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Realms, Swords & Magic

A text and illustrations based computer role-playing game with a story that will span an entire life-time and NPCs that have goals and interact with each other and the player.

Official website
http://realmsswordsandmagic.com (http://realmsswordsandmagic.com)

Twitch channel (sometimes I program live)
http://www.twitch.tv/realmsswordsandmagic#/realmsswordsandmagic (http://www.twitch.tv/realmsswordsandmagic#/realmsswordsandmagic)

My Background

Since I started playing computer games in the 80's I hoped for a game in which the NPCs would be more interactive than just giving the player quests or responding from pre-made answers. I wanted to create such a game about 15 years ago but didn't have the opportunity until now. Being self-employed I can set aside some time to program my dream project and after 7 months, here I am starting to talk about it here.


The Game's Progress

I started working on RS&M in january of this year. I have implemented the main interface and have started working on the characters a.i. Each character type will have it's own a.i. routines. Here is a brief overview of what is currently working:


This is part of the "test" game map. There are 3 characters, 2 NPCs (Bob and John) and the player character (Ben). Bob is in his house and his horse is outside. John is with me in a corridor that leads to the a bedroom. I have the key of the bedroom. Since I am working on the program I have the possibility of "forcing" characters to do specific actions to allow me to test the a.i. so I will now lock the bedroom door and force John to come with me in the main hall of the castle.


As you can read, I don't see John's name because my character doesn't know him. So I will ask him:



Now, I will put the bedroom key in the backpack that is in the chest where John and I are. I will then return to the corridor and go to the kitchen which is in the opposite room of the bed:




Please note that the dividers are actually saved games. To reload a saved game the player only has to click on the divider where he wants to restart playing. I have one at every turn because I have made an auto-save to help when there is a bug. This way I only have to reload before the crash and I am usually able to quickly find the bug.

But let's continue our adventure!



I wait in the kitchen until Bob the guard who started working enters the kitchen and requests the key of the chest. I give it to him and then he leaves. Now, let's take a look at what happened from Bob's point of view (I can read the other characters' books because it also helps debugging):


Bob waits until his day starts. Then he goes outside of his house and mounts his horse to go to work.



Bob then goes to the armory to take a sword and waits a little for his shift to start. Then he starts patrolling the castle.



When Bob encounters the locked bedroom door he goes to see John and inquire about the key. Note that this is Bob's and John's a.i.s working together. John can inform Bob of what he knows about me and the key and Bob can use these informations to try to solve the locked door situation. When Bob asks me for the key I have the options to ignore him or to give him the key. I gave him the key.


Bob can now open the bedroom door and continues his patrol. While he is patrolling I go to the stable and wait until Bob arrives at the end of his day. Here is Bob' point of view of the end of his day:

Not much to report, what I've done is not very interesting.

I've been cleaning up the goals and memory code. I have corrected some bugs in the Unlock Door goal.

I will be programming live on my Twitch channel today from about 16:30 Eastern time for a while. So if you are curious you can come and take a look. I will probably be working on the Troll character goals unless something more important comes up.

Here is the link: http://www.twitch.tv/realmsswordsandmagic#/realmsswordsandmagic (http://www.twitch.tv/realmsswordsandmagic#/realmsswordsandmagic).

I like the direction you're going - it looks like restricting yourself to primarily text based is going to actually give you a lot of freedom as far as design and AI development.  Looks awesome!

Thanks! Yes, I will really enjoy giving the NPCs and players options that would ususally not be available in CRPGs (and games in general).

I'm following the stream right now on twitch, looks very interesting!
Keep it up, I'm following this...

Here is a post that I wrote today for Gamasutra. I thought that it would also be of interest for the readers here.

Every night when I go to sleep after a day of programming I review what I have done during the day and think about the next steps that I will be doing. This helps me get a more general view of my programming instead of focusing on the routines themselves. Last night I went to sleep but didn't think about my day or where I was going very much since I was rather sleepy. But when I woke up I realized that today was the day that I would have to kill a horse. Not an actual horse but a horse in the game I am currently programming.

Realms, Swords & Magic (realmsswordsandmagic.com (http://realmsswordsandmagic.com)), the game I am creating, is a game with artificial intelligence and a more detailed gameplay (for example, it is possible for a character to look for tracks of other characters in the wild). In the previous months I have worked on having human characters solve problems like unlocking doors that would block a guard from patrolling a location. The guard can talk to other characters and inquire about the whereabouts of the key, find the character who has the key, find him and try to get the key to unlock the door. Recently I started working on the a.i. of the Troll character type. A troll can go out to the forest during the night to find a prey (a horse) and go back to his cave to sleep during the day.

Now that the troll a.i. can find a horse, I am ready to program his killing and eating of the horse. But my game, being a text-based game, makes the killing somewhat feel uncomfortable. In a regular game with graphics I would only have the troll hit the horse with a club or something, the horse would die and that would pretty much be it. But in a text game, I have to describe the action to create a vision in the mind of the player. I want the game to remain realistic but how realistic should I be with killing? Should the troll break the horse's neck? Should I give graphic descriptions of the action? How do I tell a player that his favorite horse (with a name) is now bleeding under the teeth of the troll? Should I keep the killing simple to try to keep the game fun or should I let the drama happen?

While thinking about the troll and the horse, I started thinking about when NPCs will be fighting and killing each other. Will I have to make my game the "Game of Thrones" of CRPGs? I will have to seriously think about this. I previously thought that the a.i. would be the hardest thing to think about while working on my game. Today I think that I was wrong.

I have added a Tracking skill that shows characters informations about the whereabouts of other characters in the wild.

I have made a video to give a general presentation of the game and show a demonstration of the current artificial intelligence.

Video: http://youtu.be/tNAUvHNeZfQ (http://youtu.be/tNAUvHNeZfQ)

NPC ai + rpgs is totally like my bag man. I like the cut of your jib. Reading the text of one of the npc's "stories" is pretty interesting - maybe you can incorporate that into the gameplay beyond just debugging. For instance, you snoop in someones room and find their diary, he he. One issue I think about sometimes with the ai in my game is how to communicate what is going on in the player. I don't want something really important to happen when the player isn't around to see it, and not be able to ascertain what happened easily. For instance, an important character dies, I want to find out from other characters who gossip about it, perhaps even how and where it happened. If they are just gone, and then I want to talk to that person and can't find them, it could be irritating.

Just some thoughts! I'm sure you have thought about such things as well. Do you have a wider narrative in mind, or are you aiming more for a simulation where anything* can happen? *Anything within reason and the bounds of development time of course.

Also, being the Game of Thrones of text-based crpgs... would not be a bad thing. But other games have a lot of killing, what makes your game stand out are the non-killing elements. I think occasional gruesomeness makes it have more punch when it happens.

Sorry for the late reply, I can't seem to get notifications when someone posts in this thread.


Hello, I thought about that but I would have to limit the books only to major characters because the text increases the savegame size and writing new text is rather slow with multiple books. I tried but haven't been able to improve the writing performance yet. It's a possibility but the main concern is the savegame size. Once I have created a large module I will be able to see how much space a typical savegame will take and have a better idea then.


Some events will propagate more easily than others. For example, if someone is found dead in a castle, the character who sees the body will alert the guards who in turn will alert other guards and their superiors who will possibly lock-down the castle. But if someone dies in a forest the information will probably not be known even if the character was important. He will just be missing after a while. If the missing person is an important person other characters may be sent as a search party and they may find the body. But in my module, since the player is a prince who will become a king, he will have lots of informations of what is going on provided to him.


The game will mostly be simulation. There may be some scripted events but the main game will mostly depend on what the player and NPCs do.


Great point!

From my Blog post:

Since the last post I’ve been thinking about how to deal with violence in RS&M. I was wondering whether I should lean towards graphic or sparse descriptions. I’ve decided that for now I will go with enough details to understand what is going on without going into bloody details. I’ll see when I can add specific texts for specific events whether I will add gory details or not. I may ask on the game’s Facebook page what the fans would prefer so if you are not on the page and would like to let your thoughts known on this and other questions, you can join the page (the link is on the main website).

I have added programming for the troll to kill a horse when he finds one. Here is what is happening from the troll’s point of view (‘He’ is the troll and we are in a forest):



The horse is dead. Fig (the troll) is not very strong so he has to swing the horse twice. A stronger troll would have killed him with a single swing. In RS&M it will be very or impossibly difficult to kill some characters if you are alone. So most of the time you will have to be escorted when going in the wild. Killing a character like a troll will be an event and will not happen often. It will be wiser to avoid them altogether unless they decide to invade your castle…

I will work next on dealing with an awaken horse that can try to flee and allow the troll to use weapons to kill.

I have made a new blog post about the possibility of a troll to kill using a large tree branch  >:D, poisoned drinks  :beer: and the autopsy skill  :screamy::

http://blog.realmsswordsandmagic.com/?p=131 (http://blog.realmsswordsandmagic.com/?p=131)

For those interested in following Realms, Swords & Magic development, please visit the game's blog at

realmsswordsandmagic.com (http://realmsswordsandmagic.com)

or follow the game's Facebook page at

https://www.facebook.com/RealmsSwordsAndMagic (https://www.facebook.com/RealmsSwordsAndMagic)

I will not be continuing writing development posts here as I would like them to be different from the game's blogs but it takes too much time for the low interest the game gets. But I will come from time to time to look at the other interesting projects.