At some point there will be Story Bricks...

[Pedekele]

At some point there will be Story Bricks. And we have the luck of having great RPers in our guild, so why not start to think of a quest?



Guys, i'd love to hear what kind of scenarios you can come up with. Later we'd choose the best one (or merge a few together) and develop it farther to become a questline with some depth to it?

Does that sound fun? - If so, bring it on! 

[PinkRose]

I'm not sure I understand enough about the StoryBricks.
Also, I want to remind people that the plan now is to move to EQN when it becomes a thing.
Not that plans won't change but just don't want too much invested that could get left behind.

[Talon]

I may be making this up but I believe the storybrick stuff will also feature in the house section of EQN so it's good practise. And perhaps parts will even be able to be templated and imported into EQN.

[Alirrin]

For those of us not keeping up with forums and such, what are "Story Bricks"?

[Talon]

My understanding (and I admit my following of Landmark updates is sketchy, but they mentioned it in the keynote, I believe) is: Story Bricks is the system they will be implementing that allows you to create quests, conversations etc.

Essentially allowing players to create their own mini MMO/adventure/dungeon in Landmark. You can build buildings right now. Story Bricks will allow setting up branching conversations and quests.

Apparently it is also the same system the devs will be using to craft EQN NPCs, stories, events etc.

[Jasyn]

They have been aggressively marketing it as EQN's "Emergent AI" system, so you may have seen that phrase thrown around rather frequently.

[Mixxi]

Here's a little demo of Storybricks:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3b_3UGc7Es

[Pedekele]

It's pretty much the same AI we see in game editors since at least 15years. the Starcraft1 and warcraft3 editors featured pretty similar AI.

You can create sentences with premade fragments, for example:

"NPC character1"  add conversation option "ring quest 1-1", If "player" carries "Mysterious Ring".
Who--------------action/does what------------- (with?)-----, Condition, (and/or aditional condition...)

You just get a sentence and you can switch out indivitual parts to create a certain behavior, that's how AI editing usually works and storybricks isnt really different, it has just a slightly nicer interface where you got the individual parts as "Bricks" which makes it look like some kind of organigram.

Also another thing thats kinda new is that you give characters behaviors that make them go wild on their own. like telling orc's they should look for guards and avoid cities. that's not something people did with AI before.

Also AI isnt just NPCs, for example:

Spawn "monsters" in "area1" and activate/close "door1" and "door2", if "player" or "npc" activate "trapwire1".

Also AI in combat is a cool thing to discuss,

thinking about their options for possible sentences...
they will surely have different behaviors vs different classes, for example avoid the tank or rather focus the squishy classes.
I doubt they will have options for your specific builds though so you could make a squishy that is build around dealing with being focussed by monsters, so you'd have shields and closerange AoE stuff.

Another possible option is: lower priority, if "player" has "shield-buff" activeated.
If the AI works like that, it will be a little more difficult to deal with.

Also woth discussing: Pet AI, games like FF12 with it's gambit system...
In FF12 an impotant gameplay emelement was creating your own AI for your partymembers.
Rezzing, healing at a specific percentage of health, attacking with an element an enemy is weakest to, buffing as soon as the buff runs out, attacking with priority and all that stuff was possible. And you would get more and more options as you progress though the game.
If i was gonna play a summoner/necro-class i would totally want that!

@pinky: I was thinking of this to be part of EQN eventually, just like they have playerdungeons in EQ2 already. they do want the players to work on the game, so it seems to be only a matter of time for this to happen. Landmark is just a tool to create stuff for EQN, the game i look forward to.

So if someone wants to think of a questline, writing for the AI is pretty much as if you would write an adventure for D&D, for example

There is a town, people are in hiding in their houses in fear, fear of goblin raiders. as the party enters the village it seems like a ghosttown.
when they try to enter a door they notice it's looked. someone may look out of the window and starts a conversation as they are reliefed that it's not the goblins. the party can now discover whats going on in this town. they are offered a reward if they help the villagers. now they have to track down the goblins, additional information from the villagers is available - they went west after their last attack. heading west they find a cave, maybe it's the goblins hiding place, maybe they discover that they went somewhere else...etc you guys know thuis kind of stuff.


Edit:

<-- the noob didn't expect that they are social mobs, thehehe 

[Jasyn]

http://eqnexus.com/2013/08/storybricks/

Interview with a nice EQN contextualized summary and a demo video.