HardLife - on training, conditioning, and injury
Added 2018-05-16 16:22:44 +0000 UTCOkay, after careful review, I believe the best course of action is to track progress in individual muscle groups. Its a fair amount of work, but I believe the game will be much better for it.
First off, everyone has their own favorite area/group they want to focus on, and the description system needs more precise measurements to work from. Tracking individual regions will give us this level of detail. It would be a huge injustice to you guys to glaze over the opportunity to build the physiques you want.
It should be up to you guys, the players, to decide how you want to focus your growth and abilities. As the developer, I shouldn't force you down a narrow or generic path just to save time/effort.
The exercises themselves work different combinations, and keeping track will lead to a training rhythm that alternates work/rest days on each group, creating a more natural simulation.
Then there's the matter of the upcoming contest/gambling system in v0.4. It will have activities like Armwrestling, in which very specific muscles play a huge role, while others a more minimal. Not to mention Wrestling and Boxing, which will need to know what area is fatigued or injured from impacts and submission holds.
There's also the matter of resting and recovery. While Qi is meant to refill very quickly, physical damage, toxic buildup, or injury takes quite a bit longer. So far we have not been tracking this. Among other things this change allows us to account for mental fatigue and the affect of stress, injury, and illness. It will also make it possible to overwork an area to the point of critical failure, which will create the need for a bit of strategy.
Breaking training and damage into specific regions also gives us a starting point for the upcoming perks and conditioning system, and a way to fine tune current karmic purchases such as height boosting.
Under the new system, conditioning/training/perks (and damage/wounding) will take advantage of the recently added caliber metric from combat. It was always intended as a measure for skill/abilities, and now its role is twofold: first it marks the upper bound for training at any given level, which helps us split the perks/conditioning into discrete increments; next it gives us a way to boost all existing abilities, to show overall growth with new levels.
Caliber is the triangular-root/base of your level, which in turn is the average of your primary stats. At Level 6 (having raised Cindy's stats by an average of 1) your Caliber would be 3. This means you could train muscles, perks, et cetera up to 3, and the power units would also be 3; which would make the durability/integrity of any particular body-part/muscle a 9 once fully trained, or a 3 if completely untrained.
The more you train an area or ability, the more it can handle without failing.
When an area has low integrity, there is significant risk of injury. This can and will lead to scenarios like breaking someone's arm during a match (armwrestling, submission holds, etc.). That will add a lot more flavor to the game.
Sorry for not getting this out sooner, I was writing an update last night when the internet went out, even my phone had no service. :|
I know its a lot to take in (and code) at once, but what do you guys think of this idea?
Comments
I've been thinking about doing exactly that with PSL. It seems like it would be good for this game as well, to initially hide the extra detail/control until players are ready for it. I was already considering that for the 15-energy matrix since a combination of Qi and statuses/conditions should be pretty clear indicators of when action, such as resting, is needed. The exercises hit different combinations of muscles, and some are broader exercise-groups that offer a more balanced approach... for a lower level of detail, I could simply hide most of the other workouts and just keep a short and balanced mix. But, in the case of the gym, it doesn't need to be a game-setting; it would make more sense, from a story point, that a training program was created/suggested for you as a new gym member during your 1 free personal training session/orientation tour. You can focus pretty heavily on one or a few muscles, even though there is a soft cap on the training, the act of training moves the cap upwards; so, while there can be wasted effort in some cases, most of the time you will be making progress. And as far as food, calories aside, the most balanced thing you can use is water. (works well with all 15 energies)--- interesting thought with the robot, though. It might not be a bad idea to for me to add a tutorial mode/character that has an assistant that guides them through some areas, and handles others for them. Thank you :)
ShadowRx
2018-05-17 08:39:01 +0000 UTCHmm, it's interesting and fun, but might get rather difficult to craft scenes for later on. Additionally, it makes working out potentially very grinding if you have to go and calculate which muscle group we need to focus on. (Just maintaining proper nutrition is difficult enough). Maybe if you had some autoworkout/autoeat button that did a decent enough job were people didn't have to worry about these little details if they do not want to. It could of course have a much lower rate of return than doing it perfectly. The other issue is that if you can overtrain a muscle group so easily, it will just incentivize a workout routine anyway. Therefore, the benefit of focusing on specific muscle group would be lost because growing optimally would mean not focusing on it at all. I feel as though you may want to have a basic and more advanced mode of this game to deal with both player groups. Some just want the growth and slice of life and others may care about little details like so. I think the game Free Cities is an excellent example of this. You can program a simple bot to help manage your slaves and their stats. Of course, you can always get a lot more modular control if you so choose. Something to consider.
RocketNowWow
2018-05-16 18:01:02 +0000 UTC
