No no no, you go big or you go home. You can't be a little bit The Eye of Argon.
I meant that it has a lot of parts that don't work well togther: the presentation doesn't match the writing, the writing doesn't match the setting, the slots doesn't evoke a feeling of a contested combat. It feels like a lot of ideas thrown together without an overall vision tying them together.
I keep thinging of Inkle's Sorcery! and how well it's put together, or Simogo's Device 6's novel use of text.
> a STRIPS planner
Well now! I'd love to hear more about this; I didn't notice it in action while running backwards and forwards from the war forges to the corpse room & back while waiting to see if the explicitly-mentioned time-pressure was really a thing or a unconvincing plot momentum device.
You're asking about the parts of the system. The noteworthy are:
* a STRIPS planner for the NPCs in the game that has to deal with stochastic actions
* an NLG subsystem
* all the usual game OOP stuff that would work with the above (immutable objects with semantics)
* a layered storytelling framework
But if you're asking about the 7 years, it's mostly a lot of pivots. The layered storytelling framework was an idea that I had for a very different game last year, for example.
If I knew exactly what I'm building, it would take about 6 months of work, even with my limited free time. But that's not accounting for all the things I had to learn-by-doing along the way.