Sui Generis Interview

Bare Mettle Entertainment's forthcoming RPG Sui Generis is the subject of a new interview on IncGamers that brings us answers about the game's current development status, open-world implementation, inventory system, and more from project lead Madoc Evans. An excerpt:

IG: How would conversational options work with NPCs?

ME: While we've already prototyped dialogue, this is still in development. To be honest we're still not entirely sure just how much we'll be able to accomplish and it's something we're likely to continue expanding on after release. It shares a lot with how we drive story and events in general. The aim is to provide deep story which isn't rigid and dumb to circumstance.

Whilst there more structured events where there is specific dialogue associated with specific characters, there are also roles that are interchangeable and many common behaviours that are always possible under the right circumstances.

Story progresses regardless of your involvement. What you say or do might affect its course, or grant you a certain role within it, but everything is always subject to change and just about any outcome. If none of the outcomes we specifically planned is possible then so be it, that's how the story went. Anything can happen and we're building this in a way that we can continue to expand on what (anything) might be.

In terms of actual dialogue options you will be given some that belong to roles you might have adopted and other less specific and unrelated options. You're never locked into some sort of dialogue mode, you can say nothing and walk away, rudely talk over someone, address someone else or do anything else you want.

...

IG: What's the current state of Sui Generis' features and your goals for the next few months of 2015?

ME: We've finally reached a point where we consider the core game and engine to be completely functional and support everything we might want in the future. Developing it with constant feedback from our backers and the public has driven us to do almost everything to much higher quality standards than we planned or imagined. We've acted on every bit of feedback and criticism that was in line with our goals and pushed to make everything good rather than just adequate. As you can imagine there was a lot of nitpicking about every detail as people overanalysed whatever they glimpsed. Sometimes this was counterproductive, but we think the results speak for themselves.

Now we are preparing to release the prelude, Exanima, which aims to support the game's core features but not yet the open world and dynamic story systems. Exanima is currently in alpha, beta is imminent and a full release will come very soon after that. We will continue to add features to Exanima as we develop them for Sui Generis.

At this point our focus is becoming only adding features and our dynamic story rather than developing the complex systems to support it all. Exanima is already very close to a complete game and a huge accomplishment. While it's relatively simple, there's a massive amount of stuff under bonnet that is there to support the world of Sui Generis.