Introduction

Lunar Foundation is a hard sci-fi story-telling computer game with the focus on social interaction simulation activity in the gameplay mechanics, and about the development of the fictional secret scientists' conspiracy society set in alternative history universe.

One of the key purposes of the game is spreading certain futuristic, scientific and social concepts in a purely peaceful and optimistic way, avoiding any forms of violence and suffering in the gameplay mechanics.

This document briefly represents the key concepts of the game, it's plot, game mechanics and some technical details of implementation. Certain concepts and design approaches are still subject to rethink during development.

Motivation

Problem Overview

Being a big fan of the classic role-playing games such as Fallout series and The Elder Scrolls I'm thinking about the evolution of the genre. The core idea standing behind RPG is to explore a big open world, discovering new places, meeting new characters, understanding connections between them, learning attractive storyline, and eventually assembling the puzzle of intersecting storyline quests to rule the game world. One of the primary motivations for the player is to build an avatar character for whom he plays whatever role he imaging through the system of leveling up of various skills and collecting unique game stuff. Starting from the nomad of no-name, but eventually becoming the greatest hero.

This form of game mechanic is very attractive because it creates an illusion of a dynamically evolving world letting the player taking a part of it. However, once the player studied the game universe completely, he starts realizing that the world is static. Whatever place he visits other non-human players playing a performance around the main character and personally for him. The player can change the plot based on decisions done in quests and dialogues, but the set of possible story branches is limited and eventually discovered completely. Such disappointment doesn't spoil the game per se, but it makes it lesser enjoyable than it could be if other characters would have their free will and could evolve independently too. Moreover, it could be even more attractive if other characters could be self-organizable, and be able to assemble new groups or tribes to do their own and unique stories, to manage communities themselves and even build new towns.

Let's take an example of the Vault City from Fallout 2:

After a long journey through the post-apocalyptic wasteland consisting of ruins and decadent surviving tribes, it is very impressive to encounter such a miraculous well-built town. And even more impressive when the player realizes that it was built using super-power futuristic technology fitting just in a small case called GECK.

But what if the GECK wasn't completely exhausted by the Vault City citizens yet? What if they capable to keep developing the town, assembling new buildings and facilities, expanding the town's territory, having continuous evolution of the community? I believe such thoughts come into mind to many players who walked through the game.

The later attempt towards this feature was presented in a sequel Fallout 4:

In Fallout 4 building mechanics were introduced as a mixture of Minecraft-like and tower-defense game mechanics when the player can build a small settlement for a local community of NPCs to defend them from raids and to grow it's trivial economics too. What's bad about this approach, aside from the fact that the building components are not aligned by a grid, is:

1. Contrary to Minecraft the set of components and their possible forms is limited.
2. The player is also limited in the set of things he can rebuild inside the settlement's borders. So the overall game world is still feeling static, and the manual build facility embeddings feel artificial too. The player is not able to reconstruct the entire game world as he does in Minecraft.
3. Although NPCs are capable to do some jobs on their own, their behavior is very primitive and is still mostly driven by predefined quest scenarios.
4. All facilities are built by the human player exclusively. Non-playable characters are unable to design and develop.

As a result, the game, in my opinion, feels incomplete as a building simulator and as an RPG both. And I think it was a direct consequence of the mixture between game mechanics that don't fit well with each other. Even if Fallout 4 would be polished better, having blueprint-like mechanics to design and develop buildings would still feels boring and unnatural in RPG. Why? Because of the roots of these mechanics. Initially, the idea of the blueprint-based control came from the strategy games. Both real-time strategies and city-building strategies.

In a strategy game, the player has full control over the design of whatever he wants to build on the map. His only limits are common resources(that he also has a full control of) and the map space for building layout limitations. But in general the player is capable to establish whatever he wants and whenever he wants to. So, what is the role of the player from the RPG point of view? A master of the in-game universe. He is no longer one of many between other NPC-units, he has full control over them from the beginning. There is, generally speaking, no place for discovering and challenging individual characters as the player already rules them. As such attempts of direct embedding of strategical game mechanics into RPG games don't work.

Solution Overview

Instead of building in different game mechanics driven by the player, let's simulate them by non-playable characters driven by the game's engine artificial intelligence in the first place. This approach presumes that AI should be smart enough to simulate social interaction between all characters on the high level of realism. Every NPC should be able to analyze current game state, game world evolution history and his personal history of interaction with other players. And be able to make individual unique decisions based on that analysis, and analysis of the character's unique profile too. The AI-driven NPCs should also be able to do a short-term and long-term strategic planning, to unite into groups, and to perform actions agreed upon group to build common projects including building up facilities, economics, and politics, organizing production lines, etc.

And the human-playable character can also influence these processes changing their direction in a desirable way through dialogs with other characters, and by the quests' completion. As such the gameplay should feel more natural for the classic RPG set but becomes much deeper and advanced once the player starts realizing gameplay mechanics and opening possibilities. Building up the right relations between other characters, understanding their motives, strengths, and weaknesses allows the player eventually reconstruct the entire game world universe the way he wants to without the use of blueprints and other strategy games genre ordinary gameplay instruments.

This approach seems to be hard to achieve on an acceptable level of realism for a first glance but is doable when the model of gameplay is well thought, designed and polished. Such models will be described in the next sections of this Document.

Also, it's worth to be mentioned that this approach doesn't exclude embeddings of the gameplay mechanics from other genres in the form of a mini-game. Let's say if certain building was designed by an NPC architect by an order of the player's character, it's fine and maybe even fun if the player puts some final changes in the design project. Like, if he changes wall materials, moves some interior objects or even adds an additional room to the building project. What's important here is that these forms of activity will not be forcefully required in primary mechanics to progress the game.

Gameplay

The gameplay takes place on the isometric view tile map set when the player controls his avatar-character through the point-and-click mechanics to explore a big open world.

The map consists of a number of objects including elements of terrain landscape, plants, cliffs, rivers, etc, and the elements of the build facilities such as buildings, various engineering constructions, bridges, tunnels, roads, habitation domes, transportation vehicles and many other.

All elements of the map procedurally generated based on a number of smaller predefined components such as walls, rooves, interior objects, etc.

The player can step into the buildings and its' rooms, interact with objects inside the buildings including electronic devices, computers, control panels, buttons, leverages, mechanisms, elevators, books, and some other small objects. He can read texts and messages found in books and devices, and keep them as notes in the UI.

There is one primary map in the game where the main action taking place and is available for exploring by the player's controlled character. The player can use vehicles to travel on the map faster. An example of such transportations could be, for example, ships to travel by water, a Spacecraft to travel to the moon and back, and the monorail train to travel on the Island's map.

The primary game map is a tropical Island. At the beginning of the game, the Island map is already developed. The player and the community of characters keep developing and evolving it until another point of time from which they will relocate to the map of the Moon site with the different set of content to establish moon base from scratch. For details see Plot and Setting section.

All permanent non-playable characters in the game are completely independent and procedurally generated units that have the same capabilities as the playable character does. They live their own life in the game world and interacting with each other as well as to the playable character, and the same way the playable character does. Both playable and non-playable characters can initiate dialogues with each other, take part in quests, building up social relationships, assembling new buildings, facilities, and goods, advancing researches and economics of the game. The non-playable characters are driven by the game AI simulation models.

The overall number of the non-playable characters actively simulated by the primary game AI is around a hundred of units. But the game engine also simulates more units that reveals on the map temporary from time to time, and not available for interaction. They perform direct predefined scenario-driven actions only or is a part of the environment. Examples of such units are robots, animals, the temporary visitors of the Island and the storyline characters.

The list of base actions that simulated NPCs can do are:

• Walking to a specific place on the map by foot, using vehicles or any other transportations.
• Getting an object to be delivered to another place.
• Applying the object to the target place, facility or giving it to another agent.
• Getting a construction device.
• Working with a specific facility. This includes assembling devices, vehicles, mechanisms. Also taking part in the construction of the building, working on researches in labs, etc.
• Initiating conversation session with another agent to set or receive directs, and to gather or to provide information.
• Performing everyday and regular objectives such as sleep, rest, recreation, medical examinations, etc.

The dialog options and the quests are not predefined(except a few storyline events) and completely based on the current gameplay situation that dynamically changing.

The primary ways of walking thought the game are:

• By interacting with other NPCs, understanding connections between them based on gathered data and influencing characters through dialogs and quest completion to achieve desirable goals.
• Leveling up personal skills, but also helping other characters to level up their skills too.
• Taking part in research and engineering projects and/or organizing own projects.
• Taking part in existing "tribes" and/or organizing a new one.
• Building up personal political influence, and changing the overall character's community policy in various ways.
• Technological progression of the overall community.

Any forms of fight interactions or violence mechanics are missing in the game. The game is primarily focused on social interactions and the development of the game world in a purely peaceful way.

Game AI Model

As was mentioned ealier non-playable characters should be able to interact with each other autonomously from the player control, unite into groups to organize common tasks and to evolve the game world in general. All NPCs can make decisions based only on their personal traits and information they can collect from the game world during their life experience in the game. So the NPC is, broadly speaking, in the same boat as the playable character.

All non-playable characters represent a set of game agents. For the sake of simplicity, we will call both playable and non-playable characters as agents. Both have the same set of base characteristics and interaction options and are equal from the game mechanics point of view. In general, NPCs don't distinguish between the player's controlled character and other NPCs when they interact with each other. The differences are only in the way of control: the playable character actions are driven by a player, and NPCs are driven by the game AI.

The agent's actual actions are driven by the Task Tree Framework.

Task Tree Framework

Each AI-controlled agent has a set of tasks that it wants to perform. The set of tasks shaping a tree of tasks when each subnode represents a subtask required to be performed to accomplish a supertask's goal. Every subtask has a priority from its supertask context. The leaf tasks contain actual elementary actions that need to be executed to accomplish its supertask.

Let's assume the following simplified example of task trees of two agents John and Rita working on a common "Human-Genome" project:

Once all steps are finished the project is done. But certain things could happen that will interrupt this process. For example, once John arrives at the Storehouse he realizes that it runs out of required components. Or Rita decided to join another project in the middle of the process. In such cases, the agent starts re-evaluating his tasks tree based on collected information.

The task tree can be seen as a decision-action tree that represents a "program" of the agent's actions.

Tree Evaluation Process

The nodes of the tree built up from a set of predefined node types that implement actual elements of the gameplay mechanics and could be stacked together based on the match requirements. Matching requirements determined by the gameplay models and rules sealed inside a particular node implementation algorithm and could vary based on the agent previous experience.

Once the node task failed or interrupted, the algorithm is trying to re-evaluate a subtree from the parent task. If the parent task cannot be evaluated to required conditions in new circumstances, the algorithm re-evaluates the next parent subtree up to the root.

Agent Profile

Each game agent has a set of attributes that defines character's role in the game world, unique behavior, personal preferences, strengths and weaknesses, communication and work skills, capabilities in social interactions, etc.

The set of base agent unit attributes are always public to all agents:

Other profile attributes are hidden for other agents by default, and some even hidden for the agent himself but could be described. Hidden profile attributes exploration is a key in the primary gameplay mechanics that drives game simulation and progression.

Hidden attributes divided into three groups: agent skills that the agent is leveling up, communication traits, and behavior traits. Traits are permanent most of the time, but some of them can slightly change by the storyline events and by the projects' completion too.

Skills

They affect the efficiency of the agent when he is working on a specific task in the project or when he is talking to other agents.

There are several professions required to complete the project. The exact set of professions available in the game is defined by the currently discovered projects. Some professions are shared across several projects, and some are unique. These traits are hidden to other agents by default. Each agent, in theory, can do any work in the project, but the efficiency can differ significantly. The details on the projects and the gameplay economics model described here.

Emotional Profile

This set of discrete relay traits represents the emotional nuances of speech and behavior in communicating with other agents. They affect the agent's communication capabilities only and don't affect any functional aspects. The more emotional traits match between two agents the more chance they come into an arrangement in conversation. In other words, the agents with closer Emotional Profiles tend to understand better each other by default. Also, the agent can slowly learn other agents' emotional traits he speaks to, and as such he can adjust his way of communication individually to grow his influence.

• Politeness / Rudeness
• Optimistic / Pessimistic
• Cheerful / Moody
• Verbose / Concise
• Idealist / Realist

Behavior Traits

Various scale characteristics measuring the behavior functions of the agent that affect the agent's task priorities and decision making.

Interaction Model

There are three ways of information distribution between agents:

1. Public distribution through The Journal of Foundation in the form of a news digest.
2. Closed session of a group of agents.
3. Personal private conversation between two agents.

The Journal of Foundation

Journal's digest used to spread public information related to projects in the form of a journal article across all agents:

• Announce a project, it's key ideas, goals, required resources, time estimations.
• Report the project's general progress.
• Report personal research and engineering achievements in a project.
• Opened positions in a project.
• Boost or criticize previously published articles to raise or lower their effect.

Public distributions may influence other agent's desirability to support certain initiatives based on their personal interests and traits. Positive progress towards the project completion raises the project member's personal reputation in the community and the overall interest towards the project, but failures may lower these metrics. As such, agents with high Secretivity trait levels tend to hide this information in the public field.

The article's attention effect depends on the publisher's general reputation. The higher the reputation is the more agents "read" the article and react to the article.

When the agent publishes an item he is able to also refer to some relevant articles published previously by other agents. Depending on the publishing article's effect this may raise or lower other agent's reputation slightly and boost/reduce the effect of the referred article accordingly.

For the player, the digest list is accessible through the User Interface for reading. To publish an item there is a mini-game when the player comes to his own residence to work on the article, then picking possible item goals and references, and then come into the Department of Information and ask NPC to publish the article.

Also, the Journal is used to spread storyline events in the game too.

Closed session

Closed sessions are for the project members only to coordinate their work progress, assigning/reassigning tasks and understanding the task's progress. The sessions assembling regularly by the project's administrator initiative depending on the project needs. All agents invited to the session gain complete information on other members' progress and roles. However, this information is hidden to the agents outside of the project by default but could be revealed through the private communication outside of the session.

When the player taking a role as a project administrator he is able to assemble the session thought the User Interface by scheduling the session's place and time. Once all members come to the meeting place they can be managed through the UI too.

Private conversation

Private conversations happening between agents in a form of dialog when one agent approaches another agent. There are certain options for the agent in a dialog such as:

• Asking for the issues other agent is facing in his work.
• Asking to help in personal work issues.
• Discovering other agent personal profile features through the dialog options.
• Asking for the hidden information on the project progression.
• Asking for the 3rd party agent hidden profile items information.
• Asking for the other agent of his personal strategical goals and the current strategical plans.
• Set other agent strategy plans and details.

The success of the conversation depends on several factors:

• Level of trust between agents.
• Emotional profile congruence and communication skills.
• Agent's general reputation.
• Mutual interests.

For NPC agents the process of one-to-one conversations is driven by the game engine. When the playable character participates in dialog with the NPC agent there is a User Interface showing all social information collected by the player in graphs, schemes and tables, and the dialog options that the player can try in conversations with the NPC agent to enrich certain items of the scheme. The success of conversation between non-playable character and player-controlled character depends on the same metrics as between two NPCs, except emotional profiles congruence check. Checking of the congruence is a mini-game when the player should pass through the logically equal dialog options that have different emotional emphasis. Choosing the right emphasis, among other factors, leads the player to success in conversation.

Social Model

Three base personal priorities define agent's goals:

1. Personal breakthrough. Breakthrough mechanics will be described in more details in this section, but if the agent has a breakthrough idea, it's implementation becomes his top priority.
2. Clan power grow. Some of the agents establishing secret permanent alliances of interests between each other to work on the common goals. The network of alliances shape hierarchical clans that compete to each other. If the agent belong to a clan, clan's power is the second priority among other things.
3. General community progress. Any initiatives and events that can move the overall community progress forward from the agent traits and skills point of view and don't contradict other priorities will be supported by the agent.

Alliances and Clans

Each agent has a map of trust towards other agents that is based on the history of cooperations between them. If the history of cooperation was success and stable in long-term there is a chance they become permanent allies. The Alliances between agents is a key concept of this mechanics. It's core idea loosely mimics the concepts of the European Medieval Feudalism and Japanese Samurai Institution, but also reflects similar constructions that exist in the modern societies as well.

In the alliances of two agents there is a Leader agent who establishing goals and strategies of the alliance and a Supporter agent who supports and implements the strategy. Both Leader and Supporter agents have a high level of trust and they can broadly share any information between each other. There could be several Supporter agents of one Leader, but the Supporter agent may have only one Leader. The Supporter agent can also establish his alliances with other agents where he plays the lead role toward them. The Supporter of the Supporter, however, doesn't obey the first supporter's leadership will directly, but the first supporter can use his mastership network to support his leader's goals. Since that the general stretegy of this hierarchy called a Clan is steady, but implementation tactics could vary a lot depending on the depth of hierarchy, and even corrupt in the leaves.

The leadership relations of the clan tend to be quite stable in long term due to several factors:

• Both Leader and Supporter trust each other per se due to cooperation causes preceed of their alliance.
• The agents with high Extravert traits tend to research other agents' traits carefully, so they tend to establish alliances with trustworthy agents only. So the clans passes test of time tend to be stable as well.
• The agents with high Intraver, Morale and Altruism traits tend to become leaf supporters of the clans, but they could gain protection and support from the clan of their interest in the game.
• If the Supporter betrays his Leader, it affects his reputation in overall community as a "clan player" who couldn't be trusted. Then there is a least chance he will become a part of the stable clan again in supporter's role, because no one will trust him again. However, such causes may rarely happen if the clan becomes too unstable due to new circumstances, or because of significant changes in personal priorities of the agent.

The Leader tend to protect his alies, and the clan tend to protect all of his members as a brotherhood to keep overall power of the Clan. This is a primary benefit for the supporting role of the members of the clan. If the Supporter agent breaks the alliance with his Leader, he becomes a top Leader of the new clan. And as a leader of the new clan he is loosing his previous clan overall protection, and should be well prepared to compete with other clans.

In general clan's power defined by the number of members, their skills and reputation, formal roles of the members in the projects, and overall amount of Foundation resource the clan controls through it's members. Clan's general strategy defined by it's top Leader and implementing through the series of directives down the hierarchy tree.

To compete to other clans the clan can use a wide number of instruments including promotion of it's members based on their skills to prospective projects, promotion the members to the government administrative roles, boosting public reputation of it's members, recruiting new members, and preventing the similar action of it's competitor clans.

Due to differences in personal profile traits and skills not all members can become good players of the clan system. As such many of the agents in the game don't belong to any clan. There are a lot of Loners who work on their own. However they could be useful in the clan competition strategies. For example, if one loner has advanced skills in specific field important for prospective project, the clan members will try to involve him in the project, and could even compete to other clan members to hire him.

The allies hierarchies between members and the clans themselve are "unofficial" terms. These types of relations are completely hidden to other agents by default. The structure of the clan even hidden to it's members. So understanding the social structure and it's dynamics prediction is important challange on all steps of the game evolution. The agents with high Extravert traits tend to be more efficient in this process. They use various prediction approaches based on information they could gain from two sources:

1. If the agent is a member of the clan already, he could ask for his Leader and Supporters of their relations with other agents directly, and to gain accurate information.
2. The agent could also try to gather information from the one-to-one conversation with any other agent in the game and through the public events research. And if he sees statistical outliers in the gathered data, he can put corrections in his imagination of the social relations model. The more efforts the agent invests in this activity the more accurate his understanding of the model is.

Because there is no single source of truth, agent's understanding of the social model accuracy may vary. Since of that the agents with high Extravert skills and Morale are capable to establish stable clans and play clan competition games efficiently. However, clans overall power depends on a wide range of traits and skills of it's members, so the clan assembling balance is always a challenge to the NPC agents and the human-controlled character both.

Also it's worth to be mentioned that the clan's "formal" roles in the game are not necessary correlate to the agents' actual alliance hierarchies. Members of a single clan could be members of the different projects depending on the clan's strategy. Moreover Supporter and Leader could take irrelevant roles even in a single project or in the Foundation government. The clan can promote it's members based on their actual skills and public reputation, but the secret hierarchies inside the clan.

Loners

The ordinary game agents who are not members of any clan can build different strategies of personal grow depending on their skills and the trait combinations. But, in general, they appear to be "pawns" in the hands of the clan's competition game.

Loners behavior determined by their Agent Profiles quite straightforward. They don't establishing permanent strategic alliances, however they could temporary cooperate based on two factors:

1. Agent's public reputation. Gained through the projects successful participations, scientific researches and The Journal of Foundation publications. The higher reputation agent has the more chance he get support in personal requests from the stranger, receive positive resolution for his initiatives from the government, and will gain more votes in the government election.
2. Agent's reputation. Agents with high Altruistic trait tend to help other agents in their requests. These actions affect agent's trustworthy in personal communications.

Clans versus Loners strategies analysis

The primary advantage of playing in a clan stems from cooperation effect. If the clan is well-organized, has a high power in community, and has skilled members, it is capable to forward any project faster and more efficiently than the other clans and disorganized loners do. And as a result can grow it's own power, resources, and can gain benefits for it's members in skills and reputation both.

However, clan competitions have certain disadvantages too:

1. On the clan competition level the process represents non-cooperative game. As such it may lead to the Nash equilibrium and the overall game stagnation. Nash equlibriums, however, can be broken by non systematic factors: personal scientific Breakthroughs, through the storyline events and by the player's inordinary actions.
2. Clan's resources could be shorter than particular agent needs, so his personal grow may be slower than if he would be a loner. In practice, some highly skilled and talanted Intravert agents may be interested in playing as a loner sometimes. Nevertheless, if there is too many of such agents and no clans in the game, they will be unable to implement their goals due to disability in cooperation.

Economics Model

The game's economics model representing a simplified form of Decentralized Planning Economics. There is no private property, monetary system or any forms of personal wealth. The overall welfare economical output is shared equally across all members regardless of their input. The primary stimulus for the members is a personal motivation to move community progress forward and growing the common welfare too.

However, since the overall community resources might be shorter than it needs to satisfy all member initiatives at once they have to compete with each other indirectly based on Social Model game mechanics rules.

The primary subject of economics is a Project. This is a broad term that may include a wide range of agent activities, implementation steps and maintenance processes that require cooperative input of several agents with different skills, and have clear final goals and expected indirect effects.

In general, there are two types of projects:

• Engineering projects that grow community welfare, and brining new tradable technologies to be used for internation trading. This type of project usually supported by the agents with high Practitioner trait.
• Fundamental research projects that don't give the community any material result, but could open new possibilities in the future. Supported by the agent with Theoretician trait first.

An example of fundamental research could be DNA double helix discovering. There are no direct results of this research that could be utilized directly. However, it will eventually bring new fundamental and engineering projects such as human-genome research and various disease treatment methods.

An example of a project could be building a railroad transportation system. This is an engineering type of project with the goal of improvement of cargo and people transportation speed on the map. The indirect effect is engineering technology that could be sold outside of the Foundation community to gain resources from the external world. This project requires an invention of the steam engines, then developing a prototype of an engine, then designing a transportation system on the Island, then assembling rails and components of the locomotives and cars, and finally building the railway system.

Project content

Each project consists of a unique set of predefined game content that may include:

• Agent Task Tree components that will drive agent activity for the project development based on a predefined plan.
• Types of required material resources.
• Types of buildings and build facilities that the agents will assemble using material resources. Or intermediate components used to assemble certain things.
• A new set of professions and skills for involved agents.
• Exact sets of agents and their roles in the project required to complete certain steps.
• Public reputation boosts that the agents involved in the project could gain on successful completion.
• Sellable technologies for external trade.
• Storyline and gameplay effect that the project will bring to the game after completion.

The project may include some variable things such as the design of the buildings that are built up through elementary components, transportation plans, the exact place of facilities on the map, etc. These variables don't affect the actual functional features of the completed project and serve aesthetic purposes only. If the project was designed by the NPC agent these variables set by procedural generation algorithms of the game. But for the player-controlled character this process representing mini-game when the player can see the project plan and requirements in the UI but can change various features using blueprint mechanics and other user-interface controls.

Project implementation steps

All possible projects are hidden for the agents until discovered. The project will be discovered once two requirements are met:

1. A certain set of preceded projects already completed.
2. One of the agents' levels up a specific set of skills to make a Breakthrough.

The Breakthrough event happening randomly and immediately for any, but only one agent in the game who met the skills requirements. Once the agent has made a Breakthrough, the implementation of the corresponding project becoming his top personal priority. At first step, he will come to his residence to build up the design and the plan of the project based on the project's content. Then depending on his belongingness to the clan, he will ask his Leader to help in the promotion of the project by the clan. This request will spread up to the Clan leader and decided by him. If the clan rejecting in support there is a chance the agent will break his Alliance and try to promote the project on his own(or using his personal Alliance network power).

To promote the project the agent(or someone from his clan) is coming to the Government to ask for the project support. If the project accepted by the Government the promoter becoming an Administrator of the project. The administrator is responsible to hire other agents on required roles through the one-to-one conversations, to assign tasks in the Closed session and to control the project progress. Each project includes timeframe deadlines for certain implementation steps. Failing the deadlines may lead to the project cancellation and firing the entire working group by the Government which is affecting project members' public reputation too.

Whether the project was declined by the Government in the beginning or canceled in the middle, any other agent in the game can try to ask Administration to continue the project by assembling a new working group.

Infrastructure maintenance and development

Among human resources, most of the projects require a certain set of material resources for completion and sometimes afterward long-term maintenance for the continuation of its effects. For example, a nuclear power plant requires fuel regular supply.

Once the project completed it becomes Permanent Infrastructure System in the game that may require regular resource supplies and human resources too. As such the original workgroup that completed the project automatically becoming a long-term supporting group of the built infrastructure system, and persist their roles in the group.

If the System maintenance fails, it returns the Infrastructure to the development phase and requires more resources to reactive it again. Also, failure in one system maintenance leads to related system maintenance failure too, and dependent projects in progress failure as well. The failure in the core infrastructure system can spread serious damage to entire economies. Since that, the government tends to support working systems with resources in the first place.

Infrastructure maintenance could eventually be finished without damaged when replaced with a more advanced system done through another project. For example, a Nuclear plant could be replaced with a Fusion plant.

Also to establish a new project the existing infrastructure system may require advanced development. In this case, when the government invests resources in the new projects they also invest more resources in the existing system so their workgroup can extend the system.

Workgroup

The success of the working group depends on the members' agent's profiles. When the agents have high skills in the corresponding profession of his role(or if he levels them up quickly during the work) there are more chances that corresponding steps of the project will be completed on time. As such Extravert agents who can learn other agents profile traits and skills well and relations between agents, can accomplish better management results.

Also, the agents with high Agility trait tend to change their positions and leave projects once they found better positions. If the agent leaves the project, then the project Administrator has to find a suitable replacement which is also a challenge.

If the Administrator leaves the project, the project is canceling. That action affects his reputation towards the hired working group and the public reputation depending on the level of damage this action brought to community economics. So, in general, Administrators of the projects and infrastructure system Administrators are not interested in leaving their roles. The Administrator of the project, however, could be replaced by the decision of the Government instantly without damage to the project and the entire economics.

Resource management

Since the community economics is not self-sufficient in the beginning of the game, most of the base material resources are delivering from the external world. The resource management and their spread across the projects and infrastructure systems are controlled by the community Government.

As was mentioned earlier the Government tends to support existing infrastructure in the first place. The extra resources are invested in new projects based on the project promoter public reputation, personal preferences of the Government members that determine by their traits, and the interest of the Government members clans.

Political Model

The Government of the community consists of several game agents called Academicians who gain their positions through the prime election process. The Academician status is life-long and can be taken away by the decision of the other members of the Government only. The number of academician positions is strictly limited, so the new Academician can be elected only when someone else leaves his position.

All political processes, votes, and decisions made by the Government are public for the entire community. This information can be used by Extravert agents too to reveal outlier actions of the government and discover other clan structures and it's influence power.

Election and Resignation

Any agent in the game taking a part in the election in both candidate and voter role. Each agent has only one vote he can give to any other agent except himself.

The members of the clans are voting either for their Leaders or for the candidate set by their Leaders. Loner agents are voting based on the candidate's general public reputation and personal attitudes. The candidate who took a larger number of votes than the other candidates will gain Academician status. The voting process is public, so each agent knows who were supporters of the candidate.

Resignation is a rare event that could happen only when an Academician loses his public reputation dramatically. In this case, other academicians can vote against him to take away his position. If there are more than 3/4 votes against the agent, he loses his status. Loner Academician agents are voting based on public reputation metric and personal attitude too, whereas clan members can keep supporting their members regardless of these factors. Resignation votes are also public.

Government functions

From the gameplay point of view the Government responsible for the following two functions:

• Making decisions to invest resources in the new projects. To support the project more than 1/2 of the Government members should vote for the project.
• Election of the community Governor. The Governor is elected from one of Academicians every few years by the most of the votes.

Governor has the power to replace any Infrastructure System Administrator at any time. And is managing the foreign policy.

Foreign policy and international trading

Until community internal economics reaches self-sufficient status(through the set of advanced projects) it has to keep getting various material resources from the external world required for establishing new projects and to support existing infrastructure.

Resource gathering implemented in the form of a mini-game set on the political map of the world with the game mechanics similar to the Plague Inc.

Each country on the map has:

• Particular number of Foundation divisions deployed in the country.
• The estimation of the country level of development.
• Country counter-espionage power.

Foundation divisions providing Foundation with resources they are gathering in each country automatically. Total amount of resources that can be yield from the country proportional to the number of divisions deployed in the country and the country development level, but inverse to the country counter-espionage power. And the total number of resources available for the community is summing up from all country yields.

The country's counter-espionage is growing slowly depending on the country's level of development.

Governor has two ways to influence foreign policy:

• By deploying results of Foundation research projects through the network of divisions in a particular country.
• By deploying false pseudo-scientific ideas.

Once the true results of the finished project deployed to any country, it opens new types of resources for import required to develop the next projects. Also, it increases the number of Foundation Divisions in that country, and the country level of development in time too. As such it increases Foundation resource yield from that country for a while. The negative effect of this action is that the counter-espionage power of the country starts growing faster as well. Also, eventually the level of development and counter-espionage boost spreading into other countries.

However, even if the Governor doesn't deploy any true technology results, one of the top developed countries will eventually make the breakthrough themself, opening new types of resources, increasing their level of development, counter-espionage power and spreading these effect to other countries in time, but this event will not increase the number of Foundation divisions in any country.

When the counter-espionage level in the country exceeds the critical level, the number of divisions start decreasing faster and faster. Once all divisions in the country exceeded and if the community didn't build a moon base and self-sufficient economy by that time, the player loses the game.

Governor can temporarily slow down counter-espionage effect and the country development level natural grow by either deploying more results of the Foundation researches or by deploying false pseudo-science ideas. The false ideas becoming available to use from time to time when some set of true researches already done by Foundation. Each available false idea can be deployed only once in a single country, and it temporary slows down the country development grow and it's counter-espionage grow too. This effect spreads to other countries eventually.

Some technology deployments can provoke countries to declare war to each other, or even provoking a world war. The war always slows down country development progress, but also decreases the number of Foundation divisions in the country and increases counter-espionage power. Such events may significantly decrease Governor's general public reputation and can lead to his resignation.

Simulation and Timeline

The game lasts in real-time, which means that a portion of gameplay time equals a portion of time in the game.

The player can fast-forward the game at any moment to bypass routine processes. Fast-forwarding stops when some significant event is happening including:

• Storyline events.
• Important publication in the Journal of Foundation.
• Interaction with some other agent begins.
• The player started some routine work that has finished.
• The new project has started, finished or canceled.
• Failure in the system infrastructure has happened.
• Significant changes in political structure.
• Significant geopolitical event.

The player can configure stopper-events in the User Interface.

When the game is fast-forwarding, the game world is simulated and evolving completely by the game engine based on the gameplay models. When the player starts a new game, the game engine randomizes all agent profiles and simulates the game world from the beginning evolving the system until certain conditions met: beginning projects are built, the Island map infrastructure developed. During the simulation game agents interact with each other, establishing relations, growing and losing reputation and establishing alliances and clans. Since that, by the beginning of the game, each gameplay social situation is unique and has a unique history of evolution, and the possible challenges for the player could vary too.

Each game agent(including player's controlled) has a limited lifespan when he is getting old and eventually dying because of the age or diseases. Both issues could be overcome through a set of advanced research projects completed on time. The player loses the game if he is dying or if the community became revealed before it stands self-sufficient moon colony. The player wins the game when the final research project completed.

Plot and Setting

The ideas lay behind the game setting are greatly inspired by a number of classic works of American and Soviet writers of the Golden Age of Science Fiction of the period 1940s to 1950s. But it also contains elements of Conspiracy and Spy Fiction too.

Unlike the Golden Age's space opera genre that usually portrays a future of civilization conquered distant space, the storyline of the game covering period of the XX century of alternative history and taking place on Earth and it's orbital space only. The main reason for this shift is to do the gameplay universe more realistic from a scientific accuracy point of view, also making it closer to the modern hard sci-fi genre. As such the gameplay allows us to represent certain scientific, engineering and philosophical ideas in a higher level of realism rather than it could be in a classic space opera "a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far, away..."

However, the story style and the mindset of the characters are much closer to the narrative of the classic style of the science fiction novels and focuses primarily on a conflict of the different visions on the social structure and it's development questions between characters. Despite some primitiveness of this narrative, it fits well for the video game way of representing the setting and plot, when the player motivated to explore the game universe through the gameplay mechanics learning the setting piece by piece.

CAUTION The following sections contain spoilers on the game primary storyline. Maybe you want to skip it until the game released.

Backstory

The storyline starts in the last decade of the XIX century. The secret conspiracy organization called Foundation was founded somewhere in the past of the XVIII century by a fictional character Alexander Ziolkowski, a genius inventor, philosophist and professor of mathematics who applied strict mathematics methods to scientifically prove the decline of the future civilization. To prevent catastrophe scenario and to rescue mankind from extinction, he established a secret organization based on the strong principals of faith in science and technology advance, and in the faith of the free will to achieve this advance through the freedom of thinking, creativity and the freedom from prejudice.

Ziolkowski's idea was to select and unite the most talented and extraordinary people all around the world, to build up more advanced, liberal and human society that will be hidden from the rest of the world for a while, but one day reveal and lead civilization.

To achieve their goals Foundation used to stick with certain organizational principals including conspiracy, hierarchical divisions and following a Code of Conduct. No one of the members know the rest of the members, only a few parts of their working group. And only a few members of the top inner circle aware of the entire picture and involved in planning. Many of the members live a normal life, have families, friends, ordinary jobs, yet they also have a secret life where they are taking part in the Foundation's projects.

Foundation has an extensive network of divisions around the world. All of the divisions are decorated as local firms, manufacturers, banks and other organizations providing ordinary services, hiring labors unaware of Foundation. Usually, only the top management and key persons are secret recruits of the organization. Thereby they are capable to perform instructions coming through the network of agents from the Foundation headquarters.

Due to the decentralized nature of the Foundation organizational structure and high level of conspiracy, they are resistant to the most external threats and have a wide range of influence capabilities. However, Foundation doesn't use these capabilities to gain any forms of personal benefits for their members or establishing world dominance. Their primary goal is to serve the pure knowledge and discovering secrets of nature. Since that Foundation's Code of Conduct forbids direct influence on world policy and geopolitics. Instead, they use their resources to secretly recruit new members by looking and patronaging for talented children around the world regardless of their origins or social status, but based on their talents and potential. And let them grow and realize their potential and creativity inside the Foundation using their organization's resources.

By the virtue of this way Foundation has accumulated the most intelligent people around the world by the beginning of the XX century. And thanks to their genius they reached a number of significant scientific and engineering breakthroughs including such fields as Bioengineering, Medicine, Computer Systems, Aerospace Engineering and many other amazing achievements that outperform their generation for decades if not centuries.

Yet, despite their closeness and indifference to the external world fate, Foundation shared some of their knowledge and technologies in the past in order to gain material resources required for their research projects and organization's operational expenses. And some of their sharings had controversial consequences. Few know that a number of engineering breakthroughs in Great Britain in the XVIII were not developed but revealed by secret members of Foundation. One consequence of this influence was the beginning of the era of the Industrial Revolution that eventually spread into other countries. Another, more frightening and dangerous consequence was progress in military technology production that brought wars into a new level of violence, increasing human deaths span worldwide, and also indirectly damaging the planet's ecology due to mass production pollutions. These consequences outspoken contradicted of Foundation's humanity principals lying under the basis of their high goals set by Alexander Ziolkowski.

For some, this was clear evidence of the self-fulfilling prophecy of Ziolkowski genius. Yet many were lesser skeptical which lead to even more tragical failed attempts in revealing the secrets of their knowledge in order to change the world for good, but every time they only increase human suffering and death. Lessons were learned. Foundation became more caution and closed organization. However, whether they want it or not, history continues to evolve. And eventually, they will have to face the call of time that could destroy them and disclose their secrets bringing the world to the point of a total disaster.

The Island

Foundation established their central base a long time ago on an alone isolated island somewhere in the Pacific Ocean yet hidden and undiscovered by the rest of civilization. The Island is a bastion of the entire organization, where Foundation does their key researches, collecting and storing results, building up research labs and facilities, providing scientific experiments. Strategic planning and it's divisions management, logistics, and secret operations on the mainland is also in charge by the Headquarters built on the Island.

There is a whole town built on the Island using the entire range of the top engineer thinking reached by Foundation scientists, engineers, and inventors. There are research labs, administrative and utility buildings, entertainments, medical centers, residencies for the Island's permanent habitats and guests. The city is powered by electricity based on Nuclear energy, has magnetic levitation trains transportation networks, electro cars, helicopters, supercomputer centers, and computer networks. There is even some level of robotization and automation. Yet, having all set of technology advances and high standards of living comfort for its habitants in XIX century that is comparable to the rest of civilization XXI century future level of progress, the town's planning policy still carrying of the Island ecology combining urban facilities and leaving space for nature grow. Thereby the Island scientists town is a high tech, but green city.

One of the most remarkable projects of Foundation is a Space program finished just recently. These are just first steps in the aerospace engineering field done by Foundation, but they already built a cosmodrome on the Island and successfully launched several space missions to set orbital satellites establishing transcontinental radio communication used by Foundation divisions and agents.

Another remarkable facility is a Palace of Science – Foundation Headquarters administrative building, a place of the Foundation high council assembly, and a central storage of knowledge of all Foundation inventions and discoveries. This is the heart of the entire organization and the most guarded place.

With all glorious achievements of Foundation, the Island is not a self-sufficient colony. Town's internal economy and Foundation's projects are heavily tied to deliveries from the external world through the network of mainland divisions. This includes producing or buying all sorts of multi-step production line intermediate components required for a specific project, to the habitant everyday supplies. Thanks to the high level of security standards and well-organized logistics system between Foundation's world-wide network of divisions built-in into the local regional economics of countries, Foundation is able to organize high technology mass production lines in decentralized fashion, but still keeping it secure. Such as each division framed to local manufacture, assembling or buying one specific component of production line and sending it to the next division on the opposite side of the world. But each local manufacture labors unable to see the big picture, and as such unaware of the purpose of specific detail, they are assembling. To them, it looks like just an ordinary production order like any other order they normally fulfill. All intermediate components eventually came to the Island where local habitants assembling them to the final product.

Despite the extra complexity of the logistic system and security expanses of Foundation, this approach was quite efficient in the past, when the external world technologies and economics were pure developed. Because contrary to the external world they utilized advanced production approaches such as mass production much earlier than the external world invented it too.

In nowadays the highly classified Foundation's worldwide production system efficiency has decreased dramatically. External civilization progress leads to grow of international communications and trading. So, Foundation now has to spend up to 90-95% of its worldwide divisions' network resources just to keep the system itself and the Island secure and hidden. Foundation is now in stagnation and on the verge of fundamental crisis when they will not be able to maintain their conspiracy model, and eventually will be exposed.

Alexander Ziolkowski

Too few is known about Ziolkowski biography, nor about the first steps of Foundation establishing process. This information was erased for a reason. There is no end without a beginning. Foundation was established to become an eternal force of the future civilization that will exist forever and will change humanity irreversibly. Specific names and personal cults don't make sense in the context of the High Goal.

Yet, there are a few near speculative things about Ziolkowski that we know. He was born in a poor fisherman family of uncertain roots in the north of the Russian Empire at the beginning of the XVIII century but demonstrated extraordinary talents in a wide range of fields from natural science to literature and arts from his childhood. He was never patronaged due to his lower social class belongingness, but thanks to his natural thirst for knowledge and the faith in his destiny, he gоt education in Russia, and later in Western Europe where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. Alexander Ziolkowski was a polymath who did a number of breakthroughs including discovering the atmosphere of Venus and asymmetric cryptography. But the most important one was discovering strict mathematic methods allowing prediction of the future of human societies on a very high level of accuracy. As such the main prediction about the future civilization catastrophy decline was made, as well as a prediction on the possible way of resolution through establishing Foundation.

Despite the strong mathematical proof of Ziolkowski Theory and the high level of accuracy of its predictions, there are a number of limitations:

1. The theory allows us to predict the evolution of human society and the key events of its history, but it doesn't predict the fate of a single person.
2. An accuracy of prediction violated if the prediction becomes exposed before fulfillment. In other words, the early publishing of predictions changes history and makes prediction itself obsolete. As such it must be hidden for a while.
3. However, in certain situations, it is possible to predict the exact consequences of changes in the history of the society done by a single speech spread across society.

The second rule concludes that Ziolkowski Theory itself must be hidden after the first application. Otherwise, it makes possible for someone else to re-apply it again and get the results of predictions revealed beforehand, making them effectively obsolete. Since that, the knowledge about the Theory was erased too.

Due to the speculative nature of this story, there are rumors that Alexander Ziolkowski never existed at all, and there was a group of people working under a single pseudonym. There are even more mysterious believes that this group might still exist inside Foundation as even more conspiratorial society that secretly watching for Foundation and changes its fate in the crucial moments of its history.

Whether it's true or not, no one doubts Ziolkowski's predictions truth because of the "Book Of Alexander Ziolkowski" owned by Foundation.

The book consists of a set of chapters encrypted with asymmetric cryptography methods. The decryption of each chapter requires the decryption of the previous chapter first. And hardness of decryption increasing from chapter to chapter. The first chapters were decrypted manually, in a nowadays they decrypting by Foundation supercomputers. It has to be mentioned that the decryption process itself tends to be one of the drivers of computer technology researches inside the Foundation. Averagely Foundation decrypting each new chapter once per 40-50 years. Each chapter successful decryption event attracts the attention of the entire society, and the chapter usually contains two things:

1. It describes all remarkable events that happened with Foundation and the world for the previous period, including the starting and the ending of wars, exact changes in geopolitics, economics and technologies, exact results of success and fails in Foundation projects and operations. The description even contains a quite short range of estimations of various metrics. And it never tells wrong information. Due to cryptography nature, such results couldn't be falsified. And this is a clear and very impressive proof of the truth of the theory, and the plan and goal of Foundation for all members of the society.
2. The second part of the chapter provides some advice for the future. The advice is usually formulated in a loose form. It doesn't contain specific recommendations or plans and may have controversial interpretations.

The book was the main source of beliefs and hopes of the entire society for centuries since the beginning of the Foundation.

Foundation's Society

Due to the nature of Foundation's believes in humanity principals, strong science and research-driven basis, and also because of the clear purposes in preventing mankind future decline apocalypse described in the Book Of Ziolkowski, members of Foundation are ascetics who dedicate their lives in service of Foundation at first place, but denying primitive human passions and individualistic purposes. They are fascinated by the High Goal of Foundation, and their beliefs continuously driven by Foundation miraculous achievements. Most of the members were thoroughly selected from the outside world, and they were indoctrinated in the secret society from their childhood, so their faith is sincerely coming from the very root of inside. Their society has a lot in common with the religious cult. However, it's not religious at all. Instead, their faith has a strong scientific basis in all possible aspects. Collectivism and Socialism are more suitable terms to describe their internal doctrine.

There is no private property inside the Foundation. All resources, infrastructure, facilities, final products, and research results are "owned" by the organization exclusively. Also, there is no internal currency too. The base goods such as food, accommodation, transportation, utilities, and entertainment are shared equally between members regardless of their roles inside the Foundation. Nevertheless, the members of the Foundation are highly motivated, organized and conscientious people to move the society forward and to grow common good.

Everybody has freedom of action inside the Foundation and an opportunity to implement their own ideas or to take part in the other members' projects. The society is mostly driven by initiatives coming from the bottom. Depending on one's capabilities to attract others with his own reputation and/or promising ideas he is able to assemble a group and get support in resources from Foundation to try scientific research or engineering project. The amount of invested resources usually depends on the number of supporting members and is growing as long as the project is showing successful intermediate results.

Aside from this, there is one formal institution inside Foundation called Academy of Science responsible for general coordination of all parts of the organization, resource management, and judgment. Academy of Science is a council resides inside Foundation Headquarters on the Island and consists of the most respectful and trustful members of the society and is assembled by a procedure of a public election. Academician status is an honored status received for extraordinary achievements that last lifelong, and usually cannot be taken away.

It worth to be mentioned that the entire population of the society is about a thousand members worldwide only. Most of the members are working in the network of divisions on the mainland and visiting The Island from time to time. Only a few hundred members are permanent habitats of the Islands. As was mentioned earlier some of the members of the Foundation have families and children, but they are not a part of the secret society, and they don't have any privileges too.

Since the population of the society relatively small and intelligent, they have no issues with crime and don't need police or formal jurisprudence. All controversial situations are judging by the Academician council that is following the Code of Conduct in general.

To sum up, the Foundation society consists of several groups:

1. Recruiting candidates. Those who are under patronage of Foundation, but not actual members yet. Usually, young people showing extraordinary abilities in various fields. They don't have access to organization secrets and plans. They are getting promoted once they prove their loyalty.
2. Ordinary members working in Foundation divisions around the world.
3. Permanent habitats of the Island.
4. Academicians. The governance and the court of Foundation.

Rachel Livingstone

The story told on behalf of Rachel Livingstone, a young lady of jewish ancestory who was born into well-off family of Great Britain in the end of XIX century. She is an orphan grown together with her two younger brothers by their grandfather Herbert Livingstone who was a merchant banker, but also was a secret agent of one of Foundation's divisions. Her parents were died in her childhood of epidemic of Influenza when they travel to the North America.

Rachel was a gifted child who demonstrated extraordinary talents and interest in biophysics when she studied in St. Paul's Girls' School in Western London. Later she studied in Newnham College of Cambridge where she did her first discovery of antibiotic effects of Penicillin in the age of 23. Unfortunately due to her young age, her discovery didn't get enough attention from scholar society, but thanks to her grandfather it was noticed by Foundation that developed this research into a new type of medicament. Once the first results of Rachel's discovery was obtained, she was invited to the Island to continue her work in advanced secret society.

Later, this discovery greatly helped in the cure of Spanish flu. But Rachel's vision of the future was far beyond medicine, and maybe even beyond the most progressive minds of Foundation. Rachel was dreamed to raise biology, physics and material basis of the civilization to a new level by uniting genius people together.

During the storyline she will experience through a series of challenges, but eventually she will lead Foundation, and will help the community to discover and develop new technologies including fusion reaction, robotization, artificial intelligence, molecular robotization, space technologies, discovering the secrets of the human mind, cancer treatment, and even solving the problem of aging.

The final achievement for Rachel and Foundation will be establishing a self-sufficient colony on the moon to survive inevitable world war apocalypse that will destroy all of mankind on Earth in the beginning of the XXI century. But later when the war over they will recolonize Earth, reconstruct nature damaged by the war, and lay the sprouts of a new world based on humanity, intellect and the scholarship grown by the Foundation in centuries.