[WIP] Last Seed - Primary Needs, Primitive Cooking (Thread # : V

» Tue Feb 12, 2013 9:48 am

As they say, "fail to plan, plan to fail." This is the planning thread for one of two mods I'm working the details out on, currently called Last Seed. Last Seed will be a hunger / thirst / sleep mod that has a strong emphasis on simplicity while still retaining immersion and increasing the importance of food and water. Expanding the existing cooking mechanics is also a desired focus.

Last Seed will be designed to be stand-alone, or as a part of a survival and immersion "trilogy" along side http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/downloads/file.php?id=11163 and Rain's Hand (a camping / wilderness survival mod also in the planning stages). It will also be compatible with other Hypothermia mods, like Nitor's Hypothermia, and other camping mods, such as Camping Kit of the Northern Ranger, Camping Lite, and LtMattMoo's Camping.

This thread may not get a whole lot of activity since Frostfall is still in very active development, but I can now see the end of its development lifecycle from here and would like to start the dialogue early for my next project. That way I'll already have everyone's feedback and ideas on paper when I'm ready to implement.

So, here's what I've got rolling around in my head:

Hunger, Thirst, and Sleep: I think I'll use the same scale as I did in Frostfall: 120 to 0, with 120-101 being the "bonus" range (well fed, well hydrated, well rested). Eating, drinking, and sleeping makes your status go up; failing to do so makes them go down. Every 20 points marks a "threshhold" where good or bad things happen.
Tie the timing of the mod to game timescale. Provide adjustable hunger, thirst, and fatigue rates.
Automatic eating option. This is inspired by Necessities of Morrowind, one of my favorite mods in this category. Allow the player to select a diet type; carnivore, omnivore, and herbavore. Use this setting to determine what the player should automatically eat at appropriate times from their inventory. Allow for selecting drink preference / precedence. Also allow the player to eat and drink manually.
Automatic status messages. Keep in touch with the player when their condition changes.
On-demand status checking, either via a power or some other means. Include active effects that show the player's status and the effects of that status.
Hunger, thirst, and sleep should all have unique, interesting effects, and balanced against other mods (including Frostfall) that may also affect your performance.
Show, don't tell. Togglable imagespace effects, animations, and other visual feedback are important in getting the player's attention, without getting in their way.
Use existing assets. There's already tons of food diversity in Skyrim; I just want to give it a purpose.
Cooking enhancements, with a focus on primitive cooking over a campfire or similar. I don't want this to turn into Iron Chef: Skyrim. Move the recipe for grilled chicken, grilled leeks, grilled venison, grilled anything, to an actual grill you can drop food onto and watch it cook.
Allow player to place and use a full suite of camping equipment (shared code between Frostfall and Hearthfire), to facilitate cooking over a fire, and restoring Fatigue through sleeping.
Refillable bottles and waterskins. Disallow sea-water (northern coast). The rest of Skyrim is verdant with pristine lakes and streams, that the player should be able to gather water from.

I'm on the fence about two particular features; fishing and trapping. Both of these features were planned in my head as being part of Hearthfire, since they are closer to wilderness survival activities. However, fishing is really just a food procurement method. Trapping will have other purposes than food (securing the campsite against random encounters, acquiring pelts), but it's still a primary method of catching food. Would it make more sense to put these in Last Seed instead? Or put them in both, and just make them compatible?

So, that's what's on my mind. The question is, what would you like to see? What do you feel is currently lacking in existing H/T/S mods? Thanks for your input.

» Mon Feb 11, 2013 10:38 pm

The last thread was http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1419890-wip-last-seed-primary-needs-primitive-cooking-thread-2/.

My last post was,

Anyway, I will be looking at location keywords, primarily, to dictate what goes where. Palaces and Jarl's houses, upper-class citizen homes, and the like will nearly always have fresh food (just perhaps a little less of it). Normal people will have less food, and somewhat less quality. Some of it might be found stale. Bandit hideouts and so forth will have much less food, and it will be between stale and rotten. Food will not be found in dungeons not otherwise inhabited by humans.

At any rate, it's a game. I know that's the one phrase I personally hate hearing, "It's just a game", but it serves a purpose in this context. I can't spend a lot of time developing features for the sake of academic accuracy or what I like to call "just to know it's there" features. But if the player encounters it 1% of the time, or never, it was wasted time. I care more about the moment-to-moment player experience and less about where books and tomatoes and other miscellaneous things that are present but have no source come from. The player doesn't usually care. It's all interesting from a high-level standpoint, but I'm trying to help make a game a better game, not turn a game (fun vs. realism: fun wins) into a simulator (fun vs. realism: realism wins). Granted some degree of immersion and realistic qualities can make a game fun, but no game gets more fun linearly with the more realism you insert in to the system. The dovahkiin doesn't use the bathroom because it isn't fun. Games have their own flows and their own pace, and you have to keep into perspective what this is actually going to play like while you're sitting in front of the computer instead of just thinking theoretically. And even then, you won't know what something "feels" like until you actually develop and test it.

Anyway, less about game philosophy and more about the mod. Working on fishing mechanics. I am a huge fan of Zelda Nintendo-64 /Gamecube era games, so whatever I do is going to try to draw from that as closely as possible. A big part of this will be animations, which have extremely poor support in Skyrim, so I'm just going to go with the 2-handed sword animations for now. It has a nice upright "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hass%C5%8D-no-kamae" posture instead of being held behind the player.

Part of the way I'd like this to play out would be using Power Attack to cast the line (which has a nice behind-the-head-downward-swing motion), and I spawn a bobber some fixed distance from the player. You would not be able to move your character while fishing. If the bobber detects water, fishing continues. Care will have to be taken that the bobber can't float away. Once the line is in, Normal Attack could be used to tug and reel the line. I could apply a physics bump to the bobber to make it look as if it were "pulled under", and if the player tugs within some window of time, the fish is hooked and pulled in and added to the player's inventory. At that point they can re-cast or stop fishing. Unequipping the fishing rod would stop the fishing process. There would be factors that contribute to what fish can be caught where, during what times of day, using what bait, as well as a random element. Fishing in games has historically svcked (sometimes catastrophically), and without more control over animations and the camera I will never be able to emulate what Zelda did, but I think this gets close enough, and should hopefully be a fun thing to do that doesn't take a lot of time or is a major drag to the flow of gameplay. A fishing journal would also be neat, I also liked that feature in Zelda to keep a log of your catches and so forth.

A fishing "skill" might be neat, but it would have to be handled very carefully. I don't want the Final Fantasy XI Online approach (for those of you who have played it), where you svck at it horribly until you are not so horrible. And all the while, you have to "grind" your way up to a decent level of fishing in order to catch anything, hating it the whole time. I would rather player skill be a bigger factor than character skill. In the end, a fishing skill probably won't happen. There is already a Wayfarer perk in SkyRe planned for improving fishing and hunting yields slightly.

All fish will have their ability to be clicked on / picked up by hand removed.

I will be working on a prototype of this this week, hopefully it pans out.