A bunch of people were kind enough to download 30 mb worth of example graphics, look through them, and give feedback. One of the background layers is off by a smidge; I'm having the devil of a time figuring out where the break started. (It's likely to be unnoticeable in-game, but it's irritating me.)
There's some tree placement issues, and I noticed (although no one else mentioned it) that some of the trees were putting little semi-transparent white boxes around themselves, with the result of strange white lines running through the screen. So I need to go in, erase all those, move some trees around, and reconstitute them into one layer.
All that's pretty straight forward fix-it stuff.
Less straight forward: the cliffs have some issues. I took out the layer of trees on the cliffs, added some extra shadows, and experimented with a gradient to add some variation. (Thanks to Erik's wife, and Erik, who passed on the suggestion!) I also shifted the whole thing darker and a little bit blue-er. It looks less like limestone now, but whatever. I'm having some serious issues getting the gradient to fit properly over the cliffs, though - there's either a little extra overlap, creating weird shadows, or not enough overlap, which limns the cliffs with a sliver of brightness. As a result, the cliffs look extra painted on. I think finding the right curvature for the gradient will help; a straight vertical isn't really ideal. I think a couple layered gradients in different directions will give the right effect; for now, it's experimentation. (I'm pretty happy with what I've got, but before I go through to fix the borders, I want to make sure I have it right.)
Much harder are some complaints about the grass; in parts, it's a little "bald", and you can see the shape of the curve that I textured, and not everyone is thrilled with either the monocolor or the static texture or the particular color choices. I haven't been particularly thrilled with my efforts to add color to the grass itself; the flat color recedes, but the texture pops, and given the texture of the trees, it's sort of painful. I do think it will be possible to vary the silhouette, which will help some. I'm wary of tacking on too many extra layers; we'll have to see how it runs, but flowers or something might also break the monotony. It's actually kind of difficult to do a genuine layered look with various plants (see: trees), but it's worth a try. Preliminary results from just brushing up the shape are encouraging.
One of the close-up trees has gotten a lot of comments, too, mostly with no easy fix. I'm still kind of poking at it. Some parts, like the canopy shape, are easy, if tedious, to experiment with, and probably worth doing. But things like the trunk are much harder, since it was made using a brush and my trunk-art is near nil. I think it's possible that the trunk is too dark/saturated, which is fixable, and I can back the contrast back some, but a complete trunk remodel probably isn't in the cards.
I also want to try bluing out some of the distant trees a bit, and seeing if that increases the illusion of depth.
Upsides:
- No one complained about the clouds, which is great, because they're hours and hours of really nitpicky work. Hallelujah.
- No one complained about the rain, which received a last minute tweak or six.
- No one suggested more tree variation, which is good, because I'm a little tired of trees at the moment. (All in all, there's about 250 deciduous trees, all duplicated, scaled, and placed by hand. Each of those has 11 to 13 layers, which had to be turned on or off by hand to merge the layers. About 10% of those were given custom tweaks on top of that. Plus there's 20+ conifers, which only have two layers. I still have a tertiary merge to do to get things right, but if I never look at another trunk sprite again, I will die content.)
- The general goals (season/weather info) were conveyed adequately, and in most cases excellently.
-No one protested the snow, either the active "it's snowing" screen or the snows on the trees/ground, with the exception of the tree that's already slated for an overhaul. (I still can't believe this, since my patented "put snow on trees" process consisted of a blurred brush and tracing with my mouse. Yay, though, because hours of work.)
- No one commented one way or the other on the slight variations in sky color - slightly purple in the spring, green in the fall, and less saturated/lighter in the winter. Which means that it wasn't too much of a leap. (It's pretty obvious if you've got the animation open and can directly toggle on/off one color or the other, but it's harder to catch otherwise.)
So: overall, I feel pretty good about it, and no "back to the drawing board with you!" moment. No one noticed that towards the end of the tree placement process, I got impatient and duplicated a bunch of groups. It's interesting that I can see the group division lines pretty clearly still; I'm hoping once I go away for awhile, I'll lose that recall, and it'll all just become one pretty mass.
I'll put up before/after comparisons once I've got some options I'm happy with; in the meantime, if you haven't taken a look at the alpha graphics, and want to, you can download here. Gentle criticism welcome, here or at the email mentioned in the description at the download site. Someone suggested putting the game title over the graphics line; I'm reluctant to do that, but let me know what you think.
In other news: Fishing! I know, I know, I really should have wrapped it up months back while it was fresh, but I didn't, so now I get to wade through a mass of uncommented experimental code. (I did this once already, and promptly saved over it.) The game will now put together a fishing rod for you. It's *very* alpha - it automatically provides an earthworm for bait, even in the middle of the winter or if you're in the middle of the lake, but you know, that can wait. I'm tweaking the Table of Fish at the moment. The completionist in me is sort of sad there's only a handful of species, but getting info on non-sport fish species is pretty much impossible, so the player's stuck with the usual trout, bass, catfish. (There's about 13 permutations and species, but a few of those are pretty rare. Trout, bass, and catfish cover a good 60% of the options.)
Fun fact: I am SO glad I never figured out where I wanted to put a river in the landscape.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
Friday, July 15, 2011
Design Diary, July 15
Materials is a little better, but not totally. I'm trying to nail down the Table of Excessive Properties into just a few useful qualities. Does it burn? Does it break? Does it decompose? Those are the biggies, but plenty of minor issues are coming up. For instance, burning implies that the material feeds the fire. I'm basically doing this by weight - for every pound of straw or wood or cloth or paper you put into the fire, the fire will burn for X minutes. (I considered a more complicated scheme involving BTU's, but then I got better. This is close enough for almost everything, and the exceptions are not things the player is going to run across often.)
I'm also struggling with the names for materials where there isn't really a material. Glass, wood, metal, leather: all pretty straight forward. But what about stuff like linen? It's made of . . . linen, but there's no point in having linen be a dramatically different kind of material than cotton or silk. Fiber? Cloth? Hair? Bonus question: what is a pumpkin made out of? (It cannot be plant or vegetable; those are taken.) Flesh is what I'm leaning towards for animals and people, although it's a little weird.
So, basically, there's substances, which are values, and each substance has some properties which determine the qualities of the object. This sounds crazy, until you calculate the difficulty of determining the difference between a wooden jug and a ceramic jug, and then it looks pretty nifty. Of course, in real life, there are ways to make wooden objects less flammable, etc.
I have not quite figured out all the coding complexities with things like candles, which should burn and feed the fire, but also be essentially non-flammable, but also be on fire sometimes and able to set other things on fire. Original design plans called for calculating light levels for various activities, but that feels fiddly and unwieldy now. If the PC only has one candle to read by, then by golly she's going to read by a single candle. I would like to strongly encourage the PC to sleep at night and work during the day, or at least have a regular schedule. If any light is as good as every light, that sort of hurts the whole schedule thing. (Lumberjacking by the light of a single candle is where I draw the line.) Light that isn't the sun is relatively precious, both historically and in-game. You can make candles, which takes energy, time, and precious materials. At some point, you'll be able to press oil from a few foodstuffs, but it requires equipment, quite a lot of the foodstuff, and time at a point in the season where it's a precious commodity. I'd like light to be a precious resource to be carefully conserved, and without artificial constraints, that's a bit harder. It may very well be something I need to let go of.
Also did a bit more slogging on the graphics front. Bare ground - that is, winter ground not covered by snow - was formerly a smooth set of curves the color of dirt. I bumped that up to dead grass. I don't have the color balance fully fixed yet - it's a bit fiddly getting the right look - but even the current stuff is improved. I need to do something with snow, too - the smooth curves are a little too artificial. I keep trying to get nice snow drifts, but it's actually quite hard. I think I need some shadows and blur, but can't quite visualize what I should be doing. Next attempt is going to involve highlighting the "crest" of the hill, trying to get some of that crisp reflective feel, and a blurred brush to soften the edge between hill and horizon for that soft feel.
I also did a seasonal merge with the first load of trees. Good golly, it's a lot of clicking. (Each tree needs to be actively toggled each season, multiplied by 11-ish seasons.) I'm also doing some cheating by leaving some trees in the season before/after the one I'm toggling to. It provides more variation in color overall, and saves me a little time. I've grown to appreciate conifers, which only have a "normal" and a "snow" layer. Stupid deciduous forests, with their seasons and their leaf dropping. But it's worth it to be able to click through the layers and see the seasonal progression.
I'm also struggling with the names for materials where there isn't really a material. Glass, wood, metal, leather: all pretty straight forward. But what about stuff like linen? It's made of . . . linen, but there's no point in having linen be a dramatically different kind of material than cotton or silk. Fiber? Cloth? Hair? Bonus question: what is a pumpkin made out of? (It cannot be plant or vegetable; those are taken.) Flesh is what I'm leaning towards for animals and people, although it's a little weird.
So, basically, there's substances, which are values, and each substance has some properties which determine the qualities of the object. This sounds crazy, until you calculate the difficulty of determining the difference between a wooden jug and a ceramic jug, and then it looks pretty nifty. Of course, in real life, there are ways to make wooden objects less flammable, etc.
I have not quite figured out all the coding complexities with things like candles, which should burn and feed the fire, but also be essentially non-flammable, but also be on fire sometimes and able to set other things on fire. Original design plans called for calculating light levels for various activities, but that feels fiddly and unwieldy now. If the PC only has one candle to read by, then by golly she's going to read by a single candle. I would like to strongly encourage the PC to sleep at night and work during the day, or at least have a regular schedule. If any light is as good as every light, that sort of hurts the whole schedule thing. (Lumberjacking by the light of a single candle is where I draw the line.) Light that isn't the sun is relatively precious, both historically and in-game. You can make candles, which takes energy, time, and precious materials. At some point, you'll be able to press oil from a few foodstuffs, but it requires equipment, quite a lot of the foodstuff, and time at a point in the season where it's a precious commodity. I'd like light to be a precious resource to be carefully conserved, and without artificial constraints, that's a bit harder. It may very well be something I need to let go of.
Also did a bit more slogging on the graphics front. Bare ground - that is, winter ground not covered by snow - was formerly a smooth set of curves the color of dirt. I bumped that up to dead grass. I don't have the color balance fully fixed yet - it's a bit fiddly getting the right look - but even the current stuff is improved. I need to do something with snow, too - the smooth curves are a little too artificial. I keep trying to get nice snow drifts, but it's actually quite hard. I think I need some shadows and blur, but can't quite visualize what I should be doing. Next attempt is going to involve highlighting the "crest" of the hill, trying to get some of that crisp reflective feel, and a blurred brush to soften the edge between hill and horizon for that soft feel.
I also did a seasonal merge with the first load of trees. Good golly, it's a lot of clicking. (Each tree needs to be actively toggled each season, multiplied by 11-ish seasons.) I'm also doing some cheating by leaving some trees in the season before/after the one I'm toggling to. It provides more variation in color overall, and saves me a little time. I've grown to appreciate conifers, which only have a "normal" and a "snow" layer. Stupid deciduous forests, with their seasons and their leaf dropping. But it's worth it to be able to click through the layers and see the seasonal progression.
Thursday, July 14, 2011
Monday, July 11, 2011
A Matter of Time
Okay, first of all: sleep is awesome, y'all. Does everyone know about this? Everyone should know about this. Life is SO much better when there's sleep. The game-related depression isn't entirely gone, but it is much diminished, along with the tick in my right eyelid. And the vestiges of sleep deprivation feel strangely like motivation.
So the issues with the time mechanic don't look so bad from here.
Right now, I'm using a modified version of Weather, by Ish McGravin, to give structure to time. Weather gives you a Day, Month, and Year variable, and then pulls necessary information for a given date from a table. It's not bad at all, and have let me just drop in a calendar with no real adjustments needed. I've got a whole load of scenes, as well, like During September and During Spring.
What it *doesn't* do is track actual dates. There's no easy way for me to compare Day 1, Month 5, Year 1 with Day 6, Month 6, Year 1. So if you're trying to compare distances between times (days to harvest, days to Christmas, days since you last ate), things are really, really awkward.
There are workarounds. Instead of giving food a literal date as an expiration date, I can just count down the amount of time until it spoils. I have a lot of reference tables holding statistical data, so I can actually tell you what rainfall has been like in the past week or so, the last month, the last year, etc. But it would still be nice to compare dates, and to be able to measure how long before or after Date A is from Date B.
The other sticky bit is that Ish had to do some workarounds with the code, so Month 1 is December. Which is not the usual assumption I go on, and means that you can't just write a phrase that easily measures time between dates. I think the Month 1 = December choice came from the moon phase code, which I haven't fully unpacked yet. (Okay, I only sort of glanced at it once.) You can write that phrase, of course, but every time I sit down to do it, I can't quite fully wrap my head around the implications.
Ideally, I would want an actual date value: X/Y/Z, which would make comparing dates considerably easier, and make it trivial to give things dates, or put dates as triggers. I'm not sure whether it would be possible to literally trigger events ("Now the lamb grows up in one year from now;"), but "Now the maturity date of the lamb is 5/5/2" is easier to read than any of the alternatives.
Replacing the current date system would mean having to change the triggers for pretty much every seasonal scene, plus a lot of other weather code. The introduced bugs could be non-trivial.
Of course, I could mesh a date system *over* the current one. I am not sure it's the smartest option, but it would allow me to the current meta stuff in place, and use dates for the everyday object interactions. And it would let me move forward, retrofitting all the weather/scheduling stuff as necessary.
So the issues with the time mechanic don't look so bad from here.
Right now, I'm using a modified version of Weather, by Ish McGravin, to give structure to time. Weather gives you a Day, Month, and Year variable, and then pulls necessary information for a given date from a table. It's not bad at all, and have let me just drop in a calendar with no real adjustments needed. I've got a whole load of scenes, as well, like During September and During Spring.
What it *doesn't* do is track actual dates. There's no easy way for me to compare Day 1, Month 5, Year 1 with Day 6, Month 6, Year 1. So if you're trying to compare distances between times (days to harvest, days to Christmas, days since you last ate), things are really, really awkward.
There are workarounds. Instead of giving food a literal date as an expiration date, I can just count down the amount of time until it spoils. I have a lot of reference tables holding statistical data, so I can actually tell you what rainfall has been like in the past week or so, the last month, the last year, etc. But it would still be nice to compare dates, and to be able to measure how long before or after Date A is from Date B.
The other sticky bit is that Ish had to do some workarounds with the code, so Month 1 is December. Which is not the usual assumption I go on, and means that you can't just write a phrase that easily measures time between dates. I think the Month 1 = December choice came from the moon phase code, which I haven't fully unpacked yet. (Okay, I only sort of glanced at it once.) You can write that phrase, of course, but every time I sit down to do it, I can't quite fully wrap my head around the implications.
Ideally, I would want an actual date value: X/Y/Z, which would make comparing dates considerably easier, and make it trivial to give things dates, or put dates as triggers. I'm not sure whether it would be possible to literally trigger events ("Now the lamb grows up in one year from now;"), but "Now the maturity date of the lamb is 5/5/2" is easier to read than any of the alternatives.
Replacing the current date system would mean having to change the triggers for pretty much every seasonal scene, plus a lot of other weather code. The introduced bugs could be non-trivial.
Of course, I could mesh a date system *over* the current one. I am not sure it's the smartest option, but it would allow me to the current meta stuff in place, and use dates for the everyday object interactions. And it would let me move forward, retrofitting all the weather/scheduling stuff as necessary.
Tuesday, July 5, 2011
Better Living Through Design Documentation
I'm still feeling off about FTA - frustrated and reluctant to jump back in. I wonder if it might be better as a full-on graphical game, which I think is just a sophisticated attempt by my subconscious to get me to ditch my current code, but I don't know for sure. And looking at my documentation, a lot of it is under-detailed, incomplete, or outright missing. This compounds the difficulty that the document is half-electronic, half-paper, and not organized in any particular fashion. In short, shoddy work. Which was fine, for a while. But I can't really skate by not knowing exactly what my material or crafting system will look like. I know the shape of the thing, but that's not concrete enough, and writing around it is just not adequate.
It's hard to know what's stress-induced depression - I haven't had more than five hours of sleep a day in more than three weeks, and I haven't had access to hot water or a functional kitchen in two - and what's good insight into what needs to get changed. I don't *want* to learn a new programming language to try to implement FTA, much less struggle with collision events and mouse clicks and save states. I don't even know which language would be most appropriate. Would it be a better game? I just . . . I don't know. I don't even know how to go about answering that question.
So I'm pulling back a little, again, and trying to locate and merge a bunch of documentation. It's been going okay on half-assed documentation, but that's not good enough anymore. The game's too big, and too system-based, and there's too many references between systems - it needs things laid out, and I need to be more diligent about saving all my research notes in one place. I probably won't stop implementation entirely - I do best when switching between tasks - but I do plan to cut back, take a look at what I have, and clearly map out the underlying first draft of the game.
(Since I first wrote this, I actually looked a bit at what it might take to implement as a non-IF game, and, uh, yikes. C# is really, really not as appealing as Inform. Not that I don't have wallbanger moments/hours with Inform, but yow. Steep learning curve. And I can make no progress at all with . . . well, with pretty much any of the helper platforms. Graphics is hard, y'all, and so is trying to switch from action-oriented to object-oriented. Also, I totally remember what I like about writing for IF. 50 animals do not require 100+ meshes and textures and animations and things. No, they just require a few sentences. Also, I got a full eight hours of sleep last night, and feel like maybe life is okay, after all.
Still, it goes in the design journal, because what is a design journal for if not existential crises and whining?
Also also: that design document: I should work on it. Maybe at a restaurant, since my kitchen sink is still bubbling ominously. Damn landlords.)
It's hard to know what's stress-induced depression - I haven't had more than five hours of sleep a day in more than three weeks, and I haven't had access to hot water or a functional kitchen in two - and what's good insight into what needs to get changed. I don't *want* to learn a new programming language to try to implement FTA, much less struggle with collision events and mouse clicks and save states. I don't even know which language would be most appropriate. Would it be a better game? I just . . . I don't know. I don't even know how to go about answering that question.
So I'm pulling back a little, again, and trying to locate and merge a bunch of documentation. It's been going okay on half-assed documentation, but that's not good enough anymore. The game's too big, and too system-based, and there's too many references between systems - it needs things laid out, and I need to be more diligent about saving all my research notes in one place. I probably won't stop implementation entirely - I do best when switching between tasks - but I do plan to cut back, take a look at what I have, and clearly map out the underlying first draft of the game.
(Since I first wrote this, I actually looked a bit at what it might take to implement as a non-IF game, and, uh, yikes. C# is really, really not as appealing as Inform. Not that I don't have wallbanger moments/hours with Inform, but yow. Steep learning curve. And I can make no progress at all with . . . well, with pretty much any of the helper platforms. Graphics is hard, y'all, and so is trying to switch from action-oriented to object-oriented. Also, I totally remember what I like about writing for IF. 50 animals do not require 100+ meshes and textures and animations and things. No, they just require a few sentences. Also, I got a full eight hours of sleep last night, and feel like maybe life is okay, after all.
Still, it goes in the design journal, because what is a design journal for if not existential crises and whining?
Also also: that design document: I should work on it. Maybe at a restaurant, since my kitchen sink is still bubbling ominously. Damn landlords.)
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Graphics Speed Optimizing
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| Procrastination is dead. Long live procrastination. Yes, that is one of those fluffy flavor graphics I wasn't going to make until everything else totally working. Sue me. |
I'm feeling good about the project again, which is awfully nice. I'm sketching out the speed boost for the graphics, which mostly consists of doing something about the *cough*mumble* hundred tree sprites.
If I were very very careful, I think it would be possible to collapse all foreground layers to a single sprite with seasonal changes. It would mean setting things up in Photoshop and snapping a "picture" of each season. That would be fastest, and I'm not wholly opposed to it. The downsides are: loss of flexibility and loss of variation. The loss of flexibility is more serious - what if I touch up the "bare earth" layers, which I'm not happy with? Instead of just saving new versions of the changed layers to the materials folder, I'd need to open the original Photoshop file, retake the pictures, and replace them. If there's any kind of misalignment or color tweak, this would need to happen every time. Those extra steps add up, and if I ever lost the master file, I'd be screwed. (It would be a pain to recreate the master file from the current materials folder, but doable.)
So step 1 is making backups of the essentials - both the master photoshop file where I do tweaks and check general layout concerns before going into the canvas editor, and the original, large-size sprite files.
After that, I'm planning on turning umpty hundred trees into a handful of layers: 3 backdrop tree layers, to give the forest on the horizon depth, and 1-2 foreground layers. I'm planning to drop the interstitial layer between the front wave of grass and the back wave of grass, and merge the grass layers in-game, although I might add some seasonal herbaceous plants or flowers in there. That frees up a layer for the cliffs, which have always been in the plans, but need to go in the far distance, behind the forest on the horizon. (Yes, it used to be bluffs - cliffs with a flat top - but now it's just sort of craggy hill things. Turns out they're easier to make - bluffs are hard, and I couldn't find a top that I liked. A for effort, but C- for graphical accuracy.)
In order to cut down on the work, I'm creating little tree groves - maybe a couple maples and a basswood, or five oaks and some bushes. Arranging these tree packets is quick, and flipping stuff over and putting them in different positions makes it harder to spot that placement is not entirely random. I practiced yesterday on the cliffs I made. The forest is mostly in a place that won't be seen, but it was very informative. Random placement is not as good as beginning at the back and working to the front - all kinds of overlap issues begin to crop up if you do that. That means switching between sprites more often (so you get more diversity) or working over a larger area than the cliffs provided. The grassland area should be fine. Also, things get choked up with layers pretty darn fast - I'm planning on grouping every tree group into its own folder this time, and periodically combined/flatten out the various layers to speed things up.
Or, you know, maybe your view will be of a prairie. Writing all this out makes me tired. Fortunately, it's definitely something I can do in little bursts of procrastination as a break from rewriting the damn hunting function, or implementing fish, or something.
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| 800 width pixel crop - the small end of what I expect people to use. I'm not thrilled with this one, but it does have some framing. I think some branch/trunk might be better - but perhaps a bush under the tree would round things out. |
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| 1200 pixel crop - probably about where most people will end up. Notice the complete lack of forests on the horizon. Pretty sweet moon, though. Notice how it's got a blue background during the day, just like a real moon? Also, I think I better shrink the celestial bodies again. |
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| 1800 pixel crop - probably about as big as I plan to design to. I feel like something should go on the left-hand side. The dense pine forest is the experimental part of yesterday. I think it looks pretty credible zoomed out. (Zoomed in, it's pretty clear that I have exactly 2 pine sprites, and have trouble drawing cliff shadows with the mouse, and not enough patience to use more than one brush size.) |
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| Cliffs, without trees. Something here is the wrong color. Cliffs too white? Back hill too blue? Clouds? I'd like to find a way to give the snowy hills some softness, but haven't been successful yet. |
Friday, June 3, 2011
FTA: Cooking
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| Mushroom cloud-shaped cake. I worry about people sometimes. |
I got as far as the beginnings of a taste mechanic. I figured if you were able to decide what combinations of flavors went well together, and assigned ingredients a specific flavor profile, you could have a fairly flexible system that would predict taste outcomes. For instance, lemons and chicken are classic, so the game would give a certain number of secret bonus points for an bitter/sour poultry combination, plus a bunch of extra points if it wasn't in an expected "list" - lemon chicken in itself might not win you any prizes, but what about tonic water chicken, which would have a bitter/poultry combination?
The mechanic really encouraged some bizarre combinations, some of which sounded remarkably unappetizing (blackberry bacon potatoes), but no worse than some of the real cooking competitions.
(I still think this game has potential to be hugely fun. Someone should make it.)
My first impulse in FTA was to give the PC the ability to do something similar. Sanity returned, though, and I realized I needed something way less intrusive and fiddly. Most people do not carefully craft new dishes every meal. I don't even think most *chefs* do that. The focus of the game isn't cooking, so it doesn't *really* matter if the potatoes you grubbed are pan-seared or not. And God knows I'd get fed up with a game that required careful construction of three meals a day, over years.
I've had some trouble clarifying what I do want, and this is part of that - nothing's set in stone yet.
Goals
The PC should be able to autonomously choose what to eat, cook it, and consume it.
Autonomous consumption should use food resources in a mostly appropriate manner.
The player should be able to force the decision to eat certain foods when necessary.
Desired Behavior
>EAT APPLE
The apple is sweet and crisp. You toss the core in the compost heap.
>MAKE DINNER
You dine on fresh trout, steamed spinach, and roast potatoes, washed down with a couple mugs of ale. For dessert, you polish off the last of the cherries.
>MAKE DINNER WITH APPLES
You roast nearly a dozen apples before your hunger is satisfied.
>MAKE BEEF STEW
You make beef stew, thick with chunks of top round, carrots, and onions, simmered in red wine, and set it aside for later.So there's four things here, in order of increasing difficulty.
Eat
When the EAT command is paired with an edible food, that is consumed, with nothing else. (EAT [meal] redirects to MAKE [meal].) If the food can be eaten raw, it is; if it can only be eaten cooked, an autocook reaction is probably in order. If the food is a discrete unit, like an apple, the PC will eat only one. (Maybe. It seems like there should be an option like EAT APPLES that would loop until hunger was satisfied or the food was gone.) If there's a lot of them, like berries, or it's a fluid or powder, like cornmeal, the PC will eat/prepare up to a given serving size - maybe a bowl full? - or caloric intake - if she's hungry, she'll eat until she's not, and if she's not, she'll eat a small meal/snack, up to the point where's she's too full to eat any more.
I kind of waffle on this bit - perhaps a single serving is appropriate under all circumstances. If you eat stew, you eat a single bowl of stew. If you eat bread, you eat a single slice (or roll, or whatever). Not sure what the player's intentions would be. I think either is potentially fine, and the single serving is less complicated, but jury's still out.
If different cooking methods are used to cook foods (ie boil vs. saute), eating would use the least demanding and/or quickest method of preparation. EAT OATMEAL pretty much means cook up a batch of hot cereal, not turn it into cookies or bread or bake it. (Although baked oatmeal is kind of amazing, and I should totally make some tomorrow. Also, I should not work on food design when hungry.)
Make a meal
The PC decides, on her own, what the most appropriate meal is. This requires looking at the hunger state of the PC to decide a calorie target for the meal. (Obviously, if the PC's too full to eat, she's too full to eat.) There's a location that is basically the "home kitchen" of the PC - initially, this is likely to be a campsite or cave. Later, it should be the Kitchen room. The game will look at the food available in the inventory, the home kitchen, and any nearby food storage rooms (the cellars, for instance).
From the available choices, the game will make decisions about what to eat. This bit is kind of blurry - for instance, should there be a preference for breakfasty foods at breakfast? But here's a first stab:
- Meals may consist of a main dish, plus 0-4 side dishes, something to drink, and optional dessert.
- Main dish, by order of availability:
- non-preserved, very short shelf-life food - fresh meat or fish especially
- calorie dense foods near their expiration, or shortish shelf life foods - breads, fresh green beans, corn on the cob, farmer's cheese, most vegetables, eggs
- less calorie-dense foods with shortish shelf lives, combined with something a little richer- lettuce, tomato, with cheese, oil
- moderate shelf life foods - things that might last days or a couple weeks - cured meats, potatoes, onions (with other calorie-dense food if possible), winter squash, other "keeper" vegetables
- long shelf life foods, preserved foods - dry beans, dry grains, canned goods, dried fruit, jerky, hard cheeses.
Side dishes - a variety of other categories of foods, either chosen to round out a food pyramid type thing, or by chance (or both). Main + 2 veg/fruit + 1 fat/condiment + 1 grain is a pretty rough start, but yields something that at least pretends to be a balanced meal: bacon, buttered toast, tomatoes and potatoes is a better breakfast than I usually get. Of course, I'm fudging a lot of random stuff I'd be bound to get: trout, squash, corn on the cob, cheddar and oats is kind of weird. And it would be awhile before there's much chance for randomness - most PCs are going to be eating a lot of spam, spam, spam, spam, and spam (or whatever they brought).
The nice thing about having a tier is that it seems to respond more to actual events than it does. Since fresh meat is preferred, a successful hunt will mean that the PC can sit down to a nice bit of roast rabbit the same night, which seems like a natural response to running across protein. And it doesn't require secret checks into whether the PC *did* go hunting - it just looks for the proper foods available.
Make a meal with something
This would be the flip side of EAT APPLES if I don't implement a "eat X until you're full" policy. This would allow either specifying the main, or more likely, consuming as much of a food as can be managed. Useful for trying to consume a supply of food before it goes bad - if the PC shot a deer in July, but had no curing facilities, she needs to consume as much of that meat as possible before it goes green. But standard meal practice will only include a serving size (possibly two, if the PC is very hungry) of the fresh meat with each meal, unless there's nothing else to eat.
Alternatively, the command could be used to force a main dish - if the PC has a fresh rabbit on hand, but wants to turn it all into jerky, there should be a way to easily dodge the default behavior of eating it for dinner. At that point, MAKE MEAL OF BEANS should work. This could be a totally extraneous command, depending on how EAT [something] is handled, but it's worth noting that the behavior does some nice things.
Make a specific meal
There's basically two parts of this command, one pretty froofy and one pretty necessary.
Cooking and eating takes place simultaneously. I toyed with the idea of a meal object, but there's a bunch of problems with it that I just couldn't fully resolve.
One thing not covered would be a case where the PC would want to pack a meal to eat later - say, if she was going hunting. This sort of thing would have to be covered by carrying edible food and then EATing it.
The necessary part: being able to make food *without* eating it, and being able to make food that takes sort of a long time against future use. It's possible to limit this to just a couple foods, I think, but the best example is bread. Making bread isn't part of normal meal prep. It can't be part of normal meal prep, at least for rising breads. It takes time, and a fair amount of work time. So it makes sense to make bread when you have the opportunity, and eat it later. This is a totally sensible thing for the player to expect, and really helps with time management. (And bread's a pretty key comestible for a bunch of English speakers.) It makes sense from the PC's point of view as well - it makes sense to take your lunch with you if you go cut down trees or hunt deer or fish trout, rather than hiking an extra few miles back to camp to slowly cook something. Pretty much every culture has portable food for trips and situations where you can't get home.
It's a logical extension of being able to MAKE BUTTER or MAKE CHEESE.
With the theoretical tools planned, it's possible to have dried meat or fruit or something, but I'm not entirely that justifies an inability to make bread. (Especially since it's cheaper and easier to lay hands on flour than meat or fruit.)
The less justifiable bit would be a list of specific foods and cooking methods. This one's super tempting, but also one of those holes you'll never fill. It would be kind of awesome to MAKE POACHED EGGS, but even I have trouble justifying it. And it's bad enough for stuff that has a recipe - I can give a pretty good argument that most chocolate cakes contain more or less the same stuff. (There's always exceptions. Don't email me.) But what is a stew? What goes in a stew? Meat, sometimes. Root vegetables, sometimes. Other vegetables, sometimes. But hardly ever green beans. Why?
I think I could assemble a recipe using either a specific ingredient or a kind, plus an amount. So a stew might have 6 oz of meat, 10 oz of root vegetables, and a list of optional additions (1 bay leaf, 1 bottle of wine, 2 tsp ground pepper). But holy fuck that's a lot of work, and it's hard for me to believe that it's worth it for anyone involved, especially since that stew will stay fresh less than a day, and in the meantime get all congealed and gross. And let's face it - there would never be enough recipes to satisfy people, and knowing me, there'd be some kickoff as to whether the proper crust for a key lime pie is graham cracker or wheat flour, and the world would end. (Graham cracker. Also, no whipped cream and certainly no meringue.)
I *think* I might be able to do a decent job with a few cooking methods: MAKE APPLE PIE wouldn't work, but ROAST APPLES would. I don't know if that's better or worse than doing nothing. Worse, I suspect, but it's still mostly on the table, whereas the whole recipe thing . . . yeah. Not unless I can find a way of doing it that is easy, straightforward, and just requires a couple easy-to-remember inputs into a table.
Heh. We're moving right along on the list of features no longer under consideration. On the up side, I never even started the recipe collection, so I'm going to count myself about 100+ hours ahead of where I would have been.
But I do need to chew over what, besides bread, the PC should be able to make and store. It seems reasonable to me to put a few desserts on the list. I'm looking for stuff that's fairly common - bonus points for having cultural significance. For instance, cake seems like a real possibility. Sugar is hard to come by, but possible, and it seems reasonable to let the player set by a dessert or two. Also, cakes have a bunch of nice connotations - if I were post apocalypse, I'd totally try to find a something to celebrate my birthday.
If you, dear reader, think of anything else, let me know. Preservation is a whole other issue, so dried fruit and meats, cured sausages, canned stuff, cheese/butter, and alcohol is handled elsewhere. Also, I was going to make a joke here about how there's no apocalypse cookbook and that's totally a market niche, but I was wrong. Then I was going to make a joke about there being no post-apocalyptic cookbook. D:
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