Mining and lockpicking WIPs (Patreon)

While I'm testing quest triggers and dialogues I've been running through the gameplay loop and I'm slowly filling in the holes to smooth things out.  

Some of those holes have been concerning non-combat related activities.  The goal here is to make gameplay fun and rewarding even if the player wants to be a pacifist or just play Feign like a slice of life sim.  I've been looking a lot at things like Skyrim's Hearthfire expansion, Stardew Valley, Graveyard Keeper, and Animal Crossing.  I even went back and was looking at how Ultima Online handled their gathering and crafting skills.  At the moment I'm leaning towards giving the player a few daily chore/job type activities that will be completely optional - mining, farming, ingredient foraging, and chopping wood.  This will give players something to progress in if they don't want to constantly be running combat or quest lines.  

The good thing about all of these systems is that most of the heavy lifting has already been done and it just takes a few tweaks to make them work with the new gameplay loop.  Things like berries that the player could already gather were set to respawn after a few in-game days.  I've just expanded that same system to work for things like ore mining by tweaking the respawn values and adding an animation system on top of it.  Now the player will be able to head down to the mines every few days to gather another load of ore to sell in town (or eventually craft into items - once I get the time to add a crafting system).  

Oh yeah, and I added lockpicking too!  Of course I haven't had a chance to do the artwork pass just yet but all of the base mechanics are in and ready to go.