldiers who sometimes hunt them for sport; they're not symbols of freedom or beauty but terror.

That's one vision of goblinhood, but there might be others: perhaps they do use slash-and-burn agriculture, living off primarily tubers and starchy roots and hunting with traps. Perhaps they have strict hierarchies led by the strongest and most cunning among them. Perhaps they have a caste system. Perhaps their language is entirely gutteral choking sounds, grunts, and clicks.