Jordan Kouzmanoff
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Dev Diary #1: What is Grey Eminence?
🕑 Added 2022-02-10 13:33:27 +0000 UTC
Hello everyone and welcome to the first development diary for Grey Eminence!
It’s difficult to describe how excited I am to share what we, the Nestinars, have been working on for the past three years. What began as a cursory exploration of a cool new technology has evolved into a wholesale attempt to revolutionize the grand strategy genre. So, without further ado, let’s dive in!
What is Grey Eminence?
Grey Eminence is our answer to the question:
“How would you build a historical grand strategy game if you had a x100 bigger performance budget?”
Spanning from 1356 to 1956, Grey Eminence simulates the course of (alternate) history on a scale that was hitherto considered impossible. It does this through the lens of a particular country, which you, the player, can try to steer in whichever direction you see fit through diplomacy, politics, economics, warfare, and intrigue.
What does that look like in practice? The world of Grey Eminence is truly a living organism. It is made up of 1,004,880 hexagonal tiles (and 12 pentagonal tiles, because math), each with its own population, buildings, and geography. This vast quantity of data interacts via multiple systems: from demographics modelling to production, consumption, trade, climate and so much more.
At the heart of all these systems is the idea of simulationism. In Grey Eminence, there are no arbitrary mechanics, no board game-like abstractions, no mana points. Instead, Grey Eminence’s systems represent the phenomena that drove mankind towards modernity as faithfully as possible. Collectively, they allow us to accurately model the huge variety of states that existed between 1356 and 1956: from aristocratic monarchies and tribal confederations to constitutional republics and communist dictatorships.
Our simulationist approach extends beyond the realm of the physical and into that of the social. In Grey Eminence, the country you play is not a monolithic entity; it is the amalgam of the various competing interests of its elites. The nobility, clergy, merchants, military, and the state bureaucracy itself all vie for power and will often drag your country in directions you might not agree with. The estates aren’t monolithic entities either: they are, in turn, made up of various characters, each with their own personality, history, ambitions, and fears.
While all this complexity might sound daunting, Grey Eminence is not a game with a steep learning curve (at least for a grand strategy game). We have achieved this thanks to innovative use of UI/UX, consciously eschewing micromanagement in favor of top-down strategic choices, and a design philosophy centered around “optional complexity”. In Grey Eminence, many core systems are “optional”, in the sense that even in the absence of player intervention, they still function as you would expect historically. You might not build a single farm in 600 years, but that won’t stop the nobility from expanding their wildly profitable tobacco plantations or from opening a silver mine when a new deposit is found. Of course, leaving your country to be ran entirely on autopilot will likely result in less-than-ideal results, but at least it’ll spare you the need to read every tooltip and encyclopedia entry before starting your first game.
Grey Eminence has innovations not just for the players, but for modders as well. We have built the game from the ground up with moddability in mind, and as a result there are virtually no hardcoded mechanics. In Grey Eminence, you can modify anything: the UI, AI, graphics, even core system logic. We’re pretty much giving you access to everything short of the source code itself. Notably, the base game will include a built-in world editor, the very same one we’re using right now to build the default 1356 game world. In future dev diaries, in addition to outlining the various features of Grey Eminence, we’ll also explain how they can be played around with in the world editor.
To summarize, Grey Eminence is the embodiment of the following three design principles:
- Simulationism over abstraction
- Optional complexity
- Universal moddability
If you’re wondering how an indie studio is capable of building a grand strategy game with two orders of magnitude more data than anything released to-date, we’ve written a short article that goes into some of the innovations behind Unity’s Data-Oriented Tech Stack, the experimental technology that powers Grey Eminence. You can read the article here.
I want to conclude by telling you why we’re announcing Grey Eminence now, when we’re at least a year away from a full release. Since its inception, our studio has been entirely self-funded. Grey Eminence began as a passion project – indeed, about half of the Nestinars come from the modding communities of existing grand strategies. We are not beholden to external investors and are not chasing fixed deadlines because we understand the importance of releasing a game when it is ready, not when it is convenient for the shareholders’ bottom line.
As our team and project grew in scale, however, the cost of developing Grey Eminence outstripped our capacity to sustain it. At this point, we have exhausted not only our own life savings, but – for many of us – those of our family and friends too. We believe Grey Eminence is the future of the grand strategy genre and we have given everything to fulfill that dream. If you're reading this, you're already on our Patreon page, so consider supporting us if you, too, want to see this dream come to life. There is a long road ahead, but together we can make this revolution happen.
We’ll have a lot more news to share in the coming weeks, so don’t forget to join our Discord and Subreddit, as well as to follow us on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter.
