Hi everyone!
Felix here with another episode of our weekly blog. We’re still hard at work on our behind closed door demo for gamescom. It’s still far from where I’d like it to be but we’re progressing very fast.
Originally I wanted to speak about our conquest system but we’re still breaking the vision down in tiers so I’ll save it for next time. Instead I’ll talk about an integral part of any survival game: food!
This is one of the features that has to be in the game because it’s something that survival game players come to expect but that we don’t consider one of our unique selling points in terms of features. Meaning we’re going to look at the competition and steal all of their best ideas!
The three survival games that came first to mind in terms of food when we went about this feature were:
Valheim: You can’t starve or die of thirst. You have 3 stomach slots that you have to fill with different food and drink items and each of them gives you a different buff to your health and your stamina pools and regeneration speeds as well as an optional additional buff. More complex food with harder to get ingredients give better buffs.
Icarus: Exactly the same as Valheim except you can die of starvation or dehydration.
Enshrouded: Also very close to Valheim but the buffs are more attribute related and you have to eat different categories of food: meats, vegetables, drinks, etc.
So as you can see, there is plenty of copying going around already and with good reason. None of these games consider food to be one of their main design pillars so it makes sense to take a system that’s not complicated and that works well. We’re going to go for the Valheim version because - while more realistic - we don’t consider starvation and dehydration to be fun mechanics in a game and the food categories element of Enshrouded makes sense for their attributes based system but we don’t have these.
So now we have a food system and it’s time to fill it with content. As in all survival games you’ll start out with nothing so the first foods you’ll be eating will be fruits and vegetables you can harvest in nature and eat raw or charred on a campfire followed by the meat of various animals you will hunt. The fun aspect will be once you’ll be able to do more complex recipes as that’s where we’ll be able to add the most flavor.
I’m by far not the Roman expert of the team - Jens thinks about the Roman Empire much more than I do - but even I know Romans knew how to eat! And Legionnaires had a pretty varied diet for soldiers. I’m told we will for sure have Puls (some sort of porridge) and Garum (fermented fish sauce used as condiment) in the game which both sound… really tasty? While we’ll have to figure out how to have it present in Teutoburg forest, wine in various forms (acidic, watered down, etc.) will have to play a role as well. I won’t give too many examples here due to my ignorance but we’re working closely with a historian that will help us add the proper food in the game and I’m looking forward to that.
On the topic of food in the game, we’ve also been talking to amazing book editors about making an accompanying Roman cookbook for the game. I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts about that for some sort of digital deluxe edition.
I’m sorry for the shorter update this week but there is so much to do and so little time. I’m off to go mine some more pixels and make this gamescom demo shine!
Felix