Toma said:
Hm, couldnt these items have a descriptor at least in the crafting screen then? The items that cant be used because something is contained in them are yellow, right? So how about "water (in a bottle)" vs "water (in a river)" as name tags for example?
And what is the gameplay rationale between filling up waters costing an action point? I mean, I can grab and eat berries without that costing me an action point, holding a bottle into the water doesnt really take that much longer either.
That might be doable. Some folks (like CrunchyFrog, below) have also asked for ways of filtering the ingredient list by either source location (e.g. ground-only, vehicle, camp, etc.) or by type (e.g. consumables, tools, junk, etc.). I think it's a good idea, if I can make time to do it.
As for the gameplay rationale, guilt by omission?
Seriously, though, some of the game's quirks are just legacy systems that seem out-of-place now that newer systems were added. Originally, there were no resource items, such as forests, rivers, and lakes. Forest hexes had a few sticks, but they'd run out. And water was mostly found via scavenging.
However, it seemed that some hexes should have infinite supply of certain resources, so I added forest, lake, and other items that could be "crafted" to get those supplies. It made sense at the time that one would take a few minutes to harvest sturdy sticks from a forest, or several liters of water from a river.
It's not intuitive, though, so I may just change it so that forests/water are containers that refill automatically with their resource type. Then players just need to empty them out when they want some, and "use" to refill them.
CrunchyFrog said:
Finally, crafting multiples of the same item is also a bit of a hassle when you're trying to juggle all your items in the camp at once. You'll craft one piece of meat, it'll move the cooked meat, fire, and stick to the bottom, but the moment you click the fire to bring it back up into the crafting input to cook the rest of the pieces, the stick that was leftover gets whisked away into a random spot in the crafting inventory blob. What's weird is that you've already made it such that any items in the crafting input at the top that aren't pertinent to the selected recipe persist in the window and only the needed items get manipulated, but the same isn't true for the crafting output. Making the output persistent so I don't have to both keep emptying out the whole thing and re-finding the crafting items in my inventory would go a long way to make crafting altogether a bit less tedious.
I was thinking of making it such that the tools used to craft stay put, and only the created/destroyed items move to the bottom. That way, cooking meat leaves fire and such up at the top for the next round, and only the cooked meat appears at the bottom.
The reason I clear the bottom out each time an item moves is mostly for technical reasons (e.g. leaving items there when a new recipe is triggered might block the incoming items from being added, if there's not enough space left).
CrunchyFrog said:
For some reason it wants to prioritize using purified water over the regular stuff, and for noise traps it keeps trying to use up my hospital bracelet before my stack of string.
This one's a bit trickier to solve. I tried sorting the ingredients by price, so cheaper ones get chosen first. However, some items are the same or cheaper after identified, so it breaks down occasionally. The next version will demote items that have already been identified, hopefully alleviating this issue.
However, there are also recipes where the user prefers the "best" ingredients be used first, such as when crafting a tool that's meant to last (e.g. spear). Ideally, the auto-recipe would guess correctly based on context, but that's been beyond my capabilities for now.
More_Badass said:
On surrendering/threatening, how does that work?
Each AI has morale, which is affected by things like:
- their inherent bravery/cowardice
- number of allies present vs. enemies
- weapons they and their target are using
- their conditions/injuries
- a random factor
- if there is a "pack leader" present, what they're doing
If that morale is higher, they're more likely to attack. Conversely, they'll flee if it's lower.
AI will sometimes accept an offered surrender if they are a type that cares about loot, and if you're unconscious, they may just loot you and leave. But they're under no obligation to accept surrender, any more than you are. If
they demand surrender, and you agree, they'll take some stuff and leave battle.
Threatening will slightly increase your relative morale, in hopes that an enemy near the edge breaks and flees. If an enemy is hardcore coming after you, they'll likely continue to. If you've whittled them down to defensive moves, you might be able to push them over the edge with a threat. But consider it from their view: does their threatening usually matter to you? Most people have already decided whether they're going to fight or not by the time the first turn is over.
One exception is when firing a gun. A gun has a reasonable base threat level compared to many weapons. However, when the gun is
fired, it's threat level increases quite a bit. You've just shown that you not only have ammo, but that you're willing to use it.
Burger said:
Do you have plans to move away from Flash as a development platform?
I do, but not for NEO Scavenger "1." I briefly considered porting it to a more flexible language (i.e. HaxeFlixel instead of AS3 Flixel), but it's a huge risk this late in the project. Future games will likely be in Haxe/OpenFL/HaxeFlixel, though. I apologize for the clunky application wrapper!
