Going with our Gut
Hi everyone! Welcome to another Dandelion Void dev blog. Last time we talked about our new background and traits system. Today we’re segueing that into showing a new type of Status Alert, and a trait that makes it more prominent!
As a heads up, this post is a bit “gastronomical” and discusses digestion, stomach issues, and vomiting. Nothing too visually graphic, but please be warned if this is something you are sensitive to. With regard to our regular spoiler label, this post touches on a new status alert, traits, and their gameplay implications.
Your Stomach Tightens at the Thought of Choking it Down
Our new stat alert was inspired by an item description. One of the earliest food sources in Dandelion Void was the tuber, an edible root produced by the ponic grasses. We added these because we wanted a foragable food source for our early playtest builds. To keep them from trivializing the looting experience, we gave them a very low nutritional value.
Inspired by the unpleasant thought of eating a raw potato, we came up with the description: “your stomach tightens at the thought of choking it down.”
This ended up being a pretty evocative phrase, and many of our playtesters have even felt compelled to read it aloud. The only problem is that up to now it hasn't been true: a single raw tuber wasn’t very nutritious, but players could easily pound 6 of them back-to-back to fill up their belly without any consequences. We felt that this oversight could be “tightened up.”
Indigestion is a new Stat Alert triggered by questionable dietary choices; ponic tubers now worsen indigestion in addition to relieving hunger. If you accumulate too much indigestion you might find it difficult to run. At a certain level there’s even a chance for you to throw up, which is both gross to look at and also makes you very hungry.
Please enjoy the programmer art icon while it lasts! We'll be replacing it with something more polished in the near future.
Once we add cooking, you might be able to prepare raw tubers into meals that are easier on the stomach. In the meantime, indigestion subsides over time, so getting a little bit is fine. You can chance eating a raw tuber every now and then, just don't push it.
But you may need to be extra careful if you’ve taken our new “Prone to Cramps” trait, which significantly increases the amount of indigestion you get from raw foods!
Positive Traits, Negative Gameplay?
One question we are on the fence about is whether we should make a policy of mirroring positive and negative traits. For instance: if "Prone To Cramps" makes you less tolerant of raw foods, should we have a corresponding “Four Stomachs” trait that makes them easier to digest?
It feels like an obvious choice, and it satisfies the part of my brain that craves pattern completion. But even though the mechanics behave similarly, I worry that they don’t add equal gameplay value.
From our perspective, taking “Prone to Cramps” adds new decisions for the player. Decreasing the pool of foods you can easily digest forces you to think more about the food system, and plan your meals further ahead. You might place a higher priority on getting a cooking setup going, which could in turn cause you to build more "satellite" bases so that you always have access to food preparation materials. It also creates fun story moments where, if you do run out of palatable food, you have to decide whether choking down a tuber (and possibly evacuating your stomach) is a worthwhile risk against the alternative of going hungry.
By contrast, if a “Four Stomachs” player can easily handle raw foods, then it’s easier for them to snack on the go and they don’t have to worry about cooking as much. The player’s total pool of edible options increases, but the number of choices they have to make goes down. Feeling hungry? Just grab one of the tubers that are growing everywhere! By allowing you to ignore a core mechanic, Four Stomachs might actually remove gameplay.
This is of course a slightly exaggerated example. We could balance a hypothetical Four Stomachs trait to not be game-breaking. And for a game of this level of complexity, it’s not the end of the world for players to have to think a bit less about a single system.
There’s also an argument that we can let the players make this choice – if they think Four Stomachs makes the game less fun, they don’t have to pick it! I personally like to avoid putting players in situations where the strategically “correct” choice leads to an inferior experience, but there are different philosophies on this matter.
More than anything, the point of this tangent is to communicate how game design choices that seem obvious can actually be quite thorny. This isn’t a matter we’re decided on quite yet, and we look forward to future playtest data.
Editor's note: Robin was recently seen hunched over a bottle of Pepto Bismol, muttering "If I must suffer, so must the world..." in the cadence of a supervillain monologue. She insists that this is not a relevant detail.
A Settled Stomach
That’s all for this week, thanks for reading!
- Robin and the Manzanita Interactive Team