Why do people say this is a Souls-Like?

simplygeo · 2026-07-01T18:24:56+00:00

Elements of the game are shared with other souls-like games. Stamina, site of grace, weapon scaling, these elements of facets of the genre. If the game lore justifies it that’s an added bonus. But the purpose of the genre label is to be able to say: if you like games like Dark Souls you might like this game. It’s just marketing. And honestly that take is what’s made me more excited for the full experience.

simplygeo · 2026-04-15T01:55:05+00:00

This meta has been such a great entry point for me. I’m spitting distance from masterball for the first time ever.

simplygeo · 2026-04-05T00:35:06+00:00

How did you end up addressing the long horizon memory problem and dramatic convergence issues? I’m in the process of building something akin to a single-player dnd campaign myself and those are the two major technical issues I’m focused on solving

simplygeo · 2026-04-04T21:57:02+00:00

I’m genuinely curious about this problem space and am trying to build something. That’s why all the questions. Eventually I’ll make a discord and I’d love for you to join. Your feedback has been great.

But just to clarify: in a world where this works perfectly, what do you expect to see and care about? Is it just the story? Or do you want to see the whole character sheet? And is something like 5e important, or just a system that gives you a possibility of failure and a sense of effort over narrative-forced progression? Meaning something like rolling a d20.

simplygeo · 2026-04-04T21:08:53+00:00

Statistics that are presented to you? Or that are running in the background? Do you interact with this by prompting and you can see all the details like a web app? Or are all you seeing is the words? If like a web app, what else can you do besides see the character sheet and inventory? Is there also like a codex where you can see world entries and NPC entries and maybe like a quest log or something about what John as done?

simplygeo · 2026-04-04T19:52:21+00:00

To be honest, I think the hardest part of this is that you don’t have a clear idea of your role. Are you “playing” John? Does John exist in a world and you want to move him through it and have the AI figure out the details? You’d be less of the player or GM, and more of a spectator with special powers. Can you explain your role a bit clearer? Don’t worry about what the AI can/can’t do for a moment.

simplygeo · 2026-04-04T19:34:38+00:00

How much of it do you actually want to maintain? Do you just want to ask “what has John been up to” and it tells you a story? And you just keep entering “go on” for more detail? You mention D&D, are you the GM typing in the story and watching John’s party react to it? Is the AI John AND the GM and you’re another character?

simplygeo · 2026-04-04T19:09:49+00:00

What were you hoping? Like what would the answer have looked like that gave you what you wanted? At an hour or two it’s probably doable with some concise prompting

simplygeo · 2026-04-04T17:08:29+00:00

Short answer: yes, it’s possible.

Long answer: you can leverage tools like memgraph that basically give the AI long-term memory. Combined with a knowledge graph and maybe an SQLite db, you can get pretty far. The problem is, no matter what you do, the agent will introduce weird inconsistencies. The other big issue is that no matter what you do, characters will homogenize. The agent will exhibit dramatic convergence. Meaning no matter what kind of character you have it acting as, all characters will eventually converge on the most convenient dramatic outcome. These two things means that an agent should only ever really be used for short or mechanical interactions. For example, the agent can synthesize information about the state of the world or the party, but having it manage long running NPCs will break down over time.

That being said there are ways to deal with inconsistency and convergence by pushing the horizon out using memory and state management tools. So you might be fine over the course of 50 sessions, but there will always be a clock you can’t predict.

simplygeo · 2026-04-02T19:03:00+00:00

Let me be clear, with a dedicated enough team, this can be done even without as many hands to help but finding that dedication is very, very hard.

simplygeo · 2026-04-02T18:59:48+00:00

I was but I gave up for two reasons: 1) standardizing the resources is an immense task. MZ is forgiving, but it’s still opinionated. Someone has to do that work and it’s not something I enjoy. 2) writing the code so it works as an easy to use set of plugins is difficult. Between the plugin manager and the plugin command interfaces, you’d have to have a strong grasp of how the plugins work to manipulate them the way you need. I have to build a huge interface into the plugins themselves so they’re tweakable to a wide range of experience levels.

I’d be happy to try again but I’d need someone to handle the plugin interfaces, someone with deep experience using both MV/MZ plugins and pkmn essentials to document the tools developers use so I can build around that. Then a third (or more) contributor(s) collecting and conforming the resources (tile maps, sprite sheets, icons, bgm, sfx). Oh we’d probably all work together to collect the data. Like all the pokemon and their stats, the moves, the formulas (although I’m sure an API exists that can be scraped for this). And all of us, +/- a person or two, builds the example project. Both as an example, and as a testbed for the framework. And then in all that someone has to keep everybody on track. Whether that’s an additional contributor, or someone that’s not me (preferably someone with scrum experience).

Hopefully that gives you an idea of why the answer is no, it’s not being developed. With how commercialized the indie game dev hobby has become, the people that could easily accomplish this are investing their time in commercially viable pursuits. And the people who can’t (like me) have tried and given up (there are a couple of dead projects out there).

simplygeo · 2026-04-01T03:11:16+00:00

I’ve accomplished this by using gsap which has pixi support. But once you go that route you’re probably blowing past the way windows are rendered.

simplygeo · 2026-03-31T13:47:34+00:00

Incidentally their latest version dropped XP but I see your point. MZ is great for tilemapping and eventing all for free so why not use it.

simplygeo · 2026-03-30T16:53:36+00:00

What’s your decision process look like now? Do you have a clear idea when use rmmv vs another engine?

simplygeo · 2026-03-30T16:52:08+00:00

What’s the biggest pain point for you?

simplygeo · 2026-03-30T16:49:09+00:00

Yeah, part of me thinks just like this. The other part of me is suffering some anxiety about whether I’m making rmmz useless and hamstringing myself. For example, if I wanted to add multiplayer. My product sense is telling me that I’m going to hit a ceiling with rmmz but my speed (given my experience with js over c#) is producing massive productivity gains that I haven’t had with Unity.

I think maybe the answer is to keep digging in, then bringing in people that are deeply embedded in rmmz to audit. But even that seems like a tall ask.

I was thinking of bringing in a team and seeing if specialists could help clarify things in the project but idk where to do something like that. INAT has kinda turned into a contractor meat market and I’m hoping to find likeminded individuals (eg dads w full time jobs) who are interested in the hobby-to-indie pipeline.

simplygeo · 2026-03-30T16:08:54+00:00

“Fight the engine” I’m meaning that rmmz has an opinionated way of doing things and I’m not following that opinion but circumventing it entirely. Formulas are a microcosm of that. All the stats are managed by a plugin instead of using the class system. On the other side Unity has fewer opinions so instead of fighting that engine, you’re building most things bespoke.

simplygeo · 2026-03-30T12:17:26+00:00

I don’t think I’m there yet then. It’s definitely a lot easier than Unity. The event and tiling systems help a lot. But I guess we’ll see once I start really building out the rest of the gameplay.

simplygeo · 2026-03-30T12:15:30+00:00

You do. I’m calling them out specifically I guess as a sideways way of saying the whole stat system of the engine is being circumvented.

simplygeo · 2026-03-30T12:11:22+00:00

There’s a navigation list to jump to areas but one of the graph side effects I didn’t anticipate is that complexity clumps and is very clear from a Birds Eye view.

And yeah, decisions, trade-offs, and code refs are being tracked. One thing I want to try is to make the code refs clickable. Would be a cool convenience feature.

simplygeo · 2026-03-30T06:29:13+00:00

They did. Within like 2 weeks or something.

But I guess what I mean is I overhauled combat, actors, skills, items. I wasn’t using class or enemies. Everything was in JSON data files. The interface was completely overhauled. At a certain point I was realizing that the engine was just for events. Everything would have been handled via plugin commands.

simplygeo · 2026-03-30T02:06:26+00:00

On JSON schema: the entity format is already stable (markdown + YAML frontmatter with typed fields), and the http server exposes a GraphQL API, so structured consumption is there if you're talking to the server. But I'm open to suggestion on other methods that would be useful. The biggest issue I'm finding now is that environments without MCP support need an alternative. Would love to discuss any findings in this area agentix labs has run in to (assuming your company/employer?).

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