Otherworld - a game I'm working on

It's probably best if you send a pm.

I'm not familiar with Rasberry Pi and Arduino, although I've heard of the first one, but that's all.

Currently I'm in a situation where I need to decide how to divide plants into fast growing, slow growing and something in the middle. I have gathered a lot of real world data but some of my plants are too exotic to be on the list.

 

Yeah, I can just come up with random numbers and it's not like anybody could check them.

Recently I started thinking that I need to concentrate on how to control groups rather than individuals. A PC can earn the leadership of a group of NPCs through being friendly and helpful or being intimidating. I made my plan topics visible even without log in and there is a link to them from the main page. I will make it so that groups can own resource and tool pools and if they're sufficient, all members of the group have access to them, whereas if they are lacking then some go without. With certain equipment and certain resources, the group can keep itself fed or mass produce preserved food for winter. It's going to be difficult to program, though. The idea is that the group of NPCs has very limited knowledge and the PC can teach them new recipes and learn their respect.

 

The groups can't currently do anything but in the future, they will be able to age, produce children, gather resources, manufacture items, cooperate on hunting and farming, build housing for themselves and keep themselves fed. Once you visit another location and find a path there even if it involved going around a river or a steep mountain side, you can teach the path to an away team and send them to gather resources from the off-site location. Or it might require a human player to go along as a group leader, I haven't decided 100%.

We still need to figure out cron jobs because it won't be possible to have repeated automatic tasks without them.

Currently groups start with a number of members affected by the number of PCs in the location, and their stats are random and unaffected by each other. The chart shows what affects which stat. It will be possible to host events to boost stats, but it doesn't always work out. It also depends on your reputation within the group. If you hold a speech and the group respects you, they will come and listen and be inspired, but if you're new and they don't know you yet, only a handful of people would show up. The effect depends on how many people attend and if they are satisfied by what they see/hear. For example if you host a banquet and invite more people than you can feed, they will be disappointed and the results might even be negative. Also if you're serving alcohol, chance is that fights are going to break out. Someone might get hurt or even killed, like in a Dothraki wedding, but it might still be a good event even if someone died.

I might want to plan things pretty carefully before writing it out unless it's something obvious, because I wouldn't want to end up rewriting major things. I could do the PC reputation within a group, and in the first stage, just make it possible to spend AP for the chance to gain respect, until you are high enough to claim leadership. It will be more complicated in the future.

 

I've been working on the groups system, now the part that allows you to do favors for the chance to earn respect. In the current system, if you get very lucky, you can gain maximum respect even from one click, so I should probably tone that down.

In the current system, the amount of AP you invest affects how much respect you gain or lose. Whether you gain or lose and what the multiplier is depends on the success of the mission. There are currently 6 levels of success. It rolls a number from 0 to 99. If you get 0, you fail catastrophically and lose between 300 and 1200 respect. If you score 1-4, you fail pretty big time and lose between 75-500 respect. If you score between 5 and 24, you fail just slightly and lose between 15 and 200 respect. If you score between 25 and 74, you barely succeed and gain between 15 and 200 respect. If you score between 75 and 94, you have a great success and gain between 75 and 500 respect. And if you get 95 to 99 then you are awesome and gain 300 to 1200 respect.

The current system just picks a random description of what happened and it doesn't affect anybody's stats, but in the future for example if you're hunting and the description says you or someone else gets hurt, it will actually apply the damage. Also hunts will result in animal parts and foraging will result in resources.

I should think about the chances of various outcomes in the different categories. You can suggest numbers too.

Hunting results:

Catastrophic failure:
- you die (very low chance)
- someone else dies due to your negligence
- you get seriously hurt
- someone else gets seriously hurt due to your negligence

Big failure
- somebody gets hurt and results in hunt being aborted
- you get hurt by an animal and results in hunt being aborted
- you get hurt due to clumsiness and results in hunt being aborted
- you get lost and results in hunt being aborted
- somebody else gets attacked by an animal and you run away in panic instead of helping

Slight failure
- an animal gets away because you broke from the strategy
- you scare away an animal by making too much noise
- you get scared by something that wasn't really dangerous and make a fool of yourself
- you get lost and this reduces the number of kills because they have to spend time looking for you
- others make kills but you are completely useless

Moderate success
- you help others make kills but don't make any yourself
- you make one small kill
- you make one moderate kill
- you make a few small kills
- you accidentally drive an animal in the arms of a skilled hunter, who finishes it off

Great success
- you make several moderate kills
- you make a big kill
- you come up with a strategy that allows the group to make a big kill as a team
- somebody gets lost and you find them
- somebody is threatened by an animal and you save their life while getting considerably injured

Tremendous success
- somebody gets lost and while you are searching for them, you face a dangerous animal and kill it single-handedly
- somebody is threatened by an animal and you save their life without taking a scratch
- somebody is threatened by an animal and you save their life while suffering minor damage
- you make multiple big kills

Foraging results:

I can't remember without checking which categories these were in but I'll put them in approximate order of severity:

- you find strange mushrooms and bring them home. Somebody else eats them and almost dies
- You find an unfamiliar fruit and taste it. Turns out it causes your throat to constrict and you have trouble breathing for the next few hours.
- you find a delicious looking fruit but it turns out that it causes your tongue to swell up. You speak like an idiot for the rest of the day.
- You find a strange fruit and taste it. It's delicious! You gather a bunch and take them home. At first everybody is happy eating them, until it turns out they are in fact a laxative. Everybody is very busy the following night and nobody gets much sleep.
- you find strange mushrooms and bring them home. Turns out they taste like bile and are completely useless
- You find a moderate resource deposit.
- You find a large resource deposit.
- You find a huge resource deposit.

Generic favor results:

- Due to cultural differences, you end up breaking a norm you were unaware of and everybody is upset.
- You accidentally touch a person of higher status in a way that could be interpreted as sexual. They are greatly offended.
- You stumble and accidentally bump into a person of higher status. You feel embarrassed.
- You stumble and faceplant in front of people you were trying to impress. They laugh but eventually help you up.
- You tell a joke but due to cultural differences, no one gets it. You try to explain it but get the feeling that it's already ruined.
- You tell a joke and everybody bursts into laughter, except for that one slow guy. People think you're a riot.
- You participate in a philosophical conversation. People think you're pretty smart.
- A person of higher status almost falls in front of you, but you manage to catch them at the last minute. They are very grateful.

I would appreciate it if you helped me write more outcomes.

 

Today I have been thinking about food. The original system involved harvesting and manually eating various resources, which would then go through stages of digestion. While a character has food in their stomach, they're not hungry, but once the food moves on, they will get hungry again, even though the food in their intestines will continue to be absorbed and nourish them. This system would be hard to use on groups. For groups, it's better to have a statistics based system.

People generally eat 2000 grams a day but this varies based on certain stats. People are aware of what is available in their location and will set daily gathering goals for various local resources. If gathering goals are not met, some people will go hungry and the general nourishment level will go down. People can get bored of eating the same things repeatedly, so if they have a lot of variety, the group will only demand a little bit of each, instead of a lot of one. Also the daily demands will fluxuate. One day everybody might feel like eating 5 bananas a day, another day maybe just one or none at all. They should also concentrate on what ever is in season. Groups with a good self-esteem will lean towards prepared, complex foods, while self-loathing populations will eat what ever junk they can get their hands on.

Groups should have knowledge of how many ovens and fire pits they have access to and combinations they can produce with the resources available to them. Things like herbs and spices cannot be eaten on their own, but can be used to augment other food resources. Groups will also use firewood if they know how to cook.

I was thinking of the possibility of just having a value for generic food stock, and it would grow if there's surplus and shrink if the consumption exceeds the production. However, that would not take into account variety. In a day, a normal person might eat 500 grams of fruit and vegetables, 250 grams of meat or fish, 50 grams of fat or oil, 200 grams of rice, 250 grams of milk products and 250 grams of bread. They would not be happy if they only got food from one category. So the daily intake should include types of protein, fat and carbohydrates. An imbalance would make people unhappy. I'm not yet sure how I want to approach this.

 

I can't figure out from context what you're asking me to do because it's been so long that I can't remember where I wrote about outcomes. Can you quote it for me?

The things I currently need cron for are:
- weather changes
- making plants grow
- making wounds heal with time
- updating group stats (nourishment, population, wounded, sick, morale etc)

In the future:
- making items and resources expire

One budding idea about wounds I have is that I could have a time and date for when it will either be healed or kill you, and treatment or new wounding in the same spot will alter that date. That way people could tell in advance when they're going to die if they don't treat the wound, and it wouldn't be unclear that if you log out now and don't do anything, your character won't survive. But how would this work with multiple wounds? Maybe each wound would have a heal date, but the combined condition would define wether you have a die date that needs to be nullified by first aid. That way the healing code might only reduce bleeding and turn wounds into scars when they are fully healed.

 

I asked about this on Quora and apparently we might not need wget after all. It appears that the site where I read that you must use it wasn't accurate. If you use the path of the file instead of the url, that works in a different way. I can put the file in a folder where nobody can run it (except cron) so outsiders can't hassle with it.

 

Thanks for the clarification. I drew this flowchart for hunting. This is the way I'm going to process it once I get around to rewriting it. So the result will be a story of what happened during the hunt, and your respect points will be based on how many heroic acts or blunders you make during the trip.

It would be fun to come up with more blunders, particularly for foraging and social situations. Hunting might already be covered by this chart. I might end up making another chart of foraging, but it probably won't be as detailed.

Another option would be to allow the player to choose between options, which would lead into new crossroads and choices. But in the long run, this might get repetitive, so it should be possible to repeat the choices from your previous trip.

 

Yesterday I did some background work for skills. I decided it's easiest if skill levels have different durations and advancement rates rather than going for an even split.

In vocational skills, the scale goes Inexperienced - Novice - Apprentice - Journeyman - Master, and Grandmaster. You only need 5 points to get out of Inexperienced and into Novice. After that the ranges go Novice: 5 to 55 points, Apprentice 55 to 2055 points, Journeyman 2055 to 5055 points, Master 5055 to 8055 points and Grandmaster 8055 to 10000. Generally you get one point per hour of labor, but the catch is the higher you go, the more likely it gets that you are just repeating something you knew already instead of learning something new. So for Novice, the chance of getting a point is 80%, for Apprentice, 70%; for Journeyman, 50%; for Master, 20% and Grandmaster, 5%. Inexperienced will be 100%, and I might even make it so that it gives 1 to 5 points per hour, so that if you get lucky, you clear inexperienced in one hour. People will have hidden talents and weaknesses, which affect their likeliness to get points. I made a testing script that generates random point collections with a set likeliness of success. It's assumed that 4 hours is considered a full day of work. If somebody works every day and is incredibly lucky, they can theoretically reach Grandmaster in 8 and a half years, but statistically that is very very unlikely.

I didn't yet get around to gathering skills. They will have a different scale. It would make sense if the learning rates and points system remained the same, just the titles changed.