inspiration

[Ruza]

is the amount of upgrades in the demo limited or is there a way to generate more inspiration outside of narrative? will there be something like that in the full game?

[Mintdragon]

The demo currently consists of the prologue, which is the tutorial, and chapter 1, which is the extended tutorial. Inspiration will only ever come from narrative events like dialogue, quests chains, and debates, the latter of which are a new feature not currently in the demo

[x-4000 (Chris McElligott-Park)]

In a generalized sense, everything is part of some sort of chain of events, or else doesn't really have a reward.

I am not sure how helpful the below part is, but I'll leave it just in case.

TLDR, this is a game about making decisions. You are not in a footrace with anyone, and there are no opportunities to "grind EXP" or equivalent. So that means that, to get any sort of meaningful reward, you need to make some sort of decision that pushes some sort of project chain forward.

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To use an analogy that is not perfect, in a Zelda game you can only get new heart pieces and equipment from going to dungeons or fighting bosses, or finding hand-crafted secret areas, etc. That's kind of along the lines of how this game treats upgrades.

By contrast, an RPG like Final Fantasy will give you generic EXP from fighting any monster. So there's special loot you can only get from (again) secrets or bosses or story quests, but then there's this huge amount of an intangible resource that you can just endlessly farm if you want to. I really don't care for this style of design, even though I love a lot of the final fantasy games. The developers are banking on the fact that you will find it too tedious to do that, but if there's a skill gap then potentially you can just grind it despite the tedium. That's one way of providing a relief valve for players, but again I'm not a huge fan of it.

That's kind of the RPG perspective.

To swap around genres, if you look at Age of Empires or similar, if there's a gold mine you can just mine it until it's gone, or trees you can just chop. Wander around the map and mine and chop all you want. The reason that this works in those kinds of games is that you are in a race with enemies. If you don't constantly make the most of every second of time you have on the map, then a competent enemy will pull ahead of you and smash your face in. That works great for intense, short, matches. But it kills any ability to explore for the sake of exploration, and any narrative in the actual skirmish-mode type play is pretty much out the window. Story is a thing that happens between missions, mostly, or not at all.

Going a different direction, you have 4X games like Civilization. You can't farm exp, and you there aren't mines and forests around to just infinitely get all of your prime resources. Yeah, there ARE things you mind and log and whatnot, but the really precious resources are in finite spaces on the map, and you either have them or you do not have them. So it's kind of like a "king of the hill" type situation, where if you control the hill, you have that resource, and if you don't, you don't. This encourages more exploration, while still having time pressure from enemies, without it being such a rush as the RTS example.

None of these things, from the spectrum of RPG and strategy games, quite accomplish what I wanted to. They all are very good at what they do, and certainly I've made my fair share of RTS games, or games in general where you were racing a strategic opponent in some fashion.

Heart of the Machine, in general, is a real hybrid of RPG and strategy, where to move forward you need to do so via something akin to a storyline. Sometimes that story is "this is the story of me taking over this area," but there's still room for interesting back-and-forth in there like what the scripted campaigns of, say, Age of Empires were trying to do between their campaign maps.

Man I am bad at explaining this.

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TLDR, this is a game about making decisions. You are not in a footrace with anyone, and there are no opportunities to "grind EXP" or equivalent. So that means that, to get any sort of meaningful reward, you need to make some sort of decision that pushes some sort of project chain forward.