Working on my modifiable event system for my game, is it better to allow making fewer deep events with lots of steps, or force making many shallower events linked together? The system takes a lot of design ideas from ck2. Put another way, how many ifs or choices deep should 1 event be allowed to go? What are you thoughts based on other systems you have encountered, or maybe programmed?
Depends on the game. Is your game as a whole a lot like Crusader Kings, or just the event system? I have far, far more hours in CK3 than 2, so my opinion here probably means little, but the event spam in 3 drives me up the fucking wall. Having to deal with secondary events just makes the situation worse. I’d prefer CK have events be uncommon, and solely be used to break up periods of prolonged stasis, with the gameplay instead focused on actual systems, ie, character interactions, decisions, activities.
But the Crusader Kings series is a strategy/sandbox/simulator, in addition to the RPG/storytelling elements. If your game leans more heavily on roleplaying/interactive fiction, then complex events would be preferrable.
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I’ve always appreciated the more in-depth event chains in Crusader Kings, especially the ones that take place over a prolonged period of time instead of spamming out a bunch of events in one day. It makes the whole roleplay aspect that bit more immersive.
Of course, smaller/single page events are nice to have as fluff to fill the game out between action, but they would have to be limited in use. Staying with Crusader Kings, I don’t want multiple events per month saying a random courtier has had a spat with a minor baron halfway across the world and is now planning to assassinate them, or that a random farmer has decided to give me a whopping 2 coins. If your game has a focus on roleplaying, multi-stage events are the way to go imo.
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Well i guess a description of the game may help, this is mainly a story based, 2d simulation game(where the events drive the story). Like more complex twine or ren’py games. It’s not in twine or ren’py because of performance issues. It’s not a platformer, or other movement based 2d game, so events won’t “interrupt game play” so to speak. The event system will drive player interaction with other npcs. The idea is that the modifiable event system is like ck2’s, and that anyone can write/create an event chain and add it to the game, to add some new interaction to the game.
I would add that how frequently events play or how many you get per “time step” is not what i’m referring to here. Rather, Ck2 events are not deep so much as wide. In ck2 what im calling a single event, is usually a large chain of small events typically. Ck3’s event system is an expansion of ck2’s to my understanding.
I get what you are saying about CK2 events sometimes getting in the way of the strategy board game part of CK2. While there are some really cool mods out there to add whole new layers to ck2 with events, they usually get in the way of playing the strategy board game part of it.
The question is, from a modding stand point is having to write new event, easier with a chain of small events rather than one bigger one.