Least we can do

From PEG wiki

The project is not moving as fast as I would like to. One of the problems, aside from my lack of time and/or commitment is that there is no actual game that we could experiment with. It is also hard to get excited about it without something tangible to play. For that reason I want to try to come up with an idea of a game that will somehow resemble what we want to achieve in the long run and will be as easy to implement as it is possible using our current codebase - techdemo 1 of PARPG.

On the asset side we have some human characters, buildings, objects and ground tiles. The characters have animation for idle, walk, run, use and pick up actions. For more info you can take a quick look at a relevant sections of PARPG repository [1] and [2] Gameplay wise we have walking around (with path finding), an inventory system, opening containers and a dialogue and quest system. I have implemented a more suitable camera. There is no combat, statistics or strategic map. Let's what we can do with that.

Let's assume that the several settlers have just arrived at the location of their future settlement - some sort of a ruined pre-war city or suburb. The winter has come and the snow has cut them away from the rest of the world. They have to satisfy their basic necessities, like food, water, shelter and safety - using only what they have in their backpacks and what they can find in the immediate vicinity. That way we can explain fitting all the action on a single map. We will also focus only on implementing basic mechanics for those mentioned basic necessities.

And for these I propose those few simple to implement ideas:

• shelter - for simplicity's sake let's assume the whole team is sheltered in a single, pre-defined house;
• homeostasis - let's reduce this idea to keeping everyone warm; let's assume there is a burning barrel in the middle of the shelter which provides heat; it is winter so it has to burn all the time; for that it needs some fuel, let's assume wood;
• wood - can be gathered either by cutting down trees or by gathering wooden furniture from nearby houses; they don't make much difference so I think that burning furniture has more "post-apocalyptic" feel;
• food - since these are ruins of a city, let's assume the settlers will just search for some eternal, instant food like in Fallout 3;
• stockpiling - let's assume there is a container which serves as a global stockpile of everything for the settlement;
• consumption - the burning place will consume some amount of wood per unit of time, each person will consume some amount of food per unit of time; for simplicity let's assume the resources are just "teleported" from the stockpile;
• well being - let's assume there is a health (or well being) gauge that falls when the food and heat conditions are not met; if it falls to zero the settler dies or leaves the settlement or whatever.

Having some basic productivity ideas we need some ideas for challenges.

• fast eaters/rare food - this is the simplest option, I can just either tweak the settlers to eat a lot or make the food rare and hard to find, so that the player needs to be careful with his search strategy; obviously the same can be done with firewood;
• consumption fluctuations - some random changes in the amount of consumed food and wood would force the player to consider whether he needs to focus more on gathering wood or food;
• enemies - we could add some kind of enemies to the map, like a pack of stray dogs or a local tribe of people, however that would require combat mechanics;
• harsh conditions (eg. radiation) - let's suppose there is a lot of background radiation in the city; it is not uniform, but rather happens in some more or less random spots; those spots can be detected using a Geiger counter but this is very slow - for example the counter's battery will last only for a very short time and recharging is slow; this would give the player several strategic options, like whether to explore slowly and carefully or to go fast and risk losing your settlers.

Last but not least, a goal - I see two possible easy to implement goals:

• last for n days;
• gather a surplus of n units of food.