Expanding examining and adding in-game guide books
Posted: Mon Dec 15, 2014 10:18 am
There was a brief brainstorm in #coderbus about this, but I thought it would do no harm to discuss it here also.
Situation now:
New players are highly dependent on the wiki. Even regular players are still very dependent on it. Only hardcore robust dudes remember the steps to build mechs or disassembling a reinforced wall.
There's nothing inherently bad about this, but gameplay- and roleplay-wise it would be desirable that the player could see these things in the game itself, rather than needing to tab out to the wiki all the time, breaking muh immersions and totally not reinforcing arr pee. Or ever having to deal with the situation of you messing up the steps of r-wall deconstruction and now you're just cycling all the tools until you hit the right one, ugh.
And also right now most of the object descriptions are useless reference jokes.
Integration:
Combine these two facts and we have an idea: moving the wiki into the game, into the descriptions, making examining useful.
First off, the easiest jobs to help out here are the reagent mixing jobs (chemistry, cooking, mixology) that could have recipe books with all the possible recipes in them. Right now the cookbooks and such have only few recipes.
The examine-function could be expanded first on the building/disassembling mechanics of the game.
Examples:
Examine at a busted r-wall and see "This is a reinforced wall. [MORE]
--> It can be reinforced it with 5 plasteel. It can be disassembled further with a crowbar." or for a full-on-immersion-version "It can be further disassembled by dislodging the rods with a crowbar."
Examine a girder, "This is a wall girder. [MORE]
--> It can be reinforced with 5 plasteel. It can be dislodged with a crowbar. It can be disassembled with a wrench."
This could be further expanded on mech building steps as well, and anything else in the game that has multiple steps all happening in one object (machine building), and in situations where there's multiple steps happening between multiple objects (setting up singulo) could be covered with guide books in the departments. Thoughts? Could this work? This was brainstormed a little at #coderbus but I thought talking about it here wouldn't do any harm.
Situation now:
New players are highly dependent on the wiki. Even regular players are still very dependent on it. Only hardcore robust dudes remember the steps to build mechs or disassembling a reinforced wall.
There's nothing inherently bad about this, but gameplay- and roleplay-wise it would be desirable that the player could see these things in the game itself, rather than needing to tab out to the wiki all the time, breaking muh immersions and totally not reinforcing arr pee. Or ever having to deal with the situation of you messing up the steps of r-wall deconstruction and now you're just cycling all the tools until you hit the right one, ugh.
And also right now most of the object descriptions are useless reference jokes.
Integration:
Combine these two facts and we have an idea: moving the wiki into the game, into the descriptions, making examining useful.
First off, the easiest jobs to help out here are the reagent mixing jobs (chemistry, cooking, mixology) that could have recipe books with all the possible recipes in them. Right now the cookbooks and such have only few recipes.
The examine-function could be expanded first on the building/disassembling mechanics of the game.
Examples:
Examine at a busted r-wall and see "This is a reinforced wall. [MORE]
--> It can be reinforced it with 5 plasteel. It can be disassembled further with a crowbar." or for a full-on-immersion-version "It can be further disassembled by dislodging the rods with a crowbar."
Examine a girder, "This is a wall girder. [MORE]
--> It can be reinforced with 5 plasteel. It can be dislodged with a crowbar. It can be disassembled with a wrench."
This could be further expanded on mech building steps as well, and anything else in the game that has multiple steps all happening in one object (machine building), and in situations where there's multiple steps happening between multiple objects (setting up singulo) could be covered with guide books in the departments. Thoughts? Could this work? This was brainstormed a little at #coderbus but I thought talking about it here wouldn't do any harm.