Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In this week’s blog, we want to introduce you to a brand new feature to the Mount & Blade series: the persuasion system.

No medieval drama, from Shakespeare to the Game of Thrones, is complete without a few scenes of high-stakes negotiation. Although most of our development effort goes into battles and combat, we also want to offer players alternative gameplay. Be it a plot to betray a king, a dynastic marriage, or just a way to handle a thorny conflict between your bickering subjects, skilled persuaders can find solutions to solve problems and save a bit of wear-and-tear on their sword-edges.

The persuasion system is based on the premise that, even in a dark and desperate land like Calradia, there are some things that money can’t buy. An honorable emir may feel compelled by his oath of fealty to stick by even the vilest of sultans. A conniving one might turn down the choicest bribe because frankly, he doesn’t think you have what it takes to win a civil war, and silver is no use to him if he’s dead. Persuasion is a means to help players overcome these reservations.

The persuasion system is also one of the main ways that Bannerlord’s personality and reputation system comes into play. If you have a reputation for generosity, people will believe you tell them that, if they do a favor for you, you’ll make it up to them further down the road.
Likewise, if people know you take honor seriously, they’ll be reassured if you tell them that, in your opinion, no one will ever blame them for breaking their oath to the Khan, who never kept his oath to anyone else. The NPC’s personality also plays a major role. A valorous warrior might respond better than a timid one to your courtship pitch, that he should marry you, a shield maiden who’ll fight by his side, rather than some dainty maiden with nothing to recommend her but vast tracts of land.

Personality is only part of the equation. You can also draw on a variety of skills. Charm helps you guess an NPC’s motivations and appeal to them. Charisma helps you inspire them. And, even if you don’t have much of an army at your back. Roguery is a good way to convince them that you’re not someone they ever want to mess with. Finally, the game tracks most major events, and if you can remind the Countess that the king you want her to betray murdered her cousin, or passed her over when last handing out fiefs, that will make your task much easier. We want players to feel the dynamic sandbox history of Calradia, and persuasion is often the time when a lord’s past mistakes, the dirty deeds, the slights to fragile egos, the unpopular policies, all come home to roost.

So how does the system work? All persuasion attempts are initiated through dialogs. You first need to steer the conversation to the relevant subject. You need to hint to the lord that his liege isn’t really worthy of his service, or maybe suggest to a lady that, it being a truth universally acknowledged that any ambitious young lady of title and substance must be in want of an upwardly mobile warlord to marry, you should perhaps discuss whether you are mutually compatible. At this point, the system calculates a “persuasion difficulty”. If this value is too high for any reason, the NPC will turn you down right away. But if not, you can start discussing specifics.

The NPC will then present you a number of issues where you will need to persuade him or her. During persuasion, you will see a progress bar, which shows how far you’ve gone toward convincing the other party. Every time you succeed in convincing the lord over a point, the persuasion bar will fill up a certain amount. If at the end you can fill up the entire bar, the NPC’s objections will be overcome.

His moral and long-term objections, anyway. Money can’t buy everything, but it’s usually at least part of the deal. The persuasion system is often a gateway that leads you into the barter system. Some lords will do anything for honor, or for revenge, but most want some sort of token of your appreciation up front. Each successful persuasion attempt will help to reduce the monetary cost of the action you would like to perform when it comes to the bartering stage, whereas repeated failures might make a deal impossible to reach. And if you push your luck too much, then you run the risk of severely impacting your relations with NPCs in a negative way.

Overall, we feel that the persuasion system adds a massive amount of depth to diplomacy in Bannerlord, giving players different options and ways to approach challenging situations that they are presented with. We think that it will give players greater control in playing the game in the way that they want to, opening up avenues and possibilities that were unavailable in previous games in the series.



And that’s it for 2018 folks! We will be back in the New Year with more blogs (with the next one due on the 10th of January), so make sure you follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook to keep up to date with all the latest Bannerlord news as we march ever closer to that elusive release date. We hope that you all have a wonderful time over the festive season!

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Greeting warriors of Calradia!

In video games, game design must come first. It doesn’t matter if a game has awe-inspiring art or wonderful writing if its gameplay is clunky, repetitive or downright boring. In Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, game design is king too – we want it to be as open, full of possibilities, dynamic, and engaging as a sandbox can possibly be. But that doesn’t mean anything if you can't make game designers’ ideas come true. Gameplay programmers take care of that: they turn ideas into reality, creating game systems by implementing game features in the actual game. That takes understanding the feature itself by heart as well as writing the code to make it work as it was designed. Today we talk with Selim Çam, one of our gameplay programmers, to find out what he’s working on for the single-player campaign of Bannerlord.


Selim Çam

Izmir, Turkey

2018

Software Engineering

Gameplay Programmer (Campaign Team)


“"As a Gameplay Programmer on the Campaign Team, my role involves designing and implementing various gameplay features, such as quests, character perks, kingdom decisions, the barter system and so forth. Some tasks require elaborate design meetings to discuss the feature thoroughly, so I spend some of my time attending the meetings if we are having any.

When the game design is decided, the code needs to be designed as well, to define and clarify how it will work. I try to ensure that it meets the specifications of the game design while still maintaining our internal programming paradigms. At this point, if the current design is deemed not feasible, we try to come up with a better solution by making changes. Once I have a clear view of the design, I start programming the feature, which makes up the majority of my time.

For major features, I often discuss the code structure with my team lead where we exchange ideas and try to get a better view of the feature.

Also, throughout the day, the QA Team reports bugs that they've encountered while testing the game. If it is something related to the campaign side and I'm available, I take a look to debug and fix the issue. Sometimes it takes many trips between the QA and Campaign rooms in quick succession. It can be exhausting from time to time but I enjoy the rush!”



“I really like the fact that the game presents a sandbox environment to the players in which they are free to choose their path, whether it's fulfilling the fantasy of becoming a king leading vast numbers of men or being a prominent merchant that controls the economy of the realm.”

“In Bannerlord, we are essentially creating a living medieval world in which parties travel from one settlement to another, raid settlements, buy and sell goods, lay sieges and all sorts of things that you would expect them to do. When that's the case, it can be daunting to track down a bug with unknown origins. Also, the trickiest bugs are not always easily recreated due to their indeterministic nature.

One time, the QA Team encountered a caravan party that decided to lay siege on a settlement... while it was inside! Caravans shouldn’t be able to lay siege at all, and they most definitely shouldn't be able to attack a settlement that they are inside of. Nothing made sense!

Luckily we had a way to recreate the bug easily. But that was the only easy part. I remember tracking every step of the involved parties, frame by frame, to find out what caused the issue. Turns out it wasn't that hard to fix, but it sure took enough time!”

“"Currently my main focus is on the Children feature we've recently announced. To be more specific, the transition of babies into childhood and children into adulthood, where they will be positioned, how the player will interact with them etc. Besides that, I'm doing some adjustments to the Barter feature.”



“I've always had an affection for Battania since they remind me of the Gauls and I'm a big fan of Asterix!”



“Absolutely! While the children were being implemented into the game, the work-in-progress build turned some of the townsfolk into tiny kids with full body armour and battle equipment. It was hilarious watching them walk around with shields twice their size and their tiny arms carrying gigantic spears. We shared a good laugh with the team.”



“For a medieval game that fuses elements of strategy and action RPG gameplay, the campaign is as non-linear as it can get. Players are completely free to choose their own actions. The game does not force you into a fixed path. You can do any quest that you find enjoyable. If you are not really into fighting, you can play more like a trader than a warrior, establishing productive enterprises, sending out caravans and proposing kingdom policies that support merchants etc. If you are more of a warrior, you can amass a colossal army and conquer the whole realm. You decide who you’ll marry, how your clan will persist through generations and which child of yours will inherit your legacy.

Since there are no exact ways to play the campaign, each player will experience Bannerlord uniquely, which is what we all love about the Mount & Blade series.”

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Greeting warriors of Calradia!

Becoming a noble is a major milestone in Mount & Blade games. It is the moment that your dedication and hard work is recognised and rewarded with land and title. In most cases, this will be in the service of a liege lord, however, we know that some of you prefer not to bend the knee and would rather carve out your own path in Calradia! But, regardless of how you obtain your own holdings, it is what you do with your new found gains that truly matters.



So, what makes obtaining your own fief such an important event in the game? Well, settlements are very much at the core of Bannerlord’s singleplayer campaign, and the majority of actions and events that take place in the sandbox revolve around them. They are the places where recruits are hired, wealth is built, and ultimately, what wars are fought over.

But, other than using them as a source of income, what can you actually do with your settlements?

Settlement projects are a way for players to improve their fiefs in a number of different ways. We can separate these upgrades into two categories: military and civic.

Military buildings, such as upgrades to the walls or the addition of a barrack, are all directly related to the settlement’s ability to play an effective role in times of war. Upgraded walls make the settlement harder to assault and a barrack enables the settlement to maintain a larger garrison to man those walls!

Civic buildings are focused more on the production and economic capabilities of the settlement, with buildings such as a carpenter’s hall, which helps to increase production in the settlement, or a vegetable garden, that provides a steady supply of food. However, some civic buildings offer bonuses which you could consider to be more military focused. For example, a granary allows the settlement to store more food, which will help it to hold out longer during a siege.

Settlement projects can be constructed in both castles and towns, with villages receiving bonuses from the castle or town they are connected to. With the massive increase in settlements that we have in Bannerlord, we felt that having to micromanage settlements all the way down to the village level would, over time (as your territory grows), become overbearing and tiresome to manage.

Settlement projects require manpower for the construction phase. We use a formula that determines how much progress is made with the construction each day based on the population of the settlement. And for those with a large purse, you can draft in some additional manpower to help speed up the construction!

Projects can be queued, meaning that you don’t have to worry about losing time with production if you are preoccupied with other tasks when the current project is completed. And if you manage to complete all of the projects in a settlement, or feel like you don’t need certain ones, you can invest this manpower into daily projects which will slowly develop different aspects of your settlement. The daily housing project, for example, will increase the population of the settlement by 1 each day.

Overall, we feel that settlement projects are a great way for players to tailor their fiefs to perform specific functions within the kingdom. Settlements deep within your territory might be better suited to producing food or bolstering your finances, whereas a castle bordering a hostile faction might be better suited to becoming a military stronghold from which to protect your lands and project your strength. Ultimately, we think that they give the player more tactical choices in terms of gameplay, and much greater control over (and hopefully a more engaging connection to) their fiefs than what we had in previous Mount & Blade games.



Our final point of discussion regarding settlements is the addition of a Governor role. The governor role allows you to offload the burden of managing your fiefs to a trusted clan member. They will handle all aspects of managing the settlement, providing the fief with small bonuses in the process, leaving you to focus on crushing your enemies!


In next week’s blog, we will be talking to Gameplay Programmer (Campaign Team), Selim Çam. If you have a question you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for him to answer!

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

When you read the word “scene” you most likely think of a movie or play: a character does or says something in a certain situation and place; when that’s done, the scene is over. But in level design, the word has a different meaning. There, a scene is more like a scene in a pen and paper roleplaying game, where the dungeon master defines the space (say, a tavern), the context (bustling with people because there’s a huge storm outside), and the most relevant information game-wise: where the exits and entries are, what the important NPCs are doing… The narrator doesn’t actually write what the characters are saying or will say: what they do is create a space full of possibilities to play with.

In this week’s blog, we talk with one of our level designers and video production artist, Gündüzhan Gündüz, who is currently working on scenes for Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord – thus creating the very places in Calradia where your adventures will take place.


Gündüzhan Gündüz

Ankara, Turkey

2014

Hacettepe University - Graphic Design

Level Designer / Video Production Artist


“My daily routine generally involves designing and creating scenes. I am responsible for creating various scenes, including villages, towns, castles, battlefields and arenas. I make use of historical references and geographical locations to assist me in this.

While creating terrain for the scenes, I tend to import projects from World Machine (software that creates realistic terrain formations) directly into our scene editor, or, on some occasions, I will use photogrammetry to provide me with a starting point.

In addition to this, at times, I will turn my hand to 3D modelling if I feel we are missing something from one of the scenes. I also record and edit footage for any videos that we create, including, preparing any animations that are needed for the videos, such as the logo intro.”



“What I like the most about Bannerlord is that it has a much larger number of units and larger battlefields than previous Mount & Blade games. Fighting in larger areas allows for more tactical choice and freedom, which I think makes the game more enjoyable and fun.

Also, I think the seasons system in Bannerlord makes for a beautiful feature. The liveliness and vibrancy of the trees and grass in the spring after a cold harsh winter can really cheer you up!”



“Readjusting the textures used in scenes in accordance with Physically Based Rendering was quite difficult in the beginning, however, a little practice helped to speed up the process.

Also, preparing the first siege scene that we used to showcase our replay editor, and producing a cinematic trailer as part of the process was quite a challenging, but exciting, experience.”

“I am mainly focused on town and castle scenes at the moment, and more specifically, reworking town scenes and making improvements to them to ensure that they are compatible as siege scenes.”



“My favourite faction is Empire. They are heavily influenced by Roman and Byzantine culture, which is something that appeals to me. I really enjoy creating scenes for this faction as I love their architectural style.”

“We do our best to make each of our scenes unique and original, which means that each map takes however long it takes. But, as a rough estimate, I would say they can take anywhere between a day to a couple of weeks. It is certainly less time consuming creating villages and battle scenes than it is to create towns and castles, that’s for sure!

When it comes to towns they become a little more complicated, as we have to include areas that players can reach and explore, such as taverns, shops, blacksmiths and arenas. We also have to make these scenes siegeable, and of course, these scenes can be upgraded, so we have to ensure that they can be assaulted at each different upgrade level (1-3). On top of that, if we get some new update or revision that changes something, then naturally, these larger scenes take longer to fix.”

“Our scene editor has all of the tools that an artist could wish for. I especially like our terrain and layer paint systems. Also, the terrain and flora systems are integrated with the season system which is extremely convenient for us artists!”



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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Great news! The first baby in Calradia has been born! Yay!

The mother, is us, the player, a woman named Boudicca: a caravan raider hailing from the misty foothills of Battania. On our travels (read: raids), we managed to steal the heart of Usair, an Aserai warlord who sports a proud moustache.


The proud parents, Usair and Boudicca

On the 20th of November, 1084 (the year of the Camel), the heavens blessed our union with the honour of parenting the very first child on the shores of Calradia!

Please, allow us to introduce our daughter, Ruwa, who as of now is still a babe, but we spared no expense and commissioned the best portraitist in the court of Unqid, the Sultan of Aserai, who believes she will look something a little like this by the age of 10.


Ruwa (the Children of Men)

Her beautiful face was derived from the features (facekeys) of her father and mother, with a small amount of randomness thrown into the mix. And thus, she has a unique face(key) which will retain traits of her parents into adulthood. And, it is not just the facial traits that she will inherit from her parents, but also our wealth and lands too, which we worked tirelessly to accumulate through entirely legitimate means.

As she grows, we will be able to spend more time with her, interact with her, share our experiences and skills with her, and develop her into a fine young woman.


Clan Boudicca is much more complete now!

On a more serious note, we are extremely excited to be able to share this with you. Children are something we have been working on for some time now and to finally see them implemented and working in-game has been a really rewarding experience. We have plenty to talk about in terms of dynasties and how children will work as a feature in the game, but we will save that for a later date.


Campaign team celebrating the birth of Ruwa. Oh, and that’s a cake, not a pile of pancakes!

In next week’s blog, we will talk with Level Designer / Video Production Artist, Gündüzhan Gündüz. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out from him to answer!

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Animations are a big part of video games, apart from the obvious reason (a totally still game wouldn’t be much fun, would it?), because they actually have a deep impact on gameplay. If animating a movie is hard work, just imagine animating something that will change and evolve depending on players’ input! Animations give you the visual cues you need to react to what’s happening on screen, especially in combat, so they need to feel natural and realistic. But at the same time, as a player you want to retain control over what’s going on, so animations need to be short and always keep the ability to change on the fly. Then you’ve got all the technical challenges related to motion capture – and that’s not counting animating animals such as dogs or birds, where MoCap is out of the question. This week we talk with one of our character animators, Abdullah Nakipoğlu, who will give us a sneak peek at the complex process of animating characters in Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord.


Abdullah Nakipoğlu

Ankara, Turkey

2011

Animschool - Character Animation

Animator / Motion Capture Artist

“ Generally, my day-to-day routine consists of resolving issues with reported bugs, discussing new ideas or requested developments and preparing the prototyping of these ideas when necessary.

My duty as an animator is to prepare pretty much any kind of animation and implement it into the game. Sometimes it can be an animation of an animal, an attack/injury, the movement of various characters in settlements, or an animation of an icon on the campaign map. If a character animation is necessary, I start out by recording in our MoCap studio before cleaning the animation up by hand for the game. In the instances that we don’t use MoCap (like with geese/cows/dogs), I start by preparing the skeleton system before working on the animations, using any reference videos that I have gathered.



With Bannerlord, we are using our own engine that was developed in-house, and it is something that is constantly evolving and being improved over time. Unfortunately, this means that I sometimes have to revisit some older work that I have done. In such occasions, I generally try to make corrections using the available animations, but sometimes it is necessary to start from scratch.

When I have some spare time in between my duties, I spend as much of that time as possible playing the game to focus on the effects of the completed animations and to see if they give the impact that we desire or if there is any room for improvement. If I notice something, then I take some notes and make the necessary changes.”



“I have an interest in history and I like to read about and research ancient wars. Fighting on horseback, laying siege to a castle with your own army, fighting under the command of a general, being captured... With its rich and detailed world, Bannerlord offers all of these experiences and more! Furthermore, the game features a unique combat system that has been improved upon from Warband.”

“I have faced many different problems and issues during the production process, that’s for sure!

I have found it challenging, but also compelling, preparing animations that retain a somewhat natural feel to them, but still, work within the boundaries of the game mechanics. Sometimes, we come across comments like, “can the movements be more natural?”, and it is true that we could create more detailed and animated animations to make them look and feel more natural. However, this would ultimately limit the control of the character for the player. For example, players can interrupt an attack at any time by issuing a block command, or they can move their character in any direction without waiting for an attack to end. If we were to create totally realistic animations then we would have to restrict or reduce the control of the player in these instances. It is also important in some instances that we over-exaggerate an animation so that it can be clearly seen and recognised by the player, such as with our fast-paced directional combat system. Ultimately, we try to keep any animations that would limit the control of the player to a minimum, allowing players to use and develop their skills within a control system that responds instantly.

Another example of a challenging project is the injury/stun animations. These animations needed to be prepared separately for each part of the body, in three different levels... for four different directions! These animations needed to be short enough not to limit the control of the player, while working in accordance with the inverse kinematics (IK) system. As the animation we prepared with MoCap recording is playing on the base layer, the reaction coming from the IK system is attached according to the area and direction of the attack in the upper layer. Preparing the MoCap recordings for all of these and cleaning the body movements that are inappropriate for the IK system was a difficult process.”

“I am working on the preparation of the newly added dog animations. In addition to this, I am making new MoCap recordings to make the falling animations from horseback more impressive.”




“I don’t really have a favourite faction, but I think it would be fun to try to unite the continent of Calradia with the Khuzait Khanate.”

“A MoCap recording process for horses would be a quite demanding job. The data coming from the markers located on the muscles of a horse can get quite messy and that data would need to be deep cleaned before being used for the bone motions. If we were using a muscle simulation, this data could be extremely helpful, but alas, we are not, and so we make the horse animations (as well as all other animal animations) by hand instead.”

“Yes, there will be in-game “cutscenes” that are similar to those in Warband.”

“There are some innovations in our game engine that definitely makes our workflow easier and will surely be liked by modders. The engine allows us to add multiple models and skeletons to the scene at the same time and check the animations in a new model viewer window. When we make changes to the source file of the animation, these changes are also updated in the engine simultaneously. It is also possible to observe the speed of the animation, the skeleton that the animation is connected to, or to create our own scene by adding static objects in this window if we want.

In the process of preparing an animation, we use Motion Builder to prepare motion captures. In addition to that, we use 3ds Max and Maya. We use the common .FBX extension to add animations to the game, so I think that modders will not run into any problems.”



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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

In the medieval ages, castles and strongholds were not meant to be dwellings, but military tools that were strong and easy to defend, positioned in choke points to protect an important region or trade route. Villages, on the other hand, were the population centres - places where people would dwell and sleep after a long day of work in the fields or herding their cattle. Towns were somewhat a combination of the two, but they were also very different (and complex) places. They had walls for defence and a high population count, but they were much more than just dwellings and defensive structures: they were the most important places around. Towns are where kingdoms forged their real power. Artisans worked raw materials into quality goods and merchants turned them into wealth. Courts were established in towns, so they were also the heart and brains of any realm -- where politics, conspiracies, and plots took place.



In Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, towns are very much like their real-world counterparts. They are where industrial goods are produced, higher quality troops are trained, commerce flourishes, notable NPCs do their dealings and crime is prevalent. And this is exactly what our level designers try to reflect as they create each town scene.

In a previous blog, we looked at how we approach map design for castles, which share some similarities with towns (both have upgradable walls and both can be besieged). However, when it comes to design, towns are a completely different beast.



As we design the layout of each town, we tend to divide them into recognisable districts, so that players can develop an instinct for where they can find what they are looking for. This isn’t so much a rule that is set in stone, as we want to stay fluid in our approach to level design, but all of our work on these scenes share similar design principles.

• Marketplace - This is where most goods are traded. If you are looking for a shiny new helmet, supplies for a campaign, or perhaps some barding for your horse, then the marketplace will be your first port of call. The marketplace is also where you will find the local blacksmith, where you can design and craft your own melee weapons.
  
• Slums and backstreet - Dangerous places where smugglers and bandits gather to make money by illegitimate means, diminishing the resources and taxes of the town.
  
• Keep - Where you can find the nobles and governor of the town (as well as the prisoners!). One day, this is somewhere that you will hopefully get to call home.
  
• Military district - This is where the town guards and garrison gather, and where troops can be trained. Also, this is where the town’s stockpile is located to be used in times of need (such as a defensive siege).
  
• Tavern - This is where adventurers and drunks alike gather to share stories over a mug of mead. Some revellers are just a nuisance, others are sellswords that will fight for the right amount of money, and a rare few are companions that will follow you in your ambitions and help you to achieve your goals.

We understand that no matter how nice and immersive we make our towns look, walking around them creates downtime from your conquering and pillaging. For those of you who would like to rest between your various exploits, we have many small details to explore and discover in our towns. However, for those who are in a hurry, we group interactable NPCs together according to their roles for ease of access for players. And for those of you that don’t want to set a single foot in a town, we have the settlement menu, where you can access practically every function available in towns directly from the campaign map (barring a select few that we save for immersion).



Sieges also play a big part in the design of a town scene. This comes both with technical and gameplay limitations, but also with opportunities! Small roads and buildings around town gates add variety to gameplay when the town is under siege, however, a shop that is filled to the brim with many intricate pieces of pottery would add performance complications. Our solution is to have a "siege state" for our scenes (which is easily achievable with our map editor). When a player deploys into a town that is under siege, they are greeted by deserted streets. The marketplace closes down, taking all of the colourful and fine goods with it, shops bar their doors and barricades are raised in the streets to help with defences.



This method not only helps us create immersion and ease the load on performance by removing elements that are unnecessary for a combat scene, but it also gives us more flexibility with our design. We can barricade off roads that are not related to siege gameplay to reduce overcomplexity or close shortcuts that might give an unnecessary advantage to either side while creating new choke points that would look out of place when there is no conflict.

Overall, we try to design our town scenes to be believable and immersive, but also to compliment gameplay. We want players to be easily able to navigate the world, either through their player character or through UI elements (such as menus), and experience the sandbox in the way that they want to.



In next week’s blog, we will talk to Animator and Motion Capture Artist, Abdullah Nakipoğlu. If you have any questions you would like to ask him, please leave a reply in the comments section and we will pick one out for him to answer!

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

3D artists give shape to the world we see and experience in a video game. But the devil is in the details, and sometimes what makes a game live and breathe are the small things: not the main characters and impressive buildings, but day-to-day objects such as tools, weapons, and clothes. Gameplay can be as immersive as can be to make you feel like a medieval warrior, but if you’re clothed in sweatpants and the world around you is made of cardboard, immersion jumps out of the window. Today, we talk with one of our 3D artists, Ülker Dikmen, who is one of the people responsible for making Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord not just beautiful, but also a believable world.


Ülker Dikmen

Ankara, Turkey

2012

Psychology, Hacettepe University

3D Character Artist


“When I first started working at TaleWorlds back at the beginning of 2012, my job was to create a default character head and its morphs to allow players customise their characters in the character screen. Later, I started modelling hair and clothes and other character parts.

Nowadays, I mostly make clothes (especially for the women of Calradia!). Before I start a new costume, my team leader Özgür and I discuss what kind of an outfit is needed and then I roll my sleeves up for the serious business of making medieval fashion pieces! I start off in Marvelous Designer, where I draw sewing patterns and turn them into realistic-looking clothes. Then I move to ZBrush, where I add details like laces and stitches. After I complete the low poly version of the dress in TopoGun, the task of skinning and vertex painting for the cloth simulation begins. Once it's all done I import the costume into the game and check if everything works well.”




“I think it's not surprising that as an artist I like the beautiful graphics of the game the most. My favourite part though would have to be the character screen, where I could spend hours making my perfect character. I also enjoy walking in the beautiful villages and cities and hanging out in the tavern where I can enjoy medieval music.”

“The most challenging task so far was to make the clothes look good, both when the cloth simulation is on and off. When the cloth simulation is on, I have to make sure the clothes are baggy enough to make room for the movements of the character. For instance, if the dresses are not baggy enough or have slits here and there, some body parts will show through the clothes. On the other hand, the clothes will look blocky if too baggy when the cloth simulation is off. So it's a difficult task to find a happy medium.”



“I’m editing my old costume meshes so that they work nicely with the cloth simulation (at the time I made those meshes we didn’t have cloth simulation so they need a bit of editing now).”

“Battania! Mostly because I love their shabby clothes and the dark and misty atmosphere of their settlements. Also, because blanket in Turkish is "battaniye", which evokes a cosy feeling!”



“The character creator gives the player absolute control over how their character will look. We have body type sliders to set the weight, build and height of the character. There are lots of skin, eye and hair colour options, and of course, lots and lots of face morphs to let you create your perfect character.”

“I love making tattered and dirty clothes because I enjoy experiencing a depressingly dull and bleak atmosphere in games. Creating assets like this really excites me and makes my imagination run wild. Creating the character hair was my least favourite task because it’s very difficult and time-consuming to make a hair mesh look natural and beautiful.”

“I draw much of my inspiration from medieval TV shows and movies. We also have a large collection of medieval history books here at TaleWorlds which I check out when I lack inspiration.”

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most important features of any single player game. Getting it right is key to the experience: it has to be almost invisible, so players (sort of) forget that they are playing against a machine. It has to be clever and fast enough to be a worthy opponent, but not too much – humans are fallible, after all; and ultimately the player, as the hero of the story, is supposed to win. It has to make use of the game mechanics at hand, not just to be fun and varied but to show the player what can be done. This rings especially true in a game such as Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, where skill-based combat and epic large-scale battles are at the core of the experience.

In our previous games, the AI performed adequately in combat, but it was by no means advanced. Battle tactics were quite basic in that AI armies would either launch themselves into full-out assaults or sit back and wait for the player to attack. No consideration was given to the terrain, and at no point would the AI try to exploit weaknesses in their opponent’s army or capitalise on any mistakes made by the player. This lack of depth made the AI more an obstacle, a nuisance, than a truly worthy opponent. With Bannerlord, this is something that has received a complete overhaul. We want players to be challenged, to be clever and make use of all the combat mechanics available to them if they want to emerge victorious -- and at times, to be punished for any unwise decisions or mistakes that they make. To do this, and taking into account that combat in Mount & Blade can be both one-to-one and in large battles, we had to devise a more advanced and reactive combat AI, broken into three separate categories: individual, formation, and tactical AI.



Each individual agent in a battle is controlled by its own AI. Moving to a position (pathfinding), selecting a target, attacking and defending are all managed on this level. Individual AI needs to be extremely fast and responsive and its results should be correct within a very small margin of error (swinging a weapon, engaging an enemy that just charged them out of nowhere on horseback, etc.). In addition to this, orders need to be carried out across the entire formation at the same time. Ultimately, timing and execution need to be as close to perfect as possible.

To put it simply, individual AI needs to be as precise as possible to ensure that each agent can perform effectively in combat. It needs to carry out any orders that are issued to it, as well as, assess the current situation to make its own decisions on what actions to take.

And when you have hundreds of agents performing all of these calculations at the same time, performance becomes a huge potential issue that needs addressing (which in our case is solved by using parallel processing).

Formation AI sits at a level just above individual AI. Formation AI is used to issue commands to each agent within a formation and decide what behaviour that the formation should perform (i.e. attack, defend, flank, retreat, etc.). However, it is important to note that the orders issued by the formation AI only determine what is expected of each individual agent, but it doesn’t directly make them do anything: this is left to the individual AI to interpret and carry out.

The formation AI has access to the same interface and set of commands as the player. In other words, our combat AI doesn’t cheat! It uses every piece of information that a player would have access to (although, perhaps slightly more detailed and accurate than a player’s guesstimates) to make its decisions.

Tactic AI is what gives an AI army its overall battle plan. It looks at the terrain of the battlefield, as well as the compositions of each army to determine the best tactic. To keep each battle varied and to further the emergent narrative for the player, this layer of the combat AI is influenced by the AI lord commanding the army. Some lords might be more cautious and prefer to seize the high ground before setting up in a defensive formation, whereas other lords might be a little more rash, putting pressure onto their opponents by committing to an early assault.

The tactic chosen sets the overall battle plan in that each formation knows what is expected of them but they aren't strictly tied to it. What this means is that each formation's AI will make immediate battlefield decisions independent of the tactic when necessary, such as exploiting advantages or pulling back when necessary, but when there isn’t an urgent action that needs to be carried out they will try to stick to the plan.

One way to look at it would be to think of the AI as having its own chain of command, with tactic AI being the general at the head of the army, issuing commands to its subordinates and expecting them to carry the order out to the best of their ability.



One of our main considerations while developing this new combat AI system was to ensure that any decisions that the AI makes are believable to players. The AI needs to make logical decisions that make sense to the player, otherwise, the system could be easily gamed and player immersion would be adversely affected. So far, we are pretty happy with the results. We think that Bannerlord’s AI will be a fresh challenge to returning players to the series, and provide players new and old players alike with dynamic combat experiences that test their individual combat skills and tactical prowess.

Finally, we would like to mention that Bannerlord’s AI is also moddable, too -- and its separation into three different levels is important for modders, making their life easier and allowing for more complex modifications. Tactical, formation behaviour and agent levels being separate is essential: just as commanders changing their orders during battle does not change their soldiers themselves, adding a new tactic doesn't require you to model every single formation behaviour or agent AI. Adding new formation behaviours doesn't require you to delve into agent AI either because the interface the AI uses and you will use is the medium between the hierarchies. This lets modders create a custom AI that suits their needs without breaking anything, using a complex or simple set of orders and logic to create new formation behaviours and new tactics using various formation behaviours.


In next week’s blog, we will talk to 3D Artist, Ülker Dikmen. If you have any questions you would like to ask her, please leave a reply in the comments and we will pick one out for her to answer!

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Greetings warriors of Calradia!

Due to unforeseen circumstances, we are unable to do the Q&A with Assistant Designer, Cihan Şekercioğlu that we announced last week. But, it is Thursday my dudes and the show must go on... Instead, in this week’s blog, we will talk about how we approach game design here at TaleWorlds, giving you a brief insight into the general process of taking an idea and turning it into a game feature.

Game design is possibly one of the most rewarding jobs in the game industry. Seeing an idea come to life and being enjoyed by others is most certainly a fulfilling experience. However, it is also one of the most difficult jobs that the industry has to offer. Something which might seem great on paper may turn out to be rather dull when implemented into a game. And to even get it to this stage, you need to be able to formulate your idea in a way which makes sense to your peers.

At TaleWorlds, we feel that for a game to be fun, it should be built around a solid core mechanic. In the case of Mount & Blade games, this is the combat system. We think that the combat system in our games is fun, intuitive, easy to learn, but difficult to master. And, in the end, if the core mechanic isn’t fun, then whatever is built around it becomes irrelevant.

With Bannerlord, we are building on a solid foundation of what we had achieved in previous Mount & Blade games. But, at all times, we keep it in mind that the combat is the main draw for the game. We always aim to ensure that any new mechanics we add don’t adversely affect this core mechanic. This was something we had to consider when we decided to implement directional blocking for shields. We had to ask ourselves questions such as, “does this actually enhance the combat in any way, or are we interfering with something which already works and is enjoyable?” (Ultimately, we decided that directional shield blocking actually fits in really well with the skill-based design of our combat system.)

We try to be as inclusive as possible when it comes to the design process. Everyone in the studio is a gamer (after all, we all got into this business because we love to play games!) so we try our best to make use of this wide range of opinions and experiences when it comes to designing our own game. But that’s not to say that we don’t have professionals who specialise in this aspect of development, only that we understand the importance of hearing the different opinions and thoughts of everyone in our company. And in many instances, this kind of approach allows us to highlight potential issues early on in a design as people visualise the idea differently in their own head.

With this in mind, we tend to include everyone who would be involved in implementing a feature in the design meetings alongside the game designers. Not only to offer their feedback on the actual design but so a plan can be formulated for the implementation of the design. The professional expertise of the people responsible for implementing each design is required to ensure that any new feature or mechanic is technically viable and can be implemented into the game. And in many cases, these professionals have unique solutions to any problems that arise.

Following design meetings, a document is created which the team can then refer to. This process of holding meetings and revising the design document is repeated until we feel that the design adds an additional layer to the game in a way which is positive and enjoyable for players.

We can’t say for sure if this is the best approach to development, but we certainly feel that it works well for our company, and has led to the introduction of some features that otherwise might never have seen the light of day!



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