Last post, I told you the gatekeeper was going out to the test team for a beating, and the location system was about a week from letting the world’s places move in. Both happened. The gatekeeper took its beating and came back judging fairer for it, and the world’s places are in and live.
But the real story of the last six weeks is what testing turned up once real people were holding long conversations with the NPCs. That’s the machinery we call the AWEN pipeline, everything that runs the NPCs: their conversations, their memory, their sense of where they are and who’s around them. It went through its first significant round of real testing. And what came back triggered the biggest overhaul this project has had.
The reports all pointed the same direction: the NPCs made things up. They invented helpers and cousins who don’t exist. They agreed to promises nobody ever made, as if they remembered making them. They described rooms they weren’t standing in. And the one thing they never did was admit ignorance. Across thousands of recorded conversation turns, the honest “I don’t know” was never once chosen. Making something up was always easier.
None of that was one bug. It was dozens of small paths through the machinery that all let the NPC take the easy way out, and each one had to be found and closed.
That’s where the overhaul went. An NPC with nothing to say about a topic now says so, or asks you instead. Every reply gets checked for invented people before you ever see it. A claimed shared history gets held against what the NPC actually remembers. The village’s real family and neighbor relationships now load with the world, so a father knows his son is his son. And a conversation is grounded in the real place it happens: who’s actually present, what’s actually there.
The measurements moved the way we hoped. In the overheard NPC-to-NPC talk, replies that ignored what they were answering fell from about one in a hundred to about one in a thousand. On the hardest trap questions, the ones practically inviting an NPC to invent, they roughly doubled how often they stay grounded instead of making something up.
A lot of other things landed in the same stretch and you’ll meet them in the new build: the roleplay composer grew its full set of writing tools, the world got its first real objects (Dagmar’s Tavern is stocked, and you can search it, buy from it, and carry things), and the world’s clock now runs on real time: the moon actually rises now. All good things. All in service of the same goal: a world stable enough to tell stories in.
We have not proven the AWEN pipeline is stable. The strides are real and measured, but proving it is what this round of testing is for, and we expect one more significant round of fixes after it. And stability had a price this time: the world’s memory was so tangled with the leftovers of old bugs that we wiped the database clean. Everyone starts a fresh character, and every NPC meets you for the first time. I didn’t love that either, but carrying the corruption forward would have cost more.
We’re still in the midst of making sure this works. The 0.8 build is in the testers’ hands right now, and we’re watching what comes back. If what comes back says one more build of fixes is all it needs, then everything we set out to prove with this whole testing effort is proven, and we’re ready to complete the game.
We’ve never been able to say that before.