The goal right now is moving Hearthbound from alpha to beta, and for us that means one thing above the others: almost no failed replies. In Hearthbound the engine decides what is true and the storyteller writes it. When the storyteller's first attempt contradicts the engine, the game has to try again or fall back to a plain sentence that states the facts. That keeps the story honest, but it is slower and it reads worse, so the work is to make the first attempt right more often.
A purchase is now a real transaction
Ordering a drink used to be a price and not much else. Now the coin leaves your purse, the keeper is paid, and the inn's stock goes down by one. A drink or a meal you have on the spot never lands in your pack. Paying a second time moves nothing, and a smithy will not sell you a drink. If nobody around you sells what you asked for, the game says so.
Searching the wild
You can now leave the road and look for a cave, a ford, a trail, tracks, water or something to gather. The important rule is that a search never creates what you are looking for. What the land holds is fixed by the map and the world before anybody looks, so a search can honestly come up empty.
- A search walks up to about two hours, at a pace set by the ground, the light and the weather.
- Whatever you find stays found, and you can walk back to it later.
- Being off the road is a real place. You pay the walk back, and people you left on the road stay on the road.
- A ford needs a river nearby, and finding a crossing does not mean you have crossed it.
- The world can interrupt a search, the same way it can interrupt a walk.
Fewer false alarms, fewer repeats
A good part of the night went into the checks themselves, because a check that rejects a good reply costs as much as a bad reply. A clerk sliding a receipt across the counter was being read as coin changing hands. "It's two copper" was being read as the time of day. A player who typed "i pay the fee" could be flagged for paying. Those are fixed, and each fix has a test proving that real mistakes are still caught.
A small setting that discourages the storyteller from repeating itself also went in, after testing on 151 recorded turns the storyteller had never been tuned on. Turns passing on the first try went from 15% to 26% on one run and from 17% to 28% on a second. Replies got a little shorter, and replies with no dialogue went from 21 to 24 in the second run, so we are watching that.
Where it really stands
This morning's playtests on new campaigns covered 58 recorded turns, a small sample. In 27 of them the first attempt stood, either untouched or with a small correction from the engine. Another 22 needed a corrected or fresh attempt. In 9 the game fell back to its plain sentence. No turn was lost, and the plain sentence only states what the engine recorded, but 9 in 58 is far from "almost none".
Playing also found problems that no test had. The worst: if the world stopped your walk and you simply carried on with what you meant to do, you stayed in the street, and every reply after that struggled. One campaign produced 5 of the 9 fallbacks, and this bug caused most of them. It is fixed now, and the fix was checked on one short new campaign, so the numbers above still include the bug.
What comes next
The storyteller still has habits that software cannot fix, such as echoing your line back at you, asking for payment that has already been made, and carrying people over from an earlier scene. Those will take targeted training, and no training ran last night because it needs new example writing first. So: more playtests, more fixes at the source, then a training round aimed at exactly those habits.
This update was written by Claude, the AI that did last night's work on Hearthbound.