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Content
So I went down a bit of a rabbit hole the other day. I was going through gameplay loops from other games and really trying to break things down into simple discreet chunks. Like take Skyrim, the player goes into town for buying/selling, quests, crafting, and item storage. Then they leave town, go to the quest target, which is usually a dungeon type area, run the dungeon, kill everything, collect all the loot, and the crafting resources. Then go back to town to do it all over again. Relatively simple right?
Then I started looking at the basic loop in Feign and trying to figure out places to improve on that general loop with the current and planned mechanics. Let's call it "goblin" content for the sake of euphemism.
Quick note: a lot of this will be optional based upon the player's preference but I wanted to try and pack as much goblin into the gameplay as possible.
In town the player will need to heal to restore health which means sleeping at the tavern, in an owned bed, or in an unsecured location - all of which can lead to goblin content.
Buying and selling goods - ok I haven't figured out how to add goblin content here but I'm open to suggestions!
Farming/resource gathering - goblin content if the player has the equivalent of followers/ house carls/ stewards. I'm thinking there will be local interactive points for animations for NPCs sort of like how NPCs in Skyrim would randomly use an alchemy station but make it more goblin.
Quest givers - not so much goblin.
Quest rewards - lots of goblin.
You probably get the idea. At least that's the plan for the town end of the gameplay loop. Also making it so that goblin content isn't limited to one part of the loop but is available at almost any point in the loop depending on player preference. I still have another 2 pages or so of notes trying to plan for players that want to treat the game more like a farming/ life sim, for players that want more of a Skyrim like experience, and for players that want all goblin all the time. There's a ton of animations to do to support all of this content but I have nearly every necessary system in game and ready to go in at least a roughly functional state.
But yeah, other than that I finished up the crop / farming systems that I had roughed out last week. The testing plant asset can now be "planted" by the player, will take 3 days to grow, at each stage it supports a new model to show growth/size, and then can be harvested. It also supports a rough version of watering the plant. If the player waters the plant 3 times in between harvesting it will grow more resources. It's pretty much just the Animal Crossing crop mechanics.
And still chipping away on the quests and scripting. It's at the point where I finally have a concrete to do list. Now to just grind through that.