Flavour: considering nutrition burn rate in peaceful areas.
This is an idea I just had, so I'm gonna write it here to sort it out a bit.
Depending on how quickly in-world time passes, the rate at which a character in a roguelike burns energy - and thus the amount of food they have to eat - may seem ridiculous. There are some factors that aid in suspension of disbelief, I suppose. The character is some sort of hero or adventurer embarking on some dangerous quest. They spend inordinate amounts of time crawling through subterranean mazes, picking up random items and fighting random monsters. Basically they're doing a lot of stuff. In a constantly high-stress (ostensibly) environment, it's a little easier to understand why they need to eat so often.
That said, when they're in a town or some other relatively safe place, why should they be burning as much energy? They don't have to be on guard; they don't have to fight; they don't have to try harder to lug a heavy load of loot. Basically, maybe when the character is in town, their relaxed state should be reflected in their energy consumption.
So I've gotta think about doing this in FOE: when the hero is in a peaceful area (including all settlements, the Titter River Bridge, the Hatchery, and the Starship Zephyr Sun) maybe their nutrition point consumption rate should be decreased, I imagine by at least a factor of 2. Thus, while ordinarily the hero consumes 1 point of nutrition per turn, in peaceful areas they might only consume one point every other turn. This would allow the player to spend more time in peaceful areas without worrying as much about eating or spending money on additional food. The problem isn't so much allaying starvation, since most of these places will have food readily available to purchase, but you don't necessarily want to spend huge amounts of money on food that you can otherwise collect for free through normal play, especially given the Hunting and Foraging skills; there may be times when food drops are rarer, and you would prefer to have food on hand then than have to eat it when you're in a safe place.
This isn't a necessary feature by any stretch, but it makes sense and it would soften the typical roguelike brutality a bit, which I'm comfortable doing for FOE given its relative length and depth, so I should think about doing it. It shouldn't be hard to implement, actually.
Since it wouldn't be hard to implement, I might consider doing it for SouthLab's surface grounds as well. Soulthieves is different, though; because there's no such thing as a truly "peaceful" area in Soulthieves' world, it's hard to delineate low-stress and high-stress environments either canonically or algorithmically.
Thoughts. There has been progress on the SLE, and my growing experience and comfort with Python has me thinking about the old art site concept. Quite often, actually. It would be easier to really start if I had my own computer.
Depending on how quickly in-world time passes, the rate at which a character in a roguelike burns energy - and thus the amount of food they have to eat - may seem ridiculous. There are some factors that aid in suspension of disbelief, I suppose. The character is some sort of hero or adventurer embarking on some dangerous quest. They spend inordinate amounts of time crawling through subterranean mazes, picking up random items and fighting random monsters. Basically they're doing a lot of stuff. In a constantly high-stress (ostensibly) environment, it's a little easier to understand why they need to eat so often.
That said, when they're in a town or some other relatively safe place, why should they be burning as much energy? They don't have to be on guard; they don't have to fight; they don't have to try harder to lug a heavy load of loot. Basically, maybe when the character is in town, their relaxed state should be reflected in their energy consumption.
So I've gotta think about doing this in FOE: when the hero is in a peaceful area (including all settlements, the Titter River Bridge, the Hatchery, and the Starship Zephyr Sun) maybe their nutrition point consumption rate should be decreased, I imagine by at least a factor of 2. Thus, while ordinarily the hero consumes 1 point of nutrition per turn, in peaceful areas they might only consume one point every other turn. This would allow the player to spend more time in peaceful areas without worrying as much about eating or spending money on additional food. The problem isn't so much allaying starvation, since most of these places will have food readily available to purchase, but you don't necessarily want to spend huge amounts of money on food that you can otherwise collect for free through normal play, especially given the Hunting and Foraging skills; there may be times when food drops are rarer, and you would prefer to have food on hand then than have to eat it when you're in a safe place.
This isn't a necessary feature by any stretch, but it makes sense and it would soften the typical roguelike brutality a bit, which I'm comfortable doing for FOE given its relative length and depth, so I should think about doing it. It shouldn't be hard to implement, actually.
Since it wouldn't be hard to implement, I might consider doing it for SouthLab's surface grounds as well. Soulthieves is different, though; because there's no such thing as a truly "peaceful" area in Soulthieves' world, it's hard to delineate low-stress and high-stress environments either canonically or algorithmically.
Thoughts. There has been progress on the SLE, and my growing experience and comfort with Python has me thinking about the old art site concept. Quite often, actually. It would be easier to really start if I had my own computer.