Stellaris Dev Talk, 2.9 Game Design With Senior Game Designer; Stephen Muray

this video is best enjoyed as something that is running in the background whilst listening to it so go and load up your favorite game get yourself a drink and go ahead and listen to this whilst you're just enjoying yourself in the meantime though this is something new something fresh new format at least for this channel and if you enjoy it make sure that you leave a comment below because well if you want to have more of this i will need some feedback on it so feel free to let me know what you think in addition if you have any questions to steven murray or anything based on what has been said in this particular podcast feel free to add them there down as well because we may come back and do a follow-up on this and basically follow up on your questions if you don't want to listen to the introduction to this here is a time code that will take you immediately to the meat and potatoes of the game design of the upcoming update in solaris thank you so much for watching and enjoy listening in thank you so much for joining us here we've got something special today um it's it's rather interesting over the last few weeks i've been talking to some people behind the scenes and it's like you know what um we've got all these def diaries coming up i've got some questions for the developers and today i got stephen murray with us now steven you are with us today to talk about some of the deaf diaries you've been laid out but first of all i want to i want to get the lay of the land here who are you introduce yourself what is your history and how on earth did you get stuck doing programming for a little company that is now not so literally more in stockholm well uh hi i'm steve moray i'm a lodger on the forums i'm a game designer on solaris greco senior minion um let's see i've been in the industry for about a little over 20 years now so sometimes i'm old and crotchety and cranky and stuff like that um let's see how did i come to stockholm uh i wanted to really that's the weird thing um i was perfectly happy with the stuff that i was doing before on mmo's mobile development but i had the opportunity to come work on the games that i played all right um boy did i play stellaris and ck so so you you've been you've been in the biz for 20 years you're saying right now um so what what kind of stuff would we know your work from for those of you who have been playing um video games in general like what what kind of titles have you been working on uh the one that i worked on the most is dungeons and dragons online i was the lead systems designer for that for seven years i was working on ai and things like that uh before that i've worked on a couple of mobile titles after the mmos batman or arkham underworld and uh game of thrones conquest okay uh as well as a couple of unreleased titles that were kind of fun all right i i can remember a game of thrones conquest back when people reached out to me to do videos on those and i told them no that's probably not a good idea that's all right yeah no worries you know it's just more a case of you know it doesn't really fit within the the context of the channel i'd rather have you guys come on board and talk about things so don't you worry about that that's all perfectly fine um when it comes to your your day-to-day stuff right now we're in the middle of a um i can't use the word due to youtube's related stuff however we're currently in a quote-unquote situation globally um and obviously this kind of impacts your your work uh i was reading some stuff that uh that ebba said that's the ceo of paradox regarding uh working from home as well as future stuff that may or may not be happening uh stuff that all popped up during the paradox podcast um how how is the how are you how is your day looking these days like you get out of bed you get dressed you get breakfast you start programming what's the what's the workflow here and how do you actually interact with the team on a day-by-day basis because i can imagine that over the last year or so it has been challenging oh yeah it's tough sometimes well first it's all a haze before coffee you know just like but you know cold brew and iced coffee carry me through the week so uh yeah it's very easy to miscommunicate and like not even notice that something needs your attention because you're deeply engrossed in other things but let's see you asked about my day so usually in the morning i'll catch up on you know what the conversations that have been going on on slack over since the last time i signed off uh skim the automated testing reports because those will give me an early indication if i did something either wonderful or horrible the previous day and then uh can you delve a little bit deeper in these automated testing reports like like what oh yeah like what would be the thing that you're looking for so there we've got in the automated testing reports we have uh the computers running uh single and multiplayer games overnight and i can skim through a bunch of data like what is the average number of pops per empire that were created what were the average fleet sizes uh hey look the crisis annihilated everything um what is the average time per daily tick that's one that is i'm super concerned about especially since i've been doing a lot of changes to population and economy how long the error logs are how many asserts we had all all sorts of just little technical details that may or may not be useful uh by themselves but in aggregate they can tell you very interesting things about you know it's like oh it's been a major benefit to some of this economic testing that i've been doing because every little thing that you touch affects so many other things the halo effects are wild um so reading through these uh reports i get several of them every night they they can give hints as to what i may have done wrong or what what i should look at next um i have a sort of shocking amount of freedom in my day-to-day direction so a lot of times the information that i pull out of those reports will dictate what i'm going to be working on that day all right so basically it has to do with with all the stuff that you've worked on um throughout the day before or whatever the week before do you have a team to work with directly is there a group of programmers underneath you is there a group of scripters assigned to you that tweak values within the code and also again how do if so how does it how does it work working remotely do you have like task groups or do you um do you uh operate uh more independently like what's the what's the story there so uh there's a lot of cooperation involved it's not like you know the groups are beneath me or anything like that where uh we we generally have uh major feature groups like hey we've talked about some of this so like two of the feature groups that i'm working with uh right now are intel and espionage we've thankfully mentioned that in the left dev diary so i can use the word within each major group there are designers there's content designers there are programmers there is ux uh that basically we're all working together as like a small team uh we communicate largely through slack and we have uh frequent uh sync meetings that sort of thing but uh it's a lot rougher since you know we're working from home uh things take a little bit longer um you don't you don't hear people across the room talking about something and being like hey i should you know this is something that requires my attention and i could clear this whole mess up instantly because you know as the designer i know how things are supposed to be meanwhile qa knows how things actually are which is an interesting thing qa is super important don't let anyone ever say anything else there right right so when somebody is somebody is kind of talking to themselves normally on the other side of the room and you overhear something that they're messing around in klaus with in code that somebody ages ago wrote and there's no documentation of and they're only worth the company for six months and then they have to move on and you're just like yeah you can't touch that because it's black box code and uh if you do anything with that everything will implode is that the sort of context that we're talking here or yeah precisely or stuff like uh someone's talking about like hey envoys are doing this weird thing and you're like oh wait i changed the design on that two months ago they don't we don't need that we can just stop stop stop worrying about this you know this is this is different now um so like you lose a lot of that sort of uh just sort of organic um nuance nuance yeah that's a good word so uh sometimes things get done that aren't needed sometimes uh things just aren't quite as clear because uh well i love text communication and things like that it doesn't always catch everything and uh there are so many meetings during the day that you know you can't constantly be doing you know making sure that everything is uh face-to-face voice chat sort of or like yeah it's online music it's not like you're in a in a zoom call or a slack call 24 hours a day or eight hours for the work day to get together exactly with the team and basically just do live feedback and work on whatever you're working on because you know interruption is also really really annoying so you're saying though that because of the last because of how things have been developing the last 12 months a bunch of deadlines and targets of you know expansions and whatever is coming up in the future has been pushed back by say a month or free due to delays i'd say that you know things do take longer they definitely do take longer um but we've had a lot of support from everyone up above they recognize what's going on and how difficult some of this stuff is now the interesting thing is is once in a while it's really good because if like you can get that real focus of okay i'm going to be working on this today and no one's going to interrupt you because if you don't notice that slack is sitting there blinking um yeah you can get a ton of stuff done and then realize oh wait there's you know these 34 things i need to respond i know exactly what you mean i'm in exactly the same boat because uh when when it comes to my work as well like slack uh maybe the day-to-day stuff but then you get like discord messages or you're working with like external teams and then all of a sudden you see like ah somebody sent me a message three hours ago could you do this in 20 minutes it's like hmm oh that's unfortunate no is it yeah yeah i i'm not so much sorry i see what you mean i see what you mean that's uh that's that's it's really really frustrating to work in this particular environment and i totally understand where you're coming from then um still though working working on the project in in general or or like how do you guys refer to like the project or the game or what's the yeah it's the it's the game okay so you you came on board at the end or like halfway through the development of ancient relics uh like just a general i'm not a big fan of ancient relics by myself just making sure that is that is you know for the record um and then after that you worked on uh lithoids now lithoides came out or at least it came out just after pdxcom from last year at pdxcon we were we were utterly crazy and decided to push the button while we were there so somebody somebody went over on the steam button and i hit the release okay that's hope this works because we don't have an office right yeah that was that was a problem especially considering we were on the outskirts of berlin somewhere and that was yeah that was a bit of an interesting scenario regardless though you worked on that in quite a substantial way now obviously for those people that are watching um lithoids species pack species pack were historically associated with things like ship sets uh portraits uh music that sort of thing uh pure cosmetics pure cosmetics and then you came in and said myself well this just won't do um exactly like what what did you do yeah what did you do and how how much has this particular move impacted the uh development of future things because i can imagine that setting a precedent of what you did may cause some problems in the future oh yeah so basically i started in april of that year april 1st i was the april fool's joke that just you know never went away um i started uh doing some stuff on ancient relics because that was currently in development uh the secrets of the precursors were my first like non-bug fixy sort of thing that i kind of did on my own uh mostly because i wanted to do more stuff with minor relics uh then summer hit and uh while the others were doing their experimentation i also want to do some experimentation and one of the things on the wouldn't it be nice list that we had was would it be nice if lithoids uh consumed minerals instead of food because you know if it was just a purely cosmetic species pack there would be no game effects for it i also wanted to get my hands into the code base and just kind of like root around in there and get familiar with things so i started working on that i made it and i'm like oh isn't this cool and wouldn't it be cool if they also had some traits and then wouldn't it be cool if um if you want to see a producer shudder you say the word scope creep and you know i had this great idea um so uh was this jd at the time by the way because i don't see him like i don't see him shudder very easily like um but uh that is about to say no they were very supportive and they thought it was cool and uh we did bring up that you know okay this might set a precedent where all of the species packs need to be you know beefier and so they might not be just purely cosmetic things that we can do on the side because we'll need to have either content or game design like deeply involved in this and we're like well we can see how it goes and people really liked it people loved the the lithoides it also gave us a chance to inflict hundreds if not thousands of puns upon the unsuspecting galaxy oh yeah um it was rock solid oh yeah um and uh yeah i was pretty happy with it now the interesting thing about it is okay so this said a precedent that we should that species packs that have mechanics are better received than ones without i mean that's sort of obvious you know it's like it's you're getting a bigger bang for your buck there so uh when we did necroids we were we were busy discussing or this brought up the discussion of should the traits be restricted into the phenotype like we did with the lithoids or should they not there were a lot of arguments for and against um and at the time that we launched lithoids a lot of people were like hey why can't i have my fungus eating minerals too um it just happened to be the way that i set it up uh at the time i was also thinking that modders might be able to take advantage but let's let's not get ahead of ourselves we'll talk about that particular one we'll talk about that particular one later let's put a pin into that for now shall we like uh yeah i think regardless carry on regarding the the the the the business side of there of the issue there oh yeah that uh so if we've increased the scope of a species pack they're no longer you know relatively easy to make or at least um it requires more of the team to produce one two are to the standards that you know we have now raised the bar to um in the end everyone was like okay well let's try it anyway see how it goes and it went really well so i think that this means that all of the species packs going forward will likely be uh a little more substantial than plantoids or some of the other old ones no humanoids no promises though obviously nope no i mean i ca i can never make any problems the aziz will strike that down um with yeah i know what he's like he's um you tell you that the best part of working with aziz aziz is by the way he's the he's the lead producer on uh solaris if i'm not entirely mistaken when it comes to this time it'll be yes um when i first uh when i started working at paradox aziza came on board as well around that time and at the time he was hounded by aziz light jokes i don't think that has changed uh for those of you don't know that's a fifth element reference just uh i mean yeah you're gonna get fifth element yeah well of course of course of course but uh if he doesn't like anything he will strike that down with furious anger like uh gotta gotta meet those deadlines right and keep stay on budget that's important stuff right there update your hours exactly update your hours yes this is the thing that i am the worst at by the way well isn't that more of an hr issue then though or oh no like uh your uh how in like the jira planning and things like that do you think we're gonna be working on different things right so like that's like also ties kind of into the crunch discussion i would guess like on allocated time makes makes you feel like oh they they managed to do this much work and this much time and then there's unallocated time and then all of a sudden there's a project with a larger scope and with the same amount of hours attached to it as the last time you're never going to be able to squeeze all that stuff in yeah people like me make planning hell for the producers um and that's perfectly fine you know if that works if you wanna if you wanna if you wanna make if you don't wanna make that work in your day-to-day life that's perfectly fine anyway uh we are now 18 minutes in i think it's time to talk about the thing that uh we actually came here for uh i think it's just about time um death diary 190 191 and then 192. so we've got a couple things here industrial districts colony optimization transit hubs uh initially was the prototype version we'll talk about that shortly and then the pop growth as well as what the uh final version of the automatic pop migration may or may not may or may not look like because hot code will always be hot code anyway um we've been talking in the past at least you've been talking in the past about the new industrial districts the fifth district the real question that i that that really cooks in the back of my head here is um these are economy issues right you you've come to a solution you've you've gotten to a goal so what was the initial problem here was the alloy and consumer good system not good enough as it was what was the what was the drive to change this particular thing was it pure performance was it economy was it just the gameplay loop not working out what was the main main idea here this was a change that involves a huge number of systems that are tangled together pretty extensively um subject to feel a desire to reduce micromanagement uh quality of life improvements performance ease of automation all these kind of went into it to different degrees uh we've talked about industrial districts before during my first summer uh we felt that there was some potential there but we needed a lot more time to make it actually work uh dev diary 152 i believe it was where gregor talked about how he liked the way that you know humanopolis felt with the resources coming from the district in that he also talked about some of the experiments with the buildings last that also came in with these changes uh that i've been working on so basically it didn't work out very well at the time because we were like there's potential here but we need another several months to make this work um and it's been sitting there in the back of our minds ever since uh so it's been an ongoing process basically oh yeah this was one of those it's been sitting there we we liked the general feel of getting more of the physical resources from uh districts rather than buildings uh because of how it felt when you finally got a city planet um let's see so during the spring and summer i kind of took it on as a side project to try to polish them into a state where they might be able to be considered for release and that ended up creating a enormously large merge request that got new rules instituted around it so that sort of thing wouldn't happen again uh i'm sometimes the nightmare developer can you clarify what what what a merge request would be in this case oh okay so here basically i was working on uh imagine a side branch of the stellaris game um making all of my changes there and then at some point down the line i go okay this is ready to go into the main uh project and uh every change that i made gets uh sort of compiled together into one gigantic overall change and you know it's a couple of thousand lines or something like that and people have to go through this to make sure that i'm not going to break anything because that's sort of one of our review processes to try to catch uh any bugs or like things that would negatively affect performance to a great degree so it's like revolving and moab would go through it and see what's going on yeah thankfully i wasn't alone on this i had the ghost of game directors past and present around to guide my little adventure uh and uh help me through this uh the the advice that i was getting was uh useful in a lot of this but really um this this largely started as me wanting to reduce micromanagement uh initially and then from there it went into okay i can also take the opportunity to improve performance uh hey while i'm here i should reduce the number of pops in the galaxy because as we all know uh on a huge galaxy some things get slow um and but if i do that then now the economy has changed and they need to take a look at production so basically it's kind of like throwing a bunch of plates in the air and trying to keep them all up and not breaking um and it requires a lot of iteration and revision uh this is one of the reasons why i was jokingly uh one of my dev diaries was perfectly balanced as all things should be uh yeah that that is a lie that is a blatant lie but i i couldn't not make the thanos reference when i'm killing half the galaxy no no that's totally understandable i've eased up a little bit since then i think we're still at a 40 reduction or something like that but uh so so when it comes to when it comes to the system like you mentioned you know the joking quote-unquote um perfectly balanced etc um in a system like this nothing is technically going to be balanced right you're not you're not you're not balancing for the sake of balancing you you're balancing for the sake of fun i would guess at least that's the terminology that i always use yeah i think that generally the qualitative feel needs to win if that you're in direct opposition of balance for balance or balance for fun i need things to feel right rather than uh you know i i don't like leaving blatant next points around if i can close them pretty easily but uh if if there's a question about something being enjoyable or something being right uh this is a game uh and i need to make sure that the majority of people are enjoying this um there are people who are so good at this game that i cannot challenge them um thankfully we have a huge community of modders to help to make things even more horrifically unbalanced yes and you know we can do stuff like that the times 25 crisis and stuff oh yeah of course of course and i think uh i think that video has like a hundred thousand views on it when i did something on and then people like are they are they out of their are they out of their damn minds it's like yes burn it all down this is gonna be great but yeah no it's it's totally understandable right you don't wanna you're not working on something like starcraft which has an established communi uh competitive scene where everything needs to be balanced down to the t where it may not be optimal to uh it reaches out to a larger um a larger group of people that enjoy the game rather than i want to min max the ever-loving crap out of something yeah i mean we have multiplayer and we support multiplayer um but uh we also sort of believe that the multiplayer community can somewhat police itself like the origins the origins are not balanced some of them are better than others right doom day is you know horrible for you i don't know you can work with it it's ring world that's the problematic one for mp i would guess yes or machine world for that matter yes some of them are also much more powerful than the other ones um the uh remnants are also pretty good because of the earlier it came monopolies you can get there uh but yeah they don't compare quite to the ring world uh i like with the ring world i toned it back a little bit uh in the upcoming thing uh but uh yeah uh i don't think you've spoken about this yet so we'll we'll we'll we'll keep that on the wraps for now shall we oh i thought i talked about it i think it was the i think it was the the voidborn stuff mostly it doesn't matter okay i thought i mentioned the ring world capitalism it's okay it's okay so um just to quickly tie back regarding the thing the industrial districts they were on the table for quite some time uh they were thought about and back at that point you were only with the company for like a little while back in ancient relics and le guin had been launched mega corp had been launched and uh the the project lead was being handed over it was no longer martin it moved on over towards the next person and all of a sudden you have this small but very vocal group of people that are like where are the tile why are we no longer using the tile based system uh within our economy and on top of that the game is now running slow so how do you how do you deal with this sort of this sort of feedback from the community at large that is like okay so i've inherited this system from the previous update how am i going to deal with this this is like a long-term approach that you now finally managed to get to this industrial district stuff or is it just like how like explain to me the first time you observed this in in the company well yeah it is kind of a long-term uh sort of thing like we recognized that there were issues especially with you know like the late game slowdowns and things like that as well as the micromanagement issues once you had a ton of planets and at some point it was just like i don't really care about them anymore i just want them to manage themselves or something you know um it i mean it is it was an inherited issue like you said uh but we you don't have to throw anybody under the bus that's fine you don't worry about it so uh yeah it was an inherited change uh it was what we were working with though uh the really the thing that we could do is just make things better over time uh we knew that we wanted to address pop growth in some way and make it more empire wide in some somehow a lot a lot of the industrial district stuff was born mostly around just feel rather than anything else this is kind of the balancing for fun versus balancing for uh balance sort of thing that you were talking about before we just felt that it qualitatively felt better um to be generating your physical resources from the districts the fact that it also ended up making the uh colony automation easier to do that was a secondary benefit of all of this um and that whole thing went through a bunch of iterations too actually at one point we had research districts in there too you'll notice that there's slots for six uh districts in my little mock-ups yes um but uh we eventually decided that that would suggest that unity and other intangibles should also be coming from districts and at that point the buildings become less and less relevant so we decided to keep intangible secondary resources as uh as buildings uh but the physical ones as uh districts just sort of as a general rule of course i immediately break it when you look at build a habitat or something like that um but uh you know well you know in habitat you can you can probably you can probably like justify it because the whole planet is custom so it's not necessarily a natural resource to a certain extent and everything is coming from space anyway at this stage now but i totally understand where you're coming from with this like i think martin at the time also said like making buildings for research because you're mining for physics research in this mountain or something like that it doesn't really make a whole lot of sense so having a dedicated feel to it yeah exactly um so there's quite probably quite a lot of prototyping with this stuff going on he already mentioned the research districts etc which are in the game to a certain extent um however um has anything been built at some point you can talk about but was just like this is absolute garbage or this is not going to work in our system and we've spent like two months on this but it's time to cut our losses and move on to with something else i mean that is sort of how this came came into existence that's why i was working on this separate branch where i could make crazy wild changes and just see how they they worked um and then be like nope never mind that was a terrible idea um even back in 152 we talked about how at one point we attached a lot of these to the buildings would add jobs to city districts uh that was an experiment that we ran so when you built a research lab it didn't actually produce any jobs on its own it made all your urban districts uh have researchers attached to them uh this ended up causing a weird sort of situation where you would build a district or build a building and suddenly you would have a ton of empty jobs right and they're all specialist jobs which means that because they're all moving in from the workers now we're starving yes precisely uh we do still actually have a degree of that with the uh industrial districts but especially if you've built up the chain to give them extra jobs right and that goes to the planetary designations correct yeah uh well you can build the uh for the current forged buildings instead add additional uh metallurgist jobs to the industrial districts and with the planetary designation you can shift the consumer goods producers over to alloy producers if you want a planet that is just full of nothing but alloys we we've yeah in this upcoming update we'll have uh uh several of the buildings uh adding additional jobs to the base districts um that can make a jump in free jobs when you build finally build a district but it's more of a tolerable level with that original experiment where it was like every city district will provide you one uh researcher if you built this research building and you were on a planet with 13 city districts suddenly you've got 13 specialist jobs your economy is in chaos and no one is happy right stability is down we got riots in the streets oh god it's exactly in all of this one building so we we didn't want that sort of a giant swing in general except for you know when you're actually expecting it uh so yeah that was just that one didn't work out so well i can imagine um any other any other cool examples we're just doing an overnight and you're just thinking by yourself oh god this is this is not a good idea well it was the time that i accidentally made the uh commercial forum or what the the little building that produces five uh clerks yeah uh grew totally overpowered it was uh producing i had messed with the trade values a little bit because hey remember how i said that everything cascades into everything else if you've reduced the population by 50 now uh trade is not making any sense anymore so i was like okay let me kick up the trade values on everything across the board and uh suddenly the building that is providing you five clerk jobs is uh you know shockingly good um so even though right now in the game the clerks are not really all that great respectively they're just they're just they're certainly intentionally weak uh they're kind of uh you build that if you have extra jobs and you don't have any other way to you know just keep people occupied uh they're not really intended to be excellent you want people to migrate out of clerk jobs whenever possible um um but they're still useful for the megacorp since they have a lot of things rotating around trade um or if you're in a trade federation right you can always you can always say there are ways to make them less terrible you can always add a civic or something like that that gives them more trade value and that sort of thing but yeah for briefly a couple of days they were uh yeah they were good we found we found this one actually in our dev multiplayer where someone made a void dweller megacorp and was like why am i starting with this many resources that sort of thing it's like uh why do i have an income of 120 a month exactly yeah i think it would be higher than that i i broke things pretty fiercely oh that sounds that sounds like a hilarious time yeah it's that's good and then yeah when i fixed it i sent it to that person for review and they were like i don't feel that it's in my best interest to approve this but i guess i have to and how often do you guys do these uh these how many hours a week are you spending on these mp games so we have a scheduled mp every week and it takes up most of monday afternoon uh it's fun so right now we're experimenting with uh war a little bit because a lot of times admittedly our dev mps are sort of touchy touchy-feely games where nobody's crushing each other and stuff like that and uh someone in qa pointed out that we're not getting enough of a uh you know like view into war and it's after effects and stuff like that uh so uh i'm i'm doing my part let's say okay see and that that's that's the kind of thing that's the kind of thing that i do like because i'm i personally feel this is this is completely off the off the of the beaten path here i personally don't really enjoy the warfare system at all but that we can we can keep that for some future discussion if we ever do one yeah like i don't know it's just like okay the galactic community was one of the features that i worked on uh in federations and i i really do like the whole let's build the universe up sort of thing uh until i you know start passing things that nobody else wants uh i got i got uh the final tier of uh of the egalitarian resolutions passed how does the galaxy feel being communist all over the place they are we have enforced equality is happy um that's disgusting i don't like it oh it it it was really special when that passed okay well speaking of uh keeping everybody happy um you talked a little bit about in the in one of the deaf diaries about improving colony automation and specifically building things up inside of sectors etc uh in the past there was some discussion about um about sectors building their own construction ships and then building their own stuff as long as they had their enough resources etc but also having the templates of building up um a colony and then i think the discussion was also about um you can set a pre-built colony preset and then apply it to a planet and then it just goes ham and does its own thing does this apply to that particular discussion or is it completely different everything comes down to like time scope who's available to do things um i would really love a situation sort of a system where you could be like okay i'm going to take build up this planet save it and then apply this wherever i want but uh that requires a lot of ux and ui support so i was we were trying to work within the systems that we had available um i wanted to reduce the late game micromanagement because in some of these games or you know the single-player games that i play i to be honest after i took a bunch of planets and stuff like that in a war or something like that a lot of times i wouldn't really want to deal with them uh towards the late game it's just like okay i want another forged world i want another generator world that sort of thing but you know i'll just build a couple things and then forget about the planet until it's you know got tons of unemployment and it's starting to get everybody's upset there's buildings broken down i don't want to deal with this exactly chaos um so i uh made the crazy decree one day that you know calling automation should be good enough that if i set a planet to a certain designation and push that button it would be a reasonable facsimility of that you know when i look at it again 20 years later simultaneously another designer got fed up with sector automation and started working on that i actually ended up stealing his building upgrade logic because it was better than the that i had fair enough it was real good um like he was checking to make sure that there would be people working the buildings and stuff like that uh it was good stuff uh so yeah um to put sort of my money with my mouth as i was like and in the next several multiplayers i'm gonna play the entire campaign using nothing but planetary automation so at that point i had to make it good um of course since i'm the one generating these uh build temp uh planet templates uh it is gonna basically do what i would do in those situations so i guess cheating a little bit there but i learned a lot about and how several of these things that i had exactly in how they were um so uh yeah uh basically i'm pretty happy with the the new colony automation i will take a planet i will set it to forge world and hit automate and it will go and it will make a forged world that is you know reasonably okay i might have to intervene occasionally especially if there's weird things on the planet like oh i don't know like different events or something like that it's not really great at handling some of those and i tend not to run it on my home on my capital system because that will that's where i deal with you know here are emergency things that i need to handle right but uh overall i'm extremely happy with the the level of micromanagement required in the mid to late game with all these sort of like late developing planets you mentioned though that there's a there's a ui bottleneck uh at least a design bottleneck when it comes to creating this template system that you were uh that we hypothetically were talking about and probably this has been one of the things being being tossed around a million freaking times already wouldn't it just be possible just to build a dummy uh a dummy planet system similar to say the uh ship designer and then literally just put in an order of stuff to build yeah it's that's basically what it likely would be like but it's still we would need someone to actually it still needs time etc and it still fights with some of the other uh like uh planned things and getting things on schedules and things like that uh something that is entirely script driven or script with a little bit of code uh a designer can you know just jump in and do it themselves and something that you can do by yourself is a lot easier to get past uh or approved than something that will require three or four people in some new artwork and things like that yeah no that's totally understandable cool all right well that's that's at least uh that's at least cool regarding the uh the the colony automation if it goes completely tits up what are you gonna do uh scream shout and uh yeah redo from start i guess all right cool that's that's at least something then um so here's something that ties into that directly it's the reduction of pops that is coming up um again performance we talked about all this stuff um this is kind of a weird one considering a diplomatic weight and you already talked about how the galactic community was one of the things that you were working on um are you gonna be adjusting the pop weight for pops for the galactic community because i looked at the i looked at the math behind how diplomatic weight is generated and it's a it's not listed anywhere and b it is an absolute you know you kind of need to know where you're you're going to know where you're looking in order to find it and it does involve pop numbers and pop happiness etc are you going to make any adjustment there or what's what's up with that well well uh there haven't been direct changes to the population yet although uh i actually have it on my sort of schedule to go through uh go through diplomatic way in the different parts that make it up and see if there are any changes to it and it's likely that there will be some tweaks there um the trade value of pops did change though as part of the economic pass that i mentioned before um so economic diplomatic weight will shift a bit from that so yeah there's a there's a lot of little things touching each other that will all affect that but so yeah i guess that was a total non-answer wasn't it no no that's fine it's fine if this is one of those yeah yeah we're aware of the problem and we're working on it you don't need to go into details it's like it's more in the case of um you know that it's being addressed in the end a lot of performance related stuff here and also for stuff that makes sense um when you're there's always a discussion on the forums of or at least in in the community at large it's about performance and um with all of this tying into that what else are you guys doing anything else to improve performance on more of a engine related level you may not necessarily be involved in all that stuff but how in terms of say percentages how much does this particular work improve uh performance in the future um well the reduction in pop numbers uh that had a massive effect uh because you know it is one of the heavier systems that we have to the point where when i first made some of these changes people were like hey what's broken as those i was talking about the automated reports earlier and how how far the time per tick per day dropped some of that has or some of those improvements have been lessened since then because you know i've been like okay making some more tweaks and changes and stuff like that but it's still significantly better than it was before i can't really say how much um because don't you worry we'll do some testing on that when it's time it's fine oh yeah i'm i'm sure that everyone will let me know exactly oh absolutely i'm sure i'm sure i'm sure the forums will be like you're it's still terrible we want we want our tiles back but yeah a lot of the the changes that we were making uh had performance in mind i mean there are changes that the the programmers are making on their own that i'm not directly involved in um but stuff like uh the resettlement stuff and changing the way that greater than ourselves worked um some of that had performance implications as well as well uh i was always a little bit terrified of greater than ourselves because it was and it was extremely limited in scope because of that i was airing very much on the side of caution because i was like okay so we're gonna only resettle workers or uh simple drones because since they can promote any job on a planet i don't actually need to look at the target planets to investigate you know what jobs are available there just there are free jobs on this planet therefore i can send this person there and it will it should work the incredible popularity of the resolution and stuff like that despite the huge number of restrictions on it and the fact that mods were made immediately that removed all these restrictions made it clear that i needed a better solution um so uh we had the transit hubs which i proposed originally uh in one of those uh dev diaries i laid out here's my plan i really like doing uh dev diaries a little bit early in the system because that way i can take feedback into account yeah yeah i noticed that it's uh it's it's it's interesting to take a look at your prototypes and then literally ask for that feedback and see if it actually works it's like a like a peer review almost kind of um because like it became pretty clear that the proposals that i had with the restrictions that i had placed on it in order to address a lot of these performance implications were not sufficient for what the community needed or wanted so there were a bunch of comments in the thread and some of them made me think and like the the proposal that i eventually came up with and showed in the second uh dev diary was totally different and it wasn't exactly what anyone had suggested but it was one of those things that people said something that made me think of something and then that from there i made another sort of leap of thought and ended up with this current system where the planets would uh each planet would have a chance to decide that they're going to move a pop and then if that occurred uh then i would go down into the deeper more uh elaborate calculations um so like th that chance uh is uh sort of a break on the system and also makes it less likely that we'll have multiple planets deciding hey let's move pop simultaneously right and it also it also doesn't impact performance all that much because the dice roll has to happen first and if it goes uh nicely uh the well the first thing that happens is i'm taking a look at how many pops are on the planet that are unemployed and things like that because having those heavily modified the role if you have two unemployed uh pops your chance to move is doubled so because um i didn't have that in my original passes i do a lot of iteration and a lot of changes based on those on each of those uh versions and eventually i come to something that i think feels roughly correct um and i'm not afraid to throw away things that i've done that aren't working which is you know chaos right well there's nothing wrong with a little bit of chaos every once in a while i remember it's a ladder so it's that's kind of important that we embrace exactly it's important that we embrace it but yeah okay chaos it's a ladder um and then in the end you ended up with the the current system um how how hot is this code at the moment like how heavily is it tweaking still uh that one's stabilized pretty much uh i mean i'm still likely going to uh experiment with uh different initial values i think right now we have it at either five or ten percent i don't remember which one is the the one that i mentioned diary and which one it is right now uh but i'll be experimenting with those and shifting them back and forth maybe it'll end up at 7.5 maybe it'll end up at nine we'll we'll we'll figure that out uh based on uh you know play testing don't you worry in the end it will always be wrong it's fine it's yeah they'll let you know but i've made a point of putting all of my numbers into defines so you guys can go change it yourself that's good that moddability is always nice right yeah that's uh in fact with the pop growth i uh explicitly added a uh a define that is utterly useless to me but say if you have a mega structure that has infinite districts uh you might need that so is this is that an aluminium reference right there the giga structures by any chance yeah the birch world yeah uh the the uh yeah the popcorn system would totally broken without it apparently apparently uh i i had a i had a chat with elohini about that and apparently he did not necessarily write the code behind that thing apparently it's a huge apparently it's quite big because it needs to take pops and then when there is a pop available or a certain level of pops it will just randomly grow new district slot it's really weird i'm not entirely sure how it works um there are some mods that are so creative with how they work around things uh like carrying capacity uh was one that i was looking at and oh they i am very impressed with the amount of work that went into that thing and saddened because i could do some of the things that the workarounds that they had to do by just i mean i was experimenting with the logistic pop growth formula okay uh at one point um so actually i still have parts of it there were issues with logistic pop growth that uh like even when i mentioned it in uh in that dev diary uh people talked about how with the king capacity mod they would find that it highly incentivized uh manual popular settlement because you wanted to to get enough pops onto a planet to get past the lower end of the curve and ideally you wanted to have them right in the middle of the logistic curve because that's where you're getting the greatest bonuses so since this was actively incentivizing the type of uh micromanagement that i was at like trying to crush under you know like and just make totally irrelevant uh i actually ended up cutting out the bottom half of the logistic curve so you have steady pop growth until you hit that middle point where it'll grow up to a cap of plus 100 pop growth and then it would slowly decay as the planet filled up right and reached its overall carrying capacity because of migration in general pop growth etc yeah but uh yeah it it's a lot easily a lot easier to do some stuff when you can stick your fingers into the code and change things and i have nothing but respect for the people who are able to do these miraculous things with without being able to do that like yeah they only choose they only have access to the to the the mod mod the mod code basically in the script language and the stuff they unscript the stuff the the stuff that i've seen uh is absolutely batshit insane due to the due to the sheer amount of like you mentioned the sheer amount of creativity i don't know have you have you played around with say uh hive queens or anything like that uh i haven't oh yeah it's so good it's so good dirt yeah there are so many really good mods especially with like and there's the mod jam now too with all the origins i'm going to be spending this uh winter break playing through some of those conveniently someone's been making videos about this oh that's very very interesting isn't it yes speaking of which uh the behind the scenes is next it's by uh it's by complex it's basically you are the elusive man from mass effect it's it's really cool let me let me let me quickly uh put it down for you it's basically what it is um if you are a rival with an empire and another empire goes to war with them you have the ability to go to join that war because you are the rival for instance nice so that's it's like basically a whole bunch of diplomatic stuff and on top of that if another empire is pathetic to you uh you can do a special cb called coup de grace and just annihilate them it's great i i had a little bit of a play around with it i'm going to be making the video for it later today but it's it's one of the funner ones i also really enjoyed ancient juggernaut you should try that one out it's it's everything that i uh that i like about origins it has a nice beginning and a middle and an eventual goal rather than oh the story is done in 50 years yeah it's really great when when the origins are like that and they have like little story beats throughout the game um instead of just being a start like you said right like i don't have a problem with mechanical origins i think they're perfectly fine but in the end it's it's nice when um when a story is driven throughout or you actually have a goal um for instance with the juggernaut you unlock it or you build uh you you find it and through the throughout the entire game you get more and more features being added to it to the point where it even has its own custom ui which is actually really yeah i saw that i watched your video earlier today i really i really enjoyed that it was really really really cool uh free booters is pretty yeah just the the sheer cleverness of the people out there is awesome so exactly uh paradox is hiring by the way for those of you that are out there and i want to want to want to sign up for this sort of thing although i think the please work with me yes i think the um the content designer position just closed i'm not entirely sure if that is the case i think there are enough applications but make sure you check out careers.paradox.com i guess cool um let's let's move on um the final part of this thing wow we've been talking for like 15 minutes now um in the previously we talked a little bit about um the value of plantoids and i ask you to um let's put a pin in that it's time to unpin that particular subject um because it's it's a little bit difficult i can understand and there may not be a reason for this but working on lithoids getting that death stuff out of the way finding out that people really liked the traits then doing something similar for natural necroids if you had the possibility the time and the manpower would you or the team go back to planetoids and retroactively update it to give it traits or origins that's a tough one uh it's you know timing prioritization stuff with your example here of us having the free people and the free time on it then you know it sounds like it'd be something nice uh it's the type of thing that i think would end up as like a personal development project on the side most likely uh every month we do we have some time to do our own thing and sometimes those things go into the game uh can you give an example aside from lithoids uh well yeah lithos was more of a ramp-up project uh that i was kind of doing on my own um a lot of some of the stuff that was in the anniversary uh update was sort of these like side projects that people were just kind of doing that's why it like little bits of it seemed a little bit disjointed like some of the habitat changes and things like that um and let's see what else uh i'm currently working on an origin of my own but that is that hasn't gone live yet well we'll look at that for the future can you can you can you lift a little bit of the the card a little bit does it do this it's another challenge for you uh it's pretty awful in some ways um uh let's see in my origin i've made a couple of changes where you don't start with some essential texts uh that uh starting corvettes because you don't know how to build them yet um but that's all i'm sorry about that for now all right um so anyway back to that uh it it would be so going back to plantoids and adding something into that we'd bring back the question about should traits be phenotype blocked or not um i'm not sure uh depends on the ideas that we had and uh like there there were so many arguments foreign against it when we did it with the lithuanians not with the necroids like with the necroids we just knew that those cute foxes they had to be able to animate the dead so they couldn't be neckword specific um fair enough okay i mean you know you look at them in those cute little eyes you you know that they're evil deep down oh they're grave robbing all right they're just oh yeah absolutely like those guys i don't know they're always fanatic materialists when i play them uh there there's no sense are you saying that that the the power of being like a necromancer is is materialistic and not spiritualistic yeah really hmm i don't know that power needs to come from somewhere okay maybe not yeah okay the death cults and stuff arguments can be made arguments can be made carry on so i think that there's a lot of potential in phenotype-based traits uh but i'm also concerned a little bit about like additional complexity like uh why like looking at it from a new player it's like i click on the plantoid and there's a couple of traits but when i change my appearance to something else the traits are no longer available i'm not i mean i know i did it for lithoids so it's like a little bit of a hypocrisy there um but uh like yeah uh maybe i know that's not a great answer uh oh no that's totally the answer i expected it's the best answer i can give it it would be a great mod yeah in fact i think there is a mod that gives uh planetoid some traits yes um well no um i think uh somebody once made a one called biohives which basically did the same thing but for hive minds uh basically being able to build with food that also kind of ties into this um hive queens is another one that really really ties into this where you build everything with food which i think is great it's really really fun that that does sound like a lot of fun yeah it's uh basically the idea is is that um everything costs food and ships cost less alloys as well as less uh and a similar amount of strategic resources and uh your ship set is automatically changed to that of that of the scourge right so you get all the cool ships out of it which i think is really fun and then on top of that they have another civic which is um where um you abduct pops and then uh basically they're very similar to necroids in that respect you abduct pops and you lay your eggs inside of them and then your pops hatch from the pops that you've abducted that was one of the other reasons why uh like the necrophage origin uh is a little bit vague about how this actually works right um because we wanted to let you sort of build your own story around it fill in the blanks exactly are these voluntary uh things are they mind controlled in some way or yeah especially if you're a purifier or something like that there then it's definitely not voluntary oh no absolutely not but the the other thing that they actually did was they actually added a um a type of subject empire to it as well uh which was a um a blood tributary so basically the idea is is that if you are a blood tributary under um this parasite empire are you providing problems for them for every single pop that is born um either every year you get a certain amount of pops they've got three different versions so for every pup that is born you have to hand over a pop for every two pups that are born you have to hand over a pop or um for every pup that is born you get to have to hand over two pops so you can either you can either destroy their empire by staking all their pops as tribute keep them stable or let them grow it's great it's really good really good system that's fantastic that's uh you should really try it out it's really really really good fun um but yeah you kind of already answered some of this stuff regarding the phenotypes and mods and all that stuff i was gonna ask something about hey can all the other phenotypes please have some uh some some traits as well say hey the avian skin uh they're like light light-boned or something they they don't really work on heavy planets or heavy gravity etc and uh i think there's so much potential in all of these um but i think mods are probably a better way of going about it i i i was pretty much expecting how many people are on the team right now oh i have no idea i haven't been in the office in almost a year give me give me a ballpark like 40 50 30 12. it depends on if you're looking at the core team or uh like not including the art department because they they cater to everybody okay so let me count up real quick yeah probably about 30. all right 20 or 30 cool all right i mean depending on how you count it can go up to you know significantly more than that oh yeah clearly because you know uh qa and all that stuff as well i would guess oh i counted the embedded q a okay that's um embedded marketplace they are definitely part of us um and then to wrap all this stuff up here um you mentioned some stuff about mods and you've been playing around with in the past do you ever you also looked at some of the code and stuff like that do you ever go into a mob and this is highly subjective question you don't need to answer this in any way shape or form do you ever go into a mod and be like wow that's a really cool idea i'm gonna take it i'ma put it into the main game as has that ever come up because technically from a ulab perspective paradox owns what is on the workshop regardless of who who created it i'm sure there's some legal mumbo jumbo that we can attach to that from from whatever perspective but has there ever been an idea on the workshop where it's like wow this is such a much of a better solution than we've come up with we're gonna adapt this idea and then implement in the game you don't need to mention anybody you don't need to name anything if it is the case but has this happened uh i haven't directly done anything like that um i mean if i play with occasional mods and things like that um like some of the total conversions and things like that and then there's like the ones with huge amounts of content like planetary modifiers and gigastructures um but i don't think we'd do that without contacting the mod author and uh you know talking to them about it see what they feel about it and things like that we tend to sort of stay out of the circles that the mods are in a little bit i mean yes we're going to keep making mega structures and things like that and some of those might overlap some of the gigastructures but it's it's not like a one-to-one sort of thing i think we'd and like i i'm doing a logistic uh curve in the popcorn system and that overlaps a lot of the stuff that's in the carrying capacity mod but uh i didn't actually use any of their code or anything like that to to do that or their scripts uh because it's different enough that like they're both logistic curves but it's different enough that uh it's not the same exactly right and you can do it in c plus plus rather than and yeah i can i can do in c plus which makes it a lot easier uh than having to actually do it through planetary modifiers and things like that and oh my god that was such an impressive mod stephen do you have anything to add before uh i put uh i turn off the lights oh god on the spot think of something cool to say um i don't know it's like i get to work on the game that i love to play so it's kind of like a perfect sort of uh um i like interacting with the community and the people and hearing what they have to say that's why i like throwing up my crazy ideas when they're half implemented and then radically change them based on the responses to the uh to the threads i hope that people enjoy that sort of uh back and forth um and uh yeah because i'm gonna keep doing it haha all right that's fair um if at some point in time um well obviously the video is gonna go out at some point um if there is like a bunch of feedback in the comments and for you guys that are out there feel free to put the comments down there and and put in your feedback if at some point um i reach out and say hey i got like a ton of ton of ton of uh comments here with specific questions etc would you like to come back and uh discuss what they've they've asked yeah absolutely and uh as we bring more as we share more of the features that are coming uh we can totally talk about those too sweet then uh we will i will be in touch then to see whether or not this is uh something that is interesting in the future but in the meantime though thank you all so much for watching it's been the first time that we've done something like this uh it's pretty exciting to have the developers on board in the future i want to try to get some other developers on board not that you know maria like uh mr steven etc is not the only person i don't want to talk to but still you know there's other people out there and exactly i really i really appreciate you for coming on the day and making uh be so nice and clear about everything and explain why the things are the way they are it's a it's a one hour long video at this point so i do hope that you've enjoyed our discussion i know it's your holiday as well and thank you for um thank you for uh handing your free time to me in these uh in these pre-christmas uh odd days off yeah no problem thank you so much uh for everybody for watching if you have any additional follow-ups here feel free to put them in the comments below and maybe stephen will join in let some later date and we will talk about them but in the meantime thank you so much for watching and until next time enjoy yourself have a good holidays

Channel: ASpec

Views: 46,458

Rating: 4.9690056 out of 5

Keywords: Stellaris, ASpec, A_Spec, Dev Talk, Game Design, Podcast, Game, Design, Stephen Muray, Pops, Economy, Districts, Behind the Scenes

Id: nn8vWQuVrec

Length: 66min 27sec (3987 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 26 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Nebulon-B_FrigateFTW]

Not a lot here for how long it is, it's mostly just talking about how it is to refine development ideas, and ones we already know about. Main takeaways:

• Their design approach favors making the game fun over making it balanced, which is why little is being done about origins besides a Shattered Ring nerf (dev diary did show this contrary to what Aspec thought, Ringworld preference on species).
• Industrial districts are for making the game feel better, with a goal of districts making physical resources and buildings either abstract resources or bonuses to districts (no research districts on normal planets, alloy buildings will add jobs to industrial).
• There probably won't quite be a halving of pops.
• They still need to figure out how to make trade value work with a reduction in how many pops you need (clerks were accidentally useful when doubled).
• Population growth will likely simply diminish as planets get close to carrying capacity, rather than S-shaped, as S-shaped would encourage manual resettlement (no big surprise there).
• The dev interviewed has worked on sector AI to the point he can trust it with colony designations to do what he'd do except in cases of colony events popping up.
• The devs are becoming very aware of warfare being unfun.
• Plantoids could get stuff added, but it'd require a dev spending some of their personal project time on it (like he did in making Lithoids), so don't get your hopes up, and it's iffy that they'd get any portrait-specific traits like Lithoids did in that event.

[u/Hart-am-Wind]

So, Aspec has just posted an hour long interview with Stephen Muray, who’s been responsible for many of the features we’ve come to love (or maybe not) and the dev diaries. Great talk so far, it’s extremely interesting to hear what kind of influence the modding community has had on the development of the game. Also, some of the upsides and downsides of corona on the development process. Anyway, enjoy

[u/EremiticFerret]

Is this the guy who makes out with weird aliens?

[u/Hart-am-Wind]

You’re right, but I found this video clarified a lot of the stuff which had only been teased in the dev diaries. I’m personally a big fan of stellaris approach of fun over strict balancing and it’s been great to hear a dev confirm it again. So was his knowledge of gigastructures and I think he even said they’d implement gigastructure like megastructures in the future 👀

[u/Jewbacca1991]

Warfare is one of the most fun part of the game if you ask me. There is always place for improvement, and strategical potential, but i hope they aren't planning to simply gut it further for the "pacifist" bunch. As for reworking economy to use less population for same result. Well all i can say.

Took you long enough! It was stated with 2.2, and stated over, and over, and over again. Proven countless times, that pops cause late game lagg, and pops grow way too fast. Planets also get filled way too fast. Cut that population grow, and make each pop. more valuable.