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A random set of gamedesign discussion and suggestions


Erik

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This topic revolves around the gamedesign decisions of some minecraft mods and minecraft itself. Analysing the gamedesign decisions of these similar games helps finding some suggestions for Vintage Story.

1. The meaning of gamedesign is to balance fun, challenge and reward, while trying to avoid being boring or frustrating. The right balance can lead to goal of gamedesign: Long-term motivation.

2. Terrafirmacraft: I've recently started playing TFC, couldn't get into it before, because of it's difficult early game. It's obviously quite similar to VS and VC, as it was one of your inspirations. TFC tries to be a realistic survival sandbox game and succeeds at it. The first thing I found out while playing TFC is, that like stated above, the early game can be very frustrating. You need food, fresh water, clay, seeds, stones, sticks, trees and ore. While sticks, stones, fresh water and trees are easy to find, finding clay and food can be really difficult at times. But without clay you can't progress in TFC and that's also the case for VS/VC. Without clay, gameplay is very limited, you can't smelt ore and you can't make storage. Because of this some seeds are close to being unplayable. Food, while being unable to starve in TFC, is also very essential, because you will suffer heavy penalties for not eating. Some thing I also noticed is the absence of viable building materials in the early game, you can only get wood planks after crafting a saw, which requires metal. Cobblestone, stone, dirt, gravel and sand all follow the rules of gravity, you can't stack them very high and roofs out of these materials are nonviable. The only solid, non falling blocks are wood blocks, but these take very long to destroy and aren't very easy to get in mass, because you also need them a lot for other tasks. After getting threw the early game there are more problems ahead. Food decays, making a long time food supply very difficult. Forging (not casting) isn't really fun, but annoying. Mining is really difficult, because of the "rules of gravity" and veins are hard to find.

3. Minecraft Beta 1.7.3: To experience some nostalgia I fired up a old version of minecraft. Back before Beta 1.8 minecraft used to be a building and adventuring sandbox, mainly building. Hunger wasn't a thing and world gen was still interesting and diverse. While playing I often found myself building and decorating, opposed to mining, farming and general progression in today's minecraft. While the building options were very limited, this limitation and lack of choice made building no less fun. Without the tyranny of hunger you are free to do whatever you like, a true sandbox experience.

 What can VS learn from this? 

VS has to decide on it't balance between building, survival and adventuring. I really like TFC's concept of building materials being unlocked with tech progression, but dislike the absence of useful building materials in the early game (caused by gravity). When making pickaxes and saws only able to create with metal like in TFC, which would obviously require ground ores, progression would be needed to get to new building materials. Wood should then craft into wooden planks (item), which can be crafted into wooden plank blocks, like stone dropping stone (item) which can be crafted into cobblestone blocks. Then there could be a split between building and crafting materials, items used for crafting, the blocks only used for building. This mimics the concept of the chisel mod, which also introduced blocks only used for building.

Hunger and thirst are well implemented in TFC, but have one mayor flaw: food spoiling. While thirst can kill you, you can't starve. This makes food a little less important in the early game and therefore creates more freedom for the player. Food spoiling is very annoying, you often have to cut the decay of with a knife and it takes away some freedom of the player. Another thing: food stacking in TFC is amazing, really like that concept and would like to see it in VS.

I've also noticed how annoyingly small VS's inventory is, without bags. It needs to be bigger, now it's just annoying. Please tell me why it's so tiny.

This topic is unfinished and will be extended later.

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Indeed Erik, your concerns are quite valid. Deciding for the exact direction the game should go is super hard :D

There's one thing I'd like to have in the far future, which giving the player the ability to play the game in significantly different ways. I would like them to be able to skip mining altogether by acquiring your goods and tools through trade. Do you know the space sim freelancer? I loved that mechanic where you could just become a trader, selling goods for cheap, travel and sell them expensively. There are dangers on the way so it's still a challenge to do so. This is what I would like to have translated to our theme - a network of partially road-connected villages that buy and sell goods at varying prices.

I also never liked the difficulties TFC added with building structures. I did enjoy the early game though. Clay was almost everywhere when i played it.
 

On 4/16/2017 at 6:14 PM, Erik said:

Hunger wasn't a thing and world gen was still interesting and diverse. While playing I often found myself building and decorating, opposed to mining, farming and general progression in today's minecraft. While the building options were very limited, this limitation and lack of choice made building no less fun. Without the tyranny of hunger you are free to do whatever you like, a true sandbox experience.

Well not really actually, you still needed to farm regularly to regain your health. And you got hurt pretty often back then. At least I did.
 

On 4/16/2017 at 6:14 PM, Erik said:

VS has to decide on it't balance between building, survival and adventuring. I really like TFC's concept of building materials being unlocked with tech progression, but dislike the absence of useful building materials in the early game (caused by gravity). [.....]

Yea, pretty much agree with all of those points. Food spoilage is something we did plan to implement, but in a much more forgiving way: If you preserve your food (jam, beef jerky, drying, etc), it would no longer spoil.
 

On 4/16/2017 at 6:14 PM, Erik said:

Another thing: food stacking in TFC is amazing, really like that concept and would like to see it in VS.

I though about it for a while but then realized: What for? It's basically exactly the same mechanic as item stacks. I could not find a valid point that would justify using that system.
 

On 4/16/2017 at 6:14 PM, Erik said:

I've also noticed how annoyingly small VS's inventory is, without bags. It needs to be bigger, now it's just annoying. Please tell me why it's so tiny.

You do know you can make simple baskets from reeds, right? Those extend the inventory by 2 slots each. The linen sack gives you 4 slots each, but requires some farming.

Beyond that, I fully agree that the inventory size is in direct conflict with the game encouraging exploration - I'm not sure how to resolve it. What we wanted to implement is a whole seperate crafting branch for bags, where you can make expensive, high slot bags or specialized bags that can only hold certain items (e.g. only ores).

Plus you can trade whole bags of stuff to other players and perhaps have other interesting interactions with the existence of bags.

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2 hours ago, Tyron said:

I though about it for a while but then realized: What for? It's basically exactly the same mechanic as item stacks. I could not find a valid point that would justify using that system.

With TFC's food stacking mechanic you are able to eat very precise amounts of your food instead of having to eat one item, which grants you four hunger, even though you need just two. Food spoiling is a lot easier to implement with this mechanic, too. And lastly, crops can give you very precise varying amounts of food, when you harvest them allowing for a better implementation of the farming system with a more responsive result.

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I'd caution against the TFC style of food stacking.  For one thing, they're dropping it in TFC2.  So if they're dropping it, it's probably not the best solution.  As far as portions go, the smallest amount of anything you could eat was 5 oz.  The largest stack was 160oz.  160/5=32.  So it was basically the same as a stack of 32 food.  Yes, you could use 2 or 3oz here or there to make salads and sandwiches, but that's frankly a degree of micro-management that is unnecessary.  I think food stacks is the better, simpler way to go.  Everything else just needs to be balanced around it. 

Figure out how much play you want in your crop yields, due to skill, water, and whatever other factors.  If you want a lot of different variables to play into the yield, then you might need a crop to yield up to 10 pieces or something, at ideal skill and environmental conditions.  That seems like a lot, but then each piece needs to fill less of the hunger bar, to balance it.  There's a whole host of factors that can make up the food web, and it's all easily balance-able against a piece-stack system, vs grams/oz, and it avoids having to set up a special weights and measures system just for food.   Remember that not everything that goes into farming has to affect food yield.  There can be a lot of other things brought in that aren't yield, if you want to keep the max yield down.  That's my opinion.

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9 hours ago, redram said:

As far as portions go, the smallest amount of anything you could eat was 5 oz.  The largest stack was 160oz.  160/5=32.  So it was basically the same as a stack of 32 food.

VS doesn't have to copy these values. You could always configure it to have a max size of 320oz and the smallest eating amount to be 1oz.

9 hours ago, redram said:

There's a whole host of factors that can make up the food web, and it's all easily balance-able against a piece-stack system, vs grams/oz, and it avoids having to set up a special weights and measures system just for food.

The problem is that that the minimum gap of farming efficiency with the normal stack system is one item. Plants that would normally yield one item had to yield two items when farmed under better conditions (or no bonus). With the TFC food stacking the yield difference could be 1/42 of an item. This is really simplifying the game design you have to put into farming, because you can handle everything based on formulas, because the food stacks are so precise and don't have to care about random chances, etc.

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12 hours ago, Erik said:

The problem is that that the minimum gap of farming efficiency with the normal stack system is one item. Plants that would normally yield one item had to yield two items when farmed under better conditions (or no bonus). With the TFC food stacking the yield difference could be 1/42 of an item. This is really simplifying the game design you have to put into farming, because you can handle everything based on formulas, because the food stacks are so precise and don't have to care about random chances, etc.

That's what I was talking about when I said you may have to increase yield.  Why would the limit be 2?  Why can't it be 10?  There's so very many factors that could play in.  It just depends on what the devs want.  

The stack limits actually could make cooking more important.   So say there's a lot of factors, and so each piece of food fills relatively little of the hunger bar.  You have to eat two pieces of raw food every hour, basically, for this example.  So 48 pieces per day.  Well if you're going on a week long trip you'll need 336 pieces of raw food.  If raw food stacks at 32, you don't want to take 10+ stacks of raw food with you.  So this is where cooking comes in handy.  You can cook together 24 pieces of raw food, and create a meal. Maybe those meals stack to 16 (different types of cooked food could have different stack limits, and hunger value).  That stack of 16 meals is the equivalent of 384 pieces of raw food.  So now, via cooking, you've got a week's worth of food in one stack.  And you probably eat meals faster than 24 individual pieces of food, so there's eating time saved as well.  you've now made raw food a burden, overcome by cooking.  And a better cooking skill can increase the food value gotten from the ingredients.  As could perhaps better cooking gear.  So you see, low-raw-food-value + stack limits = increased value for cooking skill and cookware. 

You can refine your system of oz/g down all you want, but at some point the quantities of subdivision are too small to make a real difference, so what have you REALLY gained?  Just make individual pieces fill less hunger, and increase the yield of them.  It works basically the same and you haven't had to create a weights and measures system.  It simplifies things, and brings value to systems that can combine those stacks of pieces.

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41 minutes ago, redram said:

That's what I was talking about when I said you may have to increase yield.  Why would the limit be 2?  Why can't it be 10? 

Because your Inventory size is really limited. Even when you can craft them into meals later, you still need to harvest them and transport them. And you wouldn't be harvesting just ten plants, you'll want to harvest 30 plants, 300 items, a minimum of five 64-item stacks, half your starting inventory. It's not totally impossible and bad, but imo the food stacking mechanics from TFC would do the job better instead. Even cooking would work better, as you wouldn't have to fiddle around with exact stack sizes for recipes. And please explain how spoiling would work without this, I tried TFC2 and the spoiling with vanilla stacks was really, really annoying... 

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So for one thing, my example was just an example.  Quantities can be adjusted.  Easily.  I tried to make that clear in my previous post that it was an example.  So don't get hung up on the numbers I gave.  Either the quantities the player has to eat, or the size of the inventory.

Furthermore, you're seeing this as limitations, I see it as an opportunity to introduce a mechanic, and progression.   The early game could be more about the struggle with food.  Limited inventory means either carrying tons of food and little else, or spending a lot of time foraging for food as you go and preparing it in the simple means available.  Later in the game you have more inventory, better cooking (to combine the food down) and domesticated food sources in one area.  That's progression.  It would, imo, bring a more nuanced game experience.  This would in a way simulate mankind's early struggles, where huge amounts of his time were spent just finding food.  Later mankind advanced, settled down, domesticated crops and animals, and started to have free time to pursue art and technology.  I see nothing wrong with this.  I think it would provide a deeper sense of progression in the game.  But it's whatever the devs want, of course.

As for spoilage, I haven't played TFC2 enough to pay attention to how it's spoilage works so I don't even know precisely.  I don't think you can even take whatever mechanic they have as the final version yet.  But it's simple, just make spoilage like Ark.  There is a timer on the stack, and when it reaches 0, 1 piece is removed, and the timer starts over.  Dead simple.  You don't get the rot trimming mechanic from TFC, but I have heard absolutely 0 people say they enjoyed that mechanic, and many, many people say they hated it.  I dealt with it easily enough, but that's me.  The VS devs have said they're going for a binary preservation system here (at least for one game mode) so that means food is either spoiling or not.  But if they ever did bring in more gradated mechanics, You just slow down the timer based on prep.  Salted or smoke meat?  50% timer.  Salted AND smoked meat?  25%.  it has the same end result as TFC1's spoilage.  Just minus the trimming, which nobody loved, and I get the impression the devs here at VS probably do not want ever, at all, just based on what I've read so far in these forums.

I don't see how an oz/g mechanic makes cooking any easier.  In TFC you just put the food in slots, hit the 'make whatever' button, and it deducts from each stack.  Why couldn't you do exactly that with normal stacks?  I always ended up with way more food than necessary anyway, so I wouldn't have cared it my sandwich ingredients were accurate to 1oz, or to 5oz.  And the thing is, you can flow it into the cooked food.  So you use 5 pieces of food to cook a meal, you get the hunger equivalent of 7 pieces.  Bonus!  How is this worse than taking 3oz of one thing 2oz each of 3 more, and 6oz of another, 15oz total, and getting say, 21oz in the final result?  It's the same thing, the end result being better than the constituent parts.  Any 'chunkiness' of ingredients can be taken up in the cooked result.

The way I see it your argument is boiling down to 1 thing:  that vanilla stacking either means the food yield from crops is too small for many factors to come into play, or the yield is so large that you can have a large range of factors in play, but you have to carry huge stacks of food.  That's true.  And if the devs want an extremely granular yield, but few stacks of food, then yes, maybe they'll either have to have higher stack limits for food, or go to a oz/g system. If they do not want extremely granular yield mechanics, then there's no reason to go to oz/g.  If they want to make carrying large amounts of food into a progression opportunity as I suggested above, then again, there is no need for oz/g mechanics.  So within this scope (obviously there's other solutions that could be come up with which we have not touched here), there are 3 options, two of which do not necessitate oz/g mechanics.

If you're arguing that the TFC rot/trim mechanic was great and fun and should be adopted here, I guess that's a second argument.  We'll have to agree to disagree in that case.

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1 hour ago, redram said:

But it's simple, just make spoilage like Ark.

That's basically how it's implemented in TFC2 (but you can't stack food with different "spoiling timers"). If it would be possible to stack food, the system would work very well, even with stacks.

2 hours ago, redram said:

The early game could be more about the struggle with food.

While that would be possible, I think it would be rather frustrating. The early game imo should be about "hunting and gathering". While there's a lot of food in every region, the supply isn't very sustainable (meaning the player wouldn't struggle in the early game). The player can either be nomadic and explore while gathering the necessary food on the way or settle down and create a sustainable food supply. Wild food could also be less nutritious than domesticated food, progression would still be present.

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On 4/22/2017 at 0:23 PM, Erik said:

The problem is that that the minimum gap of farming efficiency with the normal stack system is one item.

That is actually not a problem on a larger scale. You can just use randomization to drop any quantity of items you want on average. Want it to drop 1.25 items? then make it drop 1 and one more at 25% chance.

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30 minutes ago, Tyron said:

That is actually not a problem on a larger scale. You can just use randomization to drop any quantity of items you want on average. Want it to drop 1.25 items? then make it drop 1 and one more at 25% chance.

But players can't see the percentages. That's one of the main problems with chances, the player has no direct feedback. Other than that, random chances allow for bad luck, which obviously is a very subjective topic.

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1 hour ago, Erik said:

But players can't see the percentages. That's one of the main problems with chances, the player has no direct feedback. Other than that, random chances allow for bad luck, which obviously is a very subjective topic.

Actually you can supply direct feedback, through the block info of the crop.

> Other than that, random chances allow for bad luck, which obviously is a very subjective topic.

Thats why I said it's not a problem on a larger scale. On large scales random numbers converge (i.e. flip a coin a hundred times and you will get pretty close to 50/50% chances for either coin side). And crops are generally farmed on larger scales.

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From what I see... we need an analysis skill. Analysts get information and we always want information. That would also allow the devs to lock information from some players and give a progression in information. This would allow for many factors to exist and be available to players in a controlled, non-overwhelming way.

Also implementing a separate system for food stacking seems like a bad idea. It feels very amateurish, like something you would find in a mod. And while being fine for a mod, the base game should try to maintain a level of cohesiveness which this kind of extra mechanic would simply destroy.

However... if we wanted to use grams/ounces stacking together and have that be the system used... giving the player a maximum carry weight instead of a maximum slot count that would also work. It would keep the consistency. (and it is implemented pretty successfully in space engineers)

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  • 2 weeks later...
On 4/18/2017 at 1:49 AM, Tyron said:

There's one thing I'd like to have in the far future, which giving the player the ability to play the game in significantly different ways. I would like them to be able to skip mining altogether by acquiring your goods and tools through trade. Do you know the space sim freelancer? I loved that mechanic where you could just become a trader, selling goods for cheap, travel and sell them expensively. There are dangers on the way so it's still a challenge to do so. This is what I would like to have translated to our theme - a network of partially road-connected villages that buy and sell goods at varying prices.

 

I read over this before and can't believe this part did not stand out in my mind better!  Would LOVE to see this implemented in the game.  Sometimes mining for materials and such just gets monotonous.  When that happens, run the trade routes and see what you discover along the way.  CERTAINLY would add a TON to the temptation to explore, and with obvious reward for doing so. 

Trade between more distant villages yields better prices and more diverse inventory available for trade, or for purchase and use. 

Or, as you said, just skip mining altogether and be play as a trader/merchant... although the best building materials should only be available through mining and crafting, in my opinion...

...or perhaps from rare villages set in mining type towns. Those mining towns could also sit on extensive mine systems, allowing for the non-mining player to explore sub-surface without having to worry about the mining they are wanting to avoid in their game-play style. 

Food, armor, tools, etc, being available at game-balancing prices would also be a fun alternative to the norm for when you need a change in game play for a bit!

 

All of this would do a lot to get some players seeking out and exploring new areas and biomes, with the accompanying risk.  Travel for long distances would require safe places to sleep for the night, thus multiple bases or forts and such- food stash, small farms, etc.

Can't wait to see this start coming into the game!!!

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