The mono diet

Potjeh · 2018-06-08 15:58:42

jasonrohrer wrote:

I'll make some time to play this game this weekend.
But it looks like the kind of complicated under-the-hood food system that I'm trying to avoid. Eating a fish eyeball satisfies you both along the fish and a sausage axes.
http://ringofbrodgar.com/wiki/Food_Satiations
There are currently 15 different satiation categories.

Yeah satiations are kinda BS, but even without them there is plenty of reason for varied diet due to different stat point combos (your highest stat determines points needed to raise any stat) and variety bonus being a big deal. If you're gonna play, try taking your character from 10 to 15 stats on a mono diet, and then try doing the same with another character but never eating the same food twice between two stat gains. The difference in time it'll take you humongous.

jasonrohrer · 2018-06-08 15:59:58

aowen wrote:

"Bonus" as in the first time you eat it, you are filled to max + X beyond your hunger bar?
Or is it that you are filled the regular amount (3 for berry, for example), but you get to wait longer to eat?

Probably there's just a separate reserve tank that shows up as a number on the HUD. +25 or whatever.

So if you're starving, and you eat a berry for the first time, you get the normal 3+2 = 5 food (normal eating bonus), and then you get a variety bonus of 10 or whatever. And that just leaves you at 5 food, but puts a +10 at the end of mostly-empty food bar. That +10 counts down before your regular food bar resumes counting down. In the mean time, you can eat more berries or whatever to keep filling your regular food bar.

A rough sketch of an idea. But it seems pretty easy to understand, and it's the opposite of some kind of system that punishes you for eating the same food too much (like, repeat carrots satisfy less and less).

The only thing it misses is returning to some food later won't do anything special, even if you haven't eaten it in a while. I'm not necessarily trying to motivate an endless quest for brand new foods, but instead a general pattern of variety. I also worry about these bonus points piling up and allowing you to go 30 minutes without eating or something. Maybe you can only get bonus points for a new food if your bonus bank is currently empty, so you can only run one bonus at a time, instead of stacking them.

Potjeh · 2018-06-08 16:01:06

What if max bar was a function of food variety rather than age?

Muddauber · 2018-06-08 16:06:57

Well, I really like the idea that each food group like meat, veggies, and fruits take different rates to burn off your food bar.

Overall, I am just worried the game will get too easy with even more food bar to fill. If towns are already dying out from boredom it seems like it'd exacerbate the issue. I feel like if anything, there should just be simple needs like vitamins. You don't eat fruit for a long time, you get scurvy. You don't eat meat for a long time, you get fat-starved. Babies wouldn't have to worry about it since they're breastfeeding.

Spockulon · 2018-06-08 16:17:50

Potjeh wrote:

jasonrohrer wrote:
My 15-y-o pointed out that NO GAME has more than about 20 foods---for a reason
O RLY?
Pages in category "Foods"
The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 354 total.

Another game with more than 20 foods

But I mean, it's not like that game was that popular or anything... /s

aowen · 2018-06-08 17:10:40

jasonrohrer wrote:

Probably there's just a separate reserve tank that shows up as a number on the HUD. +25 or whatever.
So if you're starving, and you eat a berry for the first time, you get the normal 3+2 = 5 food (normal eating bonus), and then you get a variety bonus of 10 or whatever. And that just leaves you at 5 food, but puts a +10 at the end of mostly-empty food bar. That +10 counts down before your regular food bar resumes counting down. In the mean time, you can eat more berries or whatever to keep filling your regular food bar.

Some behaviors I can imagine from this
- Players collect/farm different crops and wait on eating them until the right moment
- Mothers feed babies new food (instead of breastfeeding) to keep them fed longer
- Griefers intentionally feed babies new food while young, so they can't collect the bonus as adults (is this an effective grief tactic? I'm not sure)

jasonrohrer wrote:

I also worry about these bonus points piling up and allowing you to go 30 minutes without eating or something. Maybe you can only get bonus points for a new food if your bonus bank is currently empty, so you can only run one bonus at a time, instead of stacking them.

I agree with this.
It wouldn't be difficult for an Eve to stack benefits from onions, burdocks, berries, and carrots, and then go on an efficiency spree.

jasonrohrer wrote:

A rough sketch of an idea.

Where all good ideas start.
I'm happy my feedback can be part of the process. Exploring these types of ideas is great. : )

Last edited by aowen (2018-06-08 17:19:06)

Potjeh · 2018-06-08 19:01:15

Another interesting game for food models is UnReal World. There food has carbs, fats and proteins, and you have to get enough of all of them or you waste away. Maybe in OHOL we could have those three meters next to temp, and different foods give different things. Carb bar influences hunger drain rate, protein bar influences max hunger, and fat bar influences both. These bars deplete with hunger. Raw foods are usually fairly pure in one of the components, so you have to constantly rotate them. As you get more advanced foods they start to get more balanced so there's less annoyance of juggling different food types.

Christoffer · 2018-06-08 19:25:15

Permanent bonus for eating a new food should achieve your grand sushi opening dream, Jason

Flintstone wrote:

A bonus for eating varied foods seems like a good idea. I have an alternative to keeping track of how many you have eaten of everything. Not sure it’s better, but it’s at least interesting:
A human needs a varied diet to grow up healthy. Remove certain building blocks, and people will become shorter or more often ill, shorter life span, etc. So imagine that ten of the hunger boxes are coded to ten different types of nutrition and the way to gain a hunger box is to consume a food item of that type. A diet of only carrots will yield an adult with fewer hunger boxes than one who has had a varied diet. People will live healthier lives when they get access to more food variation.

You could skip the nutrition coding and just give one hunger box for every new food, up to a maximum. Simple mechanic, but effective.

ZneoC · 2018-06-08 19:52:03

Spockulon wrote:

Potjeh wrote:
jasonrohrer wrote:
My 15-y-o pointed out that NO GAME has more than about 20 foods---for a reason
O RLY?
Pages in category "Foods"
The following 200 pages are in this category, out of 354 total.
Another game with more than 20 foods
But I mean, it's not like that game was that popular or anything... /s

Stardew. And food is useful in that game.

Rebel · 2018-06-08 20:42:58

All I can see this doing is increasing the number of plots for the meta food. if berries are still easier to grow then carrots, people will just grow another berry bush instead of carrots. Thus, huge meta food farms will just be made. unless you make it easier to grow other other crops or have all crops be the same difficulty to grow, then it would be worth growing that carrot plot to get the bonus, (and using the word bonus implies that this won't happen all the time and its a luxury).

Don't even think about using the haven food design, its unique but even for haven it doesn't really work or encourage different foods being eaten as people will still eat whatever they can to get that stat level up and even with so many pieces of food there are still meta foods people feast on, plus with drinks sats are not a problem. plus you have to play haven for like a month at least to get to know how to play and what the fuck is going on and how to avoid raiders.

I believe in you Jason to create your own solution to this problem. and we can throw ideas at you but at the end of the day, you will only know what works if you implement it, its one thing saying "Have a food bonus for eating various of food could work" and actually seeing how the players find loopholes around it. it's annoying but it's not like you haven't implemented ideas before that were good ideas at the time and players just ignored them or find ways around it.

if worse comes to worse and you cant think of a solution to it, keep adding to the tech tree and maybe that will give you some ideas. players will happily play whatever the food situation is as long as new stuff is added, I mean look how long the carrot meta was about for.

also, feel like now is a good time to mention it, if mutton pies literally fill up your food bar and we are only in the early ages of the game, will we ever unlock better food? or just easier/cheaper ways to make it? Maybe another problem for another day

Kally D · 2018-06-09 00:20:46

I'm a big fan of Haven and Hearth which was linked in this thread, but the reason food works so well in H&H is the concept of levelling up through eating, that doesn't sound realistic here. On the other hand, ancestrally inherited vigour due to varied/poor diet from your mother could have a place in the game, though in what form and to what extent I can't guess.

A lifetime stretching seasonal thing might spice things up (One Hour, One Season) Winters might bring down generational lines until we get better preservation/production tech while serving as a true test of a village's cohesion in the current age of tech. Though a winter would likely turn into "night time in a multiplayer video game" which no one ever seems to want to play.
Different seasons encourage different crops and food sources, effectively giving us 4 food systems to play within which could increase the skill ceiling and bring uniqueness to separate lifetimes.

There could be a reduced gain from LOW TECH food after ingesting enough of higher tech (foraged/hunted->farmed->prepared->prep+spiced--->) and this might be something you inherit from your mother so you could have food systems that start fresh at each tier, and then combine that with the seasonal crop idea for hundreds of food types that are able to be relevant. With high tech moving progressively onto more bites and higher yield you run into a portable food effectiveness problem that might need to bring on a nerf to low tech backpacks or something.

I don't feel that many suggested boons for food variety is realistic without reducing base capabilities, you move fast enough already so base speed would need to be reduced in order to facilitate speed food. I like the character limit one though
Reducing speed from poor diet variance could be noticeable enough to get people serious about diversification. You don't survive for less time, but are capable of doing less in that time than you would otherwise, giving others that have maintained that diet the chance and a reason to try and get you something to bring you back up to speed, possibly leading to more community and teamwork.

Flintstone's idea is also quite interesting, you either work with the hand you're dealt or import/migrate to more desirable soil. Might make for more trading scenarios.

Something else that could really increase diversity of crop could be byproducts playing a larger role, rather than craftables that consume the foods themselves while the foods they yield end up being a bit lacklustre.

Water economic/soil economic/time economic crops oh my god if you implemented any of this stuff everyone would hate me.

Tane · 2018-06-09 01:28:32

Potjeh wrote:

Another interesting game for food models is UnReal World. There food has carbs, fats and proteins, and you have to get enough of all of them or you waste away. Maybe in OHOL we could have those three meters next to temp, and different foods give different things. Carb bar influences hunger drain rate, protein bar influences max hunger, and fat bar influences both. These bars deplete with hunger. Raw foods are usually fairly pure in one of the components, so you have to constantly rotate them. As you get more advanced foods they start to get more balanced so there's less annoyance of juggling different food types.

Yeah, but we don't want to turn the game into a eating simulator

Quoteifugly · 2021-04-15 03:12:48

jasonrohrer wrote:

People have claimed that no matter how well I balance the food sources, one food will always rise to the top as the most optimal food choice, given the limitations on resources that people are facing. It was carrots, then sheep meat, then popcorn, now berries.
As I go about adding more farmable foods this week, I'm struck by the question: but why would anyone eat this?
I'm about to add burritos to the game (after you grow beans and lime the corn to make masa harina for tortillas), but why would anyone eat them? "Out of boredom" isn't a great answer. I could make them better than any existing food source, and then they'd become THE food source for a while, until I introduce yet another better food source later, and we're into the classic power-inflation thing that a lot of games face when new content is added. The old food sources become worthless.
I could make them all require different resources to grow, so you'd have to switch foods as various resources run out, but that's also a design headache of a different variety. How many different resources can be required to grow something? Or maybe they are cooking ingredients, like goose fat to make pie crust, and lime to make tortillas. But balancing how those things run out is going to be a nightmare, and then after all the higher-food ingredients run out, people are still back to eating raw foods. Might as well have been eating raw foods the whole time, right? Well, except that they use water less efficiently.
But in real life, there's another reason that we don't just mono-feast on carrots, and that's nutrition.
A bunch of people have requested a nutrition model in this game, and I've resisted building one. It's fiddly, it's beyond the scope of this coarse simulation, it's hard to message. I've seen games that do it, and I never like it. Heck, my second game had one back in 2005, and I didn't like it in my own game.

Maybe there's a cheap substitute, though....
What if eating the same food over and over reduces how filling that food is for you? Like, you just get sick of it. That first carrot is DEEE-LISH-US, but that 99th carrot is making you feel green around the gills. You can hardly eat it. Ugg.
Remember Tom Hanks in Castaway, the first time he cooked a crab. "Oh boy! Crab! You gotta love crab!" Four months later... more crab...
This could also motivate spices and other things. You're getting sick of burritos, and then you craft hot sauce and give them a new lease on life, for a while at least.
I guess this would be implemented with a list of foods eaten, server-side, and some way the food value is decremented each time you eat the food, and then incremented again each time you eat some other food.
I'm imagining this being a slow process... maybe decrementing one calorie for every 5 or 10 times the food is eaten in sequence.

There are problems with messaging here, but I think it would be okay if it just kinda crept up on you over time, and you started to notice that these carrots aren't working so well anymore.

Jason can we have more animals??? sheep suck

Morti · 2021-04-19 17:35:39

Morti wrote:

jasonrohrer wrote:
...but how do potatoes fill a niche? What's the niche?
You have water, you have soil, you have time. Maybe it's not what the player gets from the food that you should be looking at, but what the food needs that you should be looking to expand on. People have already mentioned PNP, now, more often referred to as NPK; nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. But that is probably beyond what you want to add. I get that. So make adding ash from fires a thing, make adding legumes or clover a way to fix nitrogen (without specifically saying that), make adding bones required for phosphorous. Later you can make them mineable or found out in the open the way you're doing with iron, alum or limestone, or just add them findable off the bat.
But that's not what I really wanted to hit on. There must be some other factors you can add to growing, add to the game, that can bring with it's own niches. Sunlight is the first thing that comes to mind, but , with the way biomes are scattered about, it wouldn't make much sense of some biomes had certain amounts of sunlight while others had less, with the way they are scattered about the map. Biomes have temperatures though, what about making the plants growth possible based on temperature ranges? Humidity is another thing that comes to mind. The landscape is flat, so you can't really add altitude, but you could simulate it somehow. Maybe the tundras could be some equivalent to high altitude and the deserts just the opposite?
None of those things in particular are what I want you to consider, but things like that, that can vary from place to place randomly, over large swaths of land the same way biomes do, or randomly throughout a biome , the way ponds or soil placement do. Maybe the greatest food in the game can only be generated based on some rare factor that is only as common as a gold vein or a monolith. Maybe it's based on some biological even that only occurs rarely; the equivalent of whale fall to seafloor, or a monsoon.
The environment determines what grows there, and what grows there determines what food chains exist, and what niches foods serve peoples diets around the world.
Maybe we got a swamp with more frogs, maybe they got a prairie with more chicken. Some things can be farmed, other things depend on the regeneration rate of the biome and the organisms in it. You already kinda do that with rabbits for pie. Have more factors come from the environment, either via living resources, or via inorganic ones (like the NPK) or some kind of natural events. You know, the way you made the apocalypse happen? Have something like that occur. Screen changes colors, goes dark, black out, then, the players are back in their world only to find a hurricane has passed through, the fields are flooded with water and certain crops have been devastated. Could do something similar for a server wide drought, like the dust bowl of the 1930's, or a snow storm...
I just have too many ideas on this stuff and I don't want to distract you from what you plan for the game, or take away from any one thing, by suggesting a thousand others along with it.
Natural disasters really sound fun though, but they're not really that related to food.

That was a nice post. Thx for the necro, fugly.

One Hour One Life Forums

#76 2018-06-08 15:58:42

Re: The mono diet

#77 2018-06-08 15:59:58

Re: The mono diet

#78 2018-06-08 16:01:06

Re: The mono diet

#79 2018-06-08 16:06:57

Re: The mono diet

#80 2018-06-08 16:17:50

Re: The mono diet

#81 2018-06-08 17:10:40

Re: The mono diet

#82 2018-06-08 19:01:15

Re: The mono diet

#83 2018-06-08 19:25:15

Re: The mono diet

#84 2018-06-08 19:52:03

Re: The mono diet

#85 2018-06-08 20:42:58

Re: The mono diet

#86 2018-06-09 00:20:46

Re: The mono diet

#87 2018-06-09 01:28:32

Re: The mono diet

#88 2021-04-15 03:12:48

Re: The mono diet

#89 2021-04-19 17:35:39

Re: The mono diet

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