https://youtu.be/jcZgzQmuOpA
This week, our Unity programmer Tommi started working on stranger wolf AI, which is looking pretty cool already. Our wolf artist Steve has been making some refinements to that model. Susan’s been working on a top-secret enhancement — small but delightful. And I started setting up the Lamar River in the new Amethyst map — as you can see, it’s still a work in progress (as is the entire map), but it’s coming along. This will be one of the few areas in Amethyst where you’ll be able to use the new drinking ability in WolfQuest 3, finally sating your decade-long thirst.
A thirst meter was among the ideas coming in after last week’s blog post (and thanks for all those ideas, some good food for thought). Many people also proposed adding a hunger meter. However, I’m wary of adding more meters. We already have four (plus the pup and mate health indicators), which is quite a lot to keep track of in the busier missions. Adding more meters may make the game more realistic in certain ways, but at a significant cost to usability and playability — both in practical ways (trotting halfway across the map to find water every 15 minutes) and deeper experiential ways (is thirst anywhere near to equal importance as health and pups?). Not to mention the ripple effects: Does your mate need to drink? How about the pups? Design is as often about simplifying as about adding. (“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, that’s creativity.” — Charles Mingus)
But we definitely want to incorporate hunger and thirst in ways that capture essential aspects of wolf life while also improving the gameplay. Drinking water, for example, will give you a modest health boost, which makes it helpful but not required. That creates a nice decision: Is it worth seeking out water for that health boost? Hunger is trickier, and we’ve been thinking hard about it. While severe hunger certainly should degrade health, normally hunger is simply information—it’s how your body tells you that it’s time to eat. We’re working on embodying that in the gameplay, and conversely creating disincentives to hunt again so soon after eating your fill. We hope that this new system of health, energy, hunger, and thirst will make the game more interesting and fun without unduly increasing the player’s cognitive load.