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Topics - Hypolite

#1
Off-Topic / What language(s) do you speak?
October 21, 2013, 11:04:57 PM
Just curious about who a translation RimWorld could benefit to.
#2
Ideas / Sim-ple relationships system
October 12, 2013, 05:52:18 PM
Right now colonists in RimWorld have a quite detailed system of feelings towards the environment. What they eat, what they see, where they sleep, what they are walking on, all that have an influence on both their moods, love and fear. There is also a basic relationship system where colonists would quickly chat when their are close from each other, improving their mood.

I would like to improve and extend that system to generate more tension/relief in the game by spicing things up between colonists. I'm basing myself off The Sims for that matter, with a zodiac sign-based relation wheel. Each sign would have a different feel towards each other. Colonists with compatible signs would greatly benefit from chat, while opposed signs colonists chat could degenerate in hand to hand fights.

On top of that system, I would like to suggest the idea Demonantis dubbed Social Economy. Basically, keeping track of how much each colonist worked in the past day/week, and provoke fights between beasts of burden and lazy asses.

The goal would be to force the player to separate incompatible colonists and to equilibrate the work load between the survivors. Of course, a Noble or an Assassin would be harder to find a job, but they are so good in the few tasks they agree to do... Locking away a violent colonist for him to cool off would become a viable thing to do, but the warden should be compatible with the prisoner, or else...

The system can be improved further by adding love/jealousy/hate, but it becomes a complex module to implement. Also a working tavern could help ease the mood, but drunk people aren't always the smartest when it comes to relationships...

All the presented ideas look pretty simple to include in the game as it is now. What do you think?
#3
Off-Topic / Where are you from?
October 08, 2013, 09:32:24 PM
Just curious about geography.
#4
Ideas / Multiple maps
October 07, 2013, 10:54:44 AM
Right now in RimWorld everything happens in a 200x200 squares area. Expanding that area would prevent older computers to run it smoothly. A solution would be inter-connected maps via their borders with a transition zone, Fallout-style for example.

The benefits are multiple:
- Allows extending the main base to exploit a specific resource
- Create pre-defined maps of raider's bases, creature's lairs, etc... that colonists could attack
- Load a single 200x200 square area in memory at any single time
#5
Ideas / Uncertainty Veil (Fog of War)
October 07, 2013, 10:48:29 AM
Currently RimWorld has no fog of war. Player can see everything that is going on anywhere on the map. It makes it very easy to spot mineral veins and geothermal geysers at the start of a game, and later on it makes defense very easy since raiders always wait for the middle of the night to attack after hanging out in a corner of the map for a half day.

I guess "fog of war" is ill-named in the case of RimWorld. I personally think it should be named "story-inducing Uncertainty Veil" because it allows a lot of new behaviors for players:
- Scouting raiders positions when the raiders alert pops up
- Mounting search parties to look for survivors when the crashed pod alert rings
- Exploring to find minerals, geothermal geysers and resources stacks
- Building scout towers to increase view range, of course they would need to be powered and would be choice targets for raiders.

It goes along well with some character traits (near-sighted, eagle eye, nocturnal vision) to be translated in game terms.
#6
General Discussion / Forum rules (old)
October 04, 2013, 08:21:23 PM
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#7
Ideas / Towards an adaptive AI storyteller?
September 29, 2013, 03:58:18 PM
I open this topic because I feel like the AI storyteller should take into account the current situation of the player to create a steeping curve of difficulty, but currently I keep experiencing and reading exactly the opposite. My sense of difficulty is based on the number of raiders that attack during eclipse period. I'm of course only writing about Cassandra Consistent, because neither Phoebe Friendly nor Randy Random would raise such questions.

On one of my first games, I had 4 colonists (after recruiting the first raider sent as a tutorial), some wounded, power issues, few metal and few food, and the 2nd or the 3rd eclipse, I got attacked by well-armed 6 raiders (not just pistols). I barely made it, killing them all. The next eclipse, 8 more raiders came up, reducing the few turrets to rubble before banging on the doors.

On a subsequent game, I was off to a much better start, having a lot of food and metal, 4 healthy colonists and more turrets than ever. In the following eclipse, I had to fend off only small groups of two to four raiders, constantly recruiting up to 8 colonists. At that point I had all the guns I needed and I still got attacked by fewer raiders than I had colonists.

Reading Sire's playthrough comments about raider attacks, I feel like he has experienced the same imbalance as I did.

Being outnumbered and outgunned is not necessarily a bad thing, it can be by design, but I feel like the challenge is not consistent with player's situation. A bad situation is made much worse by large raider attacks, while a good situation is never really threatened by small attacks.

I wanted to know how Cassandra well evaluate the current player's situation and if other testers had the same experience as I and Sire did, e.g. large raider attacks when in dire situation and small attacks when well-off.
#8
General Discussion / What I like about RimWorld
September 22, 2013, 12:06:25 PM
I see a lot of people around here telling they love Rimworld, reporting bugs, telling their first impressions, asking for more features, sometimes complaining about existing ones (fire anyone?), but I wanted to write about the very reasons why Rimworld, even at that point, has been that compelling to me. I'll put aside the graphics in my critic, not that they aren't good at all, but we are talking about a storytelling-oriented video game, and I wanted to specifically talk about the gameplay.

First of all, except the first few minutes where everything is new and there's a lot to take in at once, I found the handling of Rimworld very smooth. Most controls are intuitive and don't require an extensive tutorial to be mastered. Even stacked items on the same square are easy to separate with a few clicks.

About the simulation itself, even though the colonists are autonomous, there has been almost no time where I would wonder why a colonist would perform a bizarre action or venture far from the base camp. Except for running into fire, but hey, bright light and heat make a very good reason to get close. Without going into a deep comparison, I had this sort of WTF moment in Towns where one of the villagers would make a trip across the whole map just to gather the bones of a dead critter. Of course, he would eventually get wounded or killed by the same exact threat that killed the critter.

The overview screen is also very convenient. Although the priorities are currently set in stone, I liked the idea of being able to assign specific colonists to specific task, and being reminded the proficiency of each one of the workers on the same screen.

I also enjoyed the Thoughts screen. It gives a very clear picture of what is affecting the mood and how much. It is a very good support of player-conceived story as well as giving priorities if the player's goal is to improve the mood of its colonists. The Character screen is less original, but does the job well to give a quick glance at what the colonist is good at as well as giving additional story material by the means of the Traits.

Combat was one of the best feature I had experienced in that kind of games. Especially firefight. AI fighters take covers, sometimes try to flank player-controlled targets, and the graphics to represent the aiming is clear and well-thought. Moving targets are more difficult to hit with a firearm, and going straight to hand to hand is seldom a good choice against an armed enemy.

Overall, RimWorld in his current state is an unbalanced but really solid game, with no big design flaw that I can think of that would seal its fate even before its launch without major rework. I would like to extend my congratulations to Tynan who did a fantastic job so far. I realize that it is far from over but the player experience is already very good.
#9
Stories / My game stories
September 16, 2013, 10:37:29 PM
I already narrated my first game here, and I will update this post with new stories each time I complete one.
#10
Ideas / Fire
September 16, 2013, 02:24:54 AM
Having been affected by fire on my very first run, I have a simple suggestion for colonists behavior.

Don't run into fire, unless healthy (at least 75%) and fighting fire or rescuing a fellow colonist. Or mad.

Jumping voluntarily into fire (as I experienced) should be prohibited, as well as trying to be a hero with low health.
#11
General Discussion / Relation to Prison Architect
September 16, 2013, 02:16:01 AM
I don't want to start any feud in there, or call in plagiarism of any sort, but Rimworld (previously called Starship Architect) reminds of Prison Architect, currently in a very popular alpha development by Introversion Software studio. Is that because the tools used to create both games are the same, or is there any closer or more personal relation to Prison Architect?

I personaly thinks that both games can go along very well, I was just curious about the possible sources of inspiration of Rimworld.