Brainstorming Thread: Food System.

[Martyn van Buren]

That is a good point.  Agreed.

[Drjones013]

I'd personally like to see a food system like Civ 3; your city only has x potential for number of citizens and anything past that forces you to create a new settlement. This could be used to limit tech advances within a city. Food gathering is implied, player never touches it at the micro level (maybe sees it and recovers health upon destroying food items).

Settlements along these lines would emphasize building cities in the most optimal spots (which could be tile dependent or series-of-tiles dependent) and perhaps even chains of cities (total number of tech in so much area) could allow for large upgrades. An example: City A has 3 tech, City B has 4 tech, City C has 5 tech, for a total of 12 tech, which allows the building of bonus structure at City C (region check for tech + minimum tech level at building site). This would provide a built-in limit for crafting at early levels and would encourage more development at others.

It could also mean that survivors from a low-resource continent may have to be moved to a high-resource continent (read: more bonus missions, yay)

edit: upgrades should also have population minimums. They don't have to be high but this'd definitely give a player a reason to seek out rescue missions. I don't think I've seen a reason why I should bring people back to the colony which is a central point of the game.

[Mánagarmr]

I've played a lot of games with food systems and they always come down to "Press this button ever so often." The one game where food actually matters is Project Zomboid, because the damn thing is so scarce you are afraid of actually starving to death

[BobTheJanitor]

The only non-annoying food systems I know of are those that provide some sort of temporary passive buff. So you eat it periodically to get that buff, but without it you aren't much weaker and you're not forced to eat it all the time. But that would require some system of passive buffs and tracking time frames for those buffs. Enchants pretty well have that covered, without time limits.

[zebramatt]

Dr Jones's suggestion is food as a strategy level resource, which is pretty well established in that arena.

I think it could work well to flesh out the side of the game which focusses on building a civilisation in Valley. But it's definitely superfluous at this point. Something for an expansion, perhaps?

[Mánagarmr]

I'm inclined to say that any food system at all, except on the strategic scale, would be a waste of development time. AVWW is not a survival game, hence any such mechanics would be annoying at best.

[tigersfan]

I'm inclined to say that any food system at all, except on the strategic scale, would be a waste of development time. AVWW is not a survival game, hence any such mechanics would be annoying at best.

I was on the fence when this thread started, but, now I'm inclined to agree with you.

[keith.lamothe]

AVWW is not a survival game

I wonder what Chris thought when he saw that, seeing as this project began as a commerical redo of a game whose subtitle (on the title screen) was "A Game of Survival"

[x4000]

AVWW is not a survival game

I wonder what Chris thought when he saw that, seeing as this project began as a commerical redo of a game whose subtitle (on the title screen) was "A Game of Survival"

I thought: yep, that's totally accurate.

Alden Ridge was primarily an environmental-puzzle/action-survival game, but it stalled out as a project when I started trying to get adventure bits in there, which was what I realized I was more interested in.  So from the get-go, this project has always had the adventure bits at the forefront, and other stuff has kind of come and gone as support of it.  I thought the survival bits would be one of those things that would stay, but that's just not how the game evolved (and I'm happy for that).

Someday I want to properly remake Alden Ridge for what it was supposed to be, MINUS all the adventure bits that were fouling it up.  But that's really a very different project than this one, at this point!

[Mánagarmr]

What I meant was that while AVWW is a game about the survival of the human race, survival as a game mechanic (like Rogue Survivor, Project Zombiod and Dwarf Fortress Adventure mode) are not part of it.

[x4000]

I know -- and I agree.  But survival as a game mechanic was something that we had thought was going to be more a part of it, plus more the general theme of survival.  Which still lives on here, in some forms, but not like Zomboid or similar.

[silverhound]

Reading back on topics like this, it's really noticeable how the game changed over the span of a couple of months, not just in gameplay but in gameplay philosophy too.
As such i have a couple suggestions that might be more in line with how the game is right now:

How about having food and sleep not as a requirement but as a way to open new areas?
You drink a magic beverage, go to sleep in a bed in one of the many buildings, and it opens up a dream-setting version of a mission.
Depending on the beverage and the timeshard the area you went to sleep in belongs to, you get different missions/versions/difficulties.

Or eating a 'tiny robot sandwich', and taking a nap in a bed afterwards, that allows you to temporarily transport your mind into the robot by magic and 'improve' a part of yourself.
reward would be an extra upgrade aside from the 10 times you can already upgrade your character, and maybe limiting it to doing it only 3 times per individual character, that way only giving 3 more upgrade levels.
You'd be in an organic-setting, allows different enemies (like showing how magic protects the body), and possibly the other robots in the sandwich going haywire and you having to take those out aswell.
You could add in a consequence to failure, in that it would undo a previous upgrade.


This would still have a food system of sorts be present, in that you would need an npc to create such sandwiches and drinks, and you having to gather the resources in the world to do so, you could make it so that when the npc is level 3 you can make a sandwich for the first upgrade, at level 4 a croissant for the second upgrade, and level 5 a... uh...  hmm.. well something for the third upgrade.

[jwbarry]

I do think there's a very good idea that's hidden in the various parts of this conversation. It was suggested that one use for a food system is for buffing. The response was then, correctly, stated that buffing is the purview and purpose of the enchantment system. I agree, and don't think that should be changed, it does that very well at this point. However, the enchantment system can be enhanced to give additional moments of choice and player tension.

Right now, enhancements have 2 total player choices involved with them.
1 - Equip or not.
2 - Hold on to or boil down for X progress towards a new one.
While decision point 1 is fairly straightforwards, point 2 has the ability to expand into a more complex player decision. If when players break an enchantment down they have 3 decisions, all 3 destroying the item but providing different progress/benefit.

1 - Gain X% progress towards a new enchant.
2 - Gain the enchantments stats as a non-stacking buff for X period of time (time potentially shaded by enchant tier). No more than 1 buff either total or per enchant slot active at any one time. Could stack if needed, but I think more interesting if it doesn't to figure out what to combine for buffs and equips.
3 - Gain X% progress towards the chance of obtaining a higher tier enchant when you next acquire one.

Numbers of how much advancement is provided can be tuned as necessary.

[Guswut]

Personally, I think that a food system, on a character level, would be fairly out of the scope of the game's design goals. Your glyph sustains you, right? At least, when it's not shouting "Hey, listen!", heheheh.

As a part of the macro game, though, it would likely be extremely interesting. I would say that the general gain from dealing with the food system should be that your survivors are much healthier, ergo when you die, you have a better pick of survivors.

If you ignore the food system, when you die, your survivors are going to be, on average, of lesser quality (likely affected by game difficulty, tier, continent, etc, to some degree). Maybe even have the survivor crop start at a low level of health, and make supply raids, farming ventures, hunting trips, fishing trips, and the like mission-styled events that would give you the ability to raise that level, therefore raising the general health of your survivors (for a timed period, which, if ignored, goes down slowly).

Assuming that your survivors started at a low level of health, there would only be carrot and no stick in regards to dealing with the macro game food system.

[Chex Warrior]

I agree with the others that a food system for characters would most likely be tedious, but what about growing/finding food to help your settlement?