Crafting meets SimCity? This might be one of those "bite off more than you can chew" game design ideas but I was thinking about how fun it is to craft gear in RPGs (on- or offline) and wondered if this idea could be applied to buildings or areas within a game world. The core idea would be to describe some structure or area in the world with stats that could be improved or changed via some in-game activity. An easy example would be shoring up a house by boarding up the windows or reinforcing a fort with armor plating. This would be straightforward, but an extension would be to define an area as components that can be rearranged, changed or removed. Take a pool of water: If the water were described as some sort of entity with properties, maybe you could freeze it, turning it into an ice rink. Or maybe you could add soil and turn it into a marsh. Or you could drink it, sustain a garden, flash it to steam to defend against lasers, run a fusion engine or summon a water elemental. Maybe you install a secret door to your underground lair. Whatever. The point would be that the gameplay would rely on a puzzle like mixing and matching of sub-components, with associated resources, time costs and changes to stats. Obviously the limits of player creativity will be bound by the genre of the game. How the game communicates the crafting possibilities would be just as important as the gameplay required to invoke them. (A major limitation to this idea that I should note that I'm completely ignoring would be displaying the changes. Just as some RPGs allow you to modify gear without having to visually represent the modification, I'm going to assume the same is possible with structures provided you're either not supposed to enter them or their representation is not supposed to be immersive.) Thoughts?

In some of the described instances, I could see it being added into any game relatively easily. Freezing a pool, or draining it, should not be that labor-intensive compared to say, building a fortress. Or boarding up the windows shouldn't take too much to make additional graphics for.

But, the more instances you add of this, the more expensive this mechanic will be (in terms of art, coding, etc...)

As far as gameplay goes, I'd like to see some things added. Like in RPGs with magic, casting a fire, cold, electrical etc spell underwater alters how it works (fire might create a area of boiling water, Electrical do damage to everything in the water, cold freeze the water, etc...). But that gets both complex and expensive in graphics (assuming it's not a text-driven game).

Doesn't seem too hard, just time consuming to develop the whole thing.

It seems what you are describing is nothing more than a finite state machine. You described a pool FSM, its initial state is empty, add water and you go into a portion of the FSM where heating goes to steam (with possible return to water though time would probably just return it to empty) and cooling would go to the ice state. The water state could be transferred to mud with the addition of dirt. Each state would then have an image associated with it and each transition would likely have an animation associated with it.

The implementation appears trivial to me with most of the time spent building the componenets of the FSM...

Potentially there are a lot of components there and you have to think up all the reactions between them yourself, and then figure out what should happen with interactions that don't have an immediate answer.

Drain it and use it for a DIY skatepark. See Dogtown and Z-Boys for a real world example.

Use it to stock fish or turtles or other kinds of aquatic food.

Use it for hydroponics. Use it to hide your grow operations. See Nice Dreams for an unreal world example.

Use it to drown stray dogs or cats or people who have given up on life. See Down and Out in Beverly Hills for an unreal world example.

...

From my own experience designing and implementing and entity framework, the biggest challenge you’ll have is coming up with a way to link and transition entities. From the simple and time consuming method of “coding” all possible transitions of entities, also the least flexible as only the ones you’ve thought of can be done.
Or you have the much more challenging task of developing a rules engine that effectively generates those transitions, but even with this you’ll need a pretty exhaustive list of characteristics and rules to determine what is a valid transition and substitution.

For instance

Fish live in water
Water is a liquid
A pool can be filled with a liquid.

Therefore fish can live in a pool filled with water.

But Beer and Custard are also liquids
Can a fish live in a pool with beer? What about a pool filled with custard?

If this is for creating/solving puzzles, based on mix/match rules, it sounds like a world of trouble. Your ideas consistently amaze me, but don't forget how easily something like this case become cumbersome to the user instead of fun. I remember playing Return to Zork a long time ago, and one of the final puzzles involved nearly every item in the game, and there was a set of X number of statues (8 or something). You had to put each item in the right place of each statue for them to do this magical sequence and let you go forward. The context clues were almost nil, and the number of possible combinations were astronomical. You literally had to use a walkthrough guide of some kind, or call that $10/minute phone number games used to have.

Not saying this would happen here, but putting aside the cool-factor of being able to interact with your world and be imaginative, that's what it reminded me of when you said "puzzle". On the other hand, if it were more dynamic and there were multiple solutions, perhaps many even the designer (you) hadn't thought of......

Quote:

Original post by TechnoGoth Fish live in water Water is a liquid A pool can be filled with a liquid. Therefore fish can live in a pool filled with water. But Beer and Custard are also liquids Can a fish live in a pool with beer? What about a pool filled with custard?

Yeah this is the sort of thing I'm edgy about. Although I've never done this before the real PITA would seem to be the need for complex properties (for the sake of flexibility and depth), but this very need would create a rich breeding ground for bugs.

What about a more constrained approach akin to creating potions in Morrowind or putting gems in weapons in Diablo 2? It would be less flexible, but there's the argument of limiting players to doing only the things that are actually relevant / beneficial. In most games with crafting you don't get to do outlandish things, like use an enemy's blood to paint your weapon.

Quote:

Original post by popsoftheyear Not saying this would happen here, but putting aside the cool-factor of being able to interact with your world and be imaginative, that's what it reminded me of when you said "puzzle". On the other hand, if it were more dynamic and there were multiple solutions, perhaps many even the designer (you) hadn't thought of......

Thanks, good warning.

I wonder, though, if that headache you mention with Zork was intensified by the fact that you couldn't progress unless you solved the puzzle. If it were something that involved yet you could go back to it now and again as you played in a sandbox environment would it feel like a huge mystery or project? Or would it still be a pain in the butt?