ranzware
Speaking as someone with a pathological fascination with procedural simulations, following the development of Streets of Fortuna feels like watching as my time and attention are steadily pulled toward the event horizon of a distant black hole. Considering it’s coming from Kitfox Games, who we can thank for ushering Caves of Qud out of early access and publishing the Steam release of Dwarf Fortress, it should come as no surprise that Streets of Fortuna is aiming to simulate its ancient, Constantinople-esque sandbox cities so thoroughly that it already feels like beholding the works of a mad wizard.
And based on a devlog video Kitfox published yesterday, that sandbox looks like the wizards in question have a lot of murder, arson, and general skulduggery in mind.
In the video, lead designer Brent Ellison walks us through the NPC behavior systems that serve as the bedrock for Streets of Fortuna’s simulation. Ellison says at this point in development, when the game generates a city, it models the schedules, needs, and emergent behaviors of around 1000 NPCs, which Kitfox hopes to bump up to 3000 “in the near future.”
Whether or not they’re on-screen, Ellison says “all NPCs are properly simulated at all times, navigating about the city, interacting with objects, and paying attention to their schedules.” The potential of that level of simulation is already tantalizing, especially knowing that Streets of Fortuna is being designed with input from the developers of Dwarf Fortress. But if you need more reason to be interested, Ellison immediately elaborates with a pretty clear image of where Kitfox’s design priorities lie:
“They know how recently they’ve tended to their needs,” Ellison says. “So yes, of course we’re thinking about how we want to make sure you can poison someone’s drink and leave the area, confident that you’ve pulled off the perfect crime.”
That’s music to my ears. The video isn’t action-packed by any means—it’s around eight minutes of watching NPCs roam around attending to their needs with an intermission to examine the behavior tree driving their priorities—but it’s clear throughout Ellison’s overview that Kitfox is deeply considering how the player might tinker with the city’s clockwork simulation for their own ends.
As an NPC putters about his home to light his lamps with a fire-striker, Ellison casually mentions that Kitfox will probably make lamp-lighting a little more involved so that NPCs have a chance to interrupt you when you inevitably “pull a striker out of your pack and try to set their stuff on fire.”
Later, Ellison drags a cleaver off a counter to demonstrate that “NPCs in their own properties like to put things back where they belong”—implying potential ways to manipulate a character’s location if you’re hoping to snoop around their home. When Ellison notes that “NPCs will also refill their water sources from nearby troughs and fountains,” it’s hard not to wonder what opportunities for meddling that could entail. If those fountains are fed by cisterns and aqueducts, what might happen if somebody stashed a hypothetical poisoning victim in the city water supply?
Streets of Fortuna doesn’t have a release window yet, so it’ll be a while before we know just how deep its simulation goes. Based on Kitfox’s history, however, we’ve got plenty of reasons to be optimistic.
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Kurt Indovina
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