Recipes & Death, what if...

Purumus · 2017-07-12 01:13:21

What if when the player looks at an item, it showcases a thought bubble instead of a speech bubble, and it fills it with half of the recipe of that item.
If mouse is hovering over sharp rock (after 5 seconds - Jason said: 1 second is 6 days... meaning they're studying it for a month), Sharp Rock: a thought shows up above the character's head and says: Round Rock + Hit:_______).
A studied hatchet says: "Tied short Shaft + Item:______"
Eventually, an end of civilization player would look at a car and only see the two items that it needs, but in order to go all the way back to the axiomatic item, they would have to reverse engineer the world too.

Which brings me to Death. Jason posted a quote saying that "death is largely meaningless...), and I can see that nothing happens during death. But what if when a player is in the "[OK] death" screen, one sees the item (recipes) being constructed in the server being broadcast like thoughts popping up and fading away on the screen. That way, if one dies, there's a purpose to living and dying again. It's like Socrates (I'm about to butcher philosophy here but whatevs) Phaedo and Death, or one of those books, socrates talks a bit about "how the soul has knowledge that is given to one upon living" or "knowing between death". I may be recalling this so badly, gimme hemlock anyway. The point is that when one dies in this game, the death screen suggests that there's no life after death, and that would be true if the player can't play again. But since the player can, AND the player will carry that knowledge between lives, then it could be purposeful to help the player while dead by gifting some information to them through the actions of other living players.

This would also keep me from having to look at a recipe guide, which I know players will do (create and review) anyway, but my main question is, why can't I learn more about the world through observation like in real life? So much of this game is done only via trial and error, or another player showing me, that if I were to be EVE, I couldn't learn anything by myself unless I tried/died/tried/died, and so on. That last bit would maybe get me to the iphone, but it would take so long by myself that I would stop caring long before I can mine that glass.

Thought bubbles?

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-12 17:45:00

Well, the problem with looking at a hatchet and suddenly "knowing" how to craft it is that you have to have the hatchet in the first place before you ever have a chance to study it. Who made the hatchet that you're studying? If no one has figured it out, no one can study it and thus figure it out. Thus "top down" crafting hints don't seem to help much.

I'm currently working on something like thought bubbles (probably more like notebook pages that pop up along the bottom of the screen), but "bottom up" hints. Like if you look at a branch, it will say, "Sharp Stone + Branch = Long Shaft"

And if you look at a long shaft, it will say, "Sharp stone + Long Shaft = short shaft"

And if you look at a short shaft, it will say, "Short shaft + rope = tied shaft"

If you stumble on a hatchet and look at it, it won't tell you how to make it, but instead will tell you what you can do with it.

You'll see "hatchet + branch = kindling"

Obviously, there needs to be a multi-page interface, with some way to page through the options. A hatchet can turn about 10 things into kindling. A sharp stone can be used to dig a carrot and make a hatchet and clean a branch into a shaft and so on.

But in your end of civilization example, if you see a car sitting there, it might say,

"Bucket of Gas + Empty Car = Full Car."

And if you mouse over some petrol refining machine, it might say:

"Bucket of Crude Oil + Refining Machine = Bucket of Gas"

And if you stumble onto a pump-jack oil well, it might say:

"Bucket + Pump Jack = Bucket of Crude Oil"

All these help you figure out how to use the car. But they don't help you make the car.

However, it's possible to "feel your way" up to the car from the bottom.

Purumus · 2017-07-12 19:00:25

That would be very useful!

Why not both "bottom up" "top down"? It's like OOP, "is a" or "has a"; this game adds a "does a". Bonus: TD won't require multiple pages, only one single item hint, not all of its possibilities. Complex items would work the same way: Full Car {Empty Car + ...}. i.e. I think players do both BU/TD and create online strategy guides when either is missing.

IRL, I can't make a car, but I can disassemble it. Upon doing this, I will find many things I already know about, though...

IRL, when I stumble on a "hatchet", which I've never made nor seen anyone make, I'm probably going to think of both what I can do with it, and what it's made of, maybe in that order for a hatchet, but not on food, where I'd rather know what's in it and than how it's prepared. A hammer still works this way at the store. I've seen tons different ones, but I'm looking for the one that can do and undo a nail + that is made of a metal and a wood. If I break the wood, I know I could fix it, if I break the metal I would be SOL.

Perhaps this is as simple as putting the material on the name of the item... but that feels clunky.

I often find a small cluster of things that others made, and have no clue about what it took to make it. And not knowing what resources I need to further it, I go on to another place I can make a cluster of my own, since that, at least, gives me something to do.

I've had problems with the know how required for a water bottle/skin (make it, fill it, use it) even though I know it involves rabbit skin because of what I see with my eyes on the screen, not because of what the character helps me discover in the world. Finding axiomatic items (and End items: those that can't do anything else) would also be surprises, a rabbit is made of {rabbit}; i.e. one wouldn't see {rabbit != meat + fur}.

IRL, I would think it takes a fur, some heat, and needle and thread, and I'm sure I'm not that far off. Now, ingame, the game's thought process doesn't get revealed much, and that may be what you like, which I can understand it especially if it's mostly about moving forward throughout civilization... then it doesn't need to teach about the world, just about what one can do, much like a playground one visits.

However, i feel characters are somewhat intelligent and know things about the world. So, when dedicating contemplation/study on an object for a couple of seconds (weeks for an Homo-OHOL), I wish they would share both what you could do with it AND where it's made of.

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-12 21:00:46

Okay.... well, I'm not sure I want to hand EVERYTHING to you. I still want some mystery. I still want you to ask another player how they made something. I still want a village that figures out how to make cars to be the ONLY place cars exist in the world. Maybe they sell them! Yes, of course I want some people to sell the more hard-to-make things, or maybe even keep "trade secrets."

The point of the bottom-up hints is literally to help a beginning player actually DO something, anything at all.

I expect more dedicated players to study out-of-game databases and such.

Think of it like Minecraft:

There's no crafting hints at all in that game, neither bottom-up or top-down. In fact, in that game, you cannot craft much of anything on the built-in 2x2 grid until you "bootstrap" yourself by making a crafting bench, gaining access to the full 3x3 crafting grid. So you might even try to make a hatchet in Minecraft, and simply not be able to do it until you figure out that you have to make a crafting bench first.

HOWEVER, that doesn't mean that there's nothing for a beginning player to do. You dig into the ground with your bare hands. You gather resources. You can stack them up and start building stuff. You can play Minecraft for several hours, trying to survive the night and such, just doing the "mine" part of it without ever touching the "craft" part of it. Then, when you decide to go deeper, the Wiki and the Guides and the How-To-Videos are there waiting for you. But you don't need those external resources to get started. To play and have an interesting time.

So, my game needs an entry point like this. You just bought it, you know nothing about it, but there should be several hours of pretty interesting game waiting for you. Then, if you want to go deeper, the external resources exist to help you.

Also, I think some opaqueness helps with the cultural "stickiness" of a game. All those wikis and articles and guides and how-to videos build and bolster the community around Minecraft. Friends help each other get started playing, etc.

That said, I don't think a game can be totally opagque, because then it will never get off the ground. Or should I say, I'm too chicken to make a totally opaque game.

Minecraft also had the non-opaque part (digging around and building stuff).

I do worry that a complete, game-wide bottom-up crafting hint system gives too much away, and makes it too transparent. I may implement a cut-off at some point, based on how high in the tree you've climbed. Like, hints are only given for stuff that's 5 transitions away from a natural object...

But, for the time being, I'm implementing a full bottom-up crafting hint system and seeing where it takes us.

Hippasus · 2017-07-14 20:38:24

Hints feel necessary now because we're almost always popping into this game an eve and alone. Even with so few players I managed to learn a good deal of the current crafting tree by watching or asking my mum. Things are going to be quite different when enough players exist that the chance you spawn as an eve approaches zero. I mean, why not make the stickiness inside the game rather than out?

It's like the meta-game mirrors the structure of growing up. At first you come ignorant and it's HARD to figure it out yourself. So instead you turn to others. And in turn, perhaps feeling a little indebted to those who helped you, you teach your children a few tricks of the trade before you drop dead. This feels like an important way of forming bonds in the game.

I understand that with the peak of new players on release things aren't going to be so rosy. So perhaps you are right that to kick start things some in game info is a good thing. But perhaps not all the info. Inventing stuff is meant to be hard. Our retrospective bias makes us very unsympathetic towards our ancient ancestors, but the reality still remains that civilization was a culmination of tens of thousands of years of almost getting nowhere at all. Accumulated knowledge through an oral tradition is a pretty frick'n cool thing to have in a game by the way.

One last point. I think being able to backwards engineer things should definitely NOT be in the game. If (let's imagine things get a bit apocalyptic) I'm wandering around with my bow and arrow and come across a smart phone, it should be a magical artifact. I shouldn't be able to take a peep at it and instantly deduce, "Ahhh, so smartphones are simply the combination of an integrated circuit a battery and a small screen. Which in turn are constructed from... etc." The example need not be so extreme, I'm sure a stone age tribe coming across fired clay artifacts would have no idea how they were constructed. I for instance am surrounded by pieces of string and thread (I'm literally clothed in the stuff!) but you better not ask me to make some for you, because, well, I can't.

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-14 22:17:11

Yeah, I'm pretty solidly against hints for reverse engineering being in the game, for all the reasons that you mentioned.

Also, I do love that after civilization gets advanced enough (people don't even have fires anymore, because they have electric heaters or whatever), they can collectively "forget" primitive survival skills. When civilization collapses, they'll be back to figuring the basics out again, just like we would be if we needed to make thread from scratch.

Really, in the current state of the game, you ALL are in a situation where you've forgotten your primitive skills. The struggle with the bowdrill comes mostly from not knowing how a real bowdrill works. You can't smother the tiny ember. You need to pick it up with a leaf and put it on TOP of the tinder. For real.

All that said....

Unlike CM and TCD, this game is supposed to work for any size player base. 1 player, 2 player, 10,000 player, and here's hoping, 100,000 player or even 1,000,000 player.

It's also supposed to be immune to "permanently dying out." Right now, lets say the base rate of TCD acquisition is 1 new player every four days or so. Lets say there's a spike because of some coverage, and we get 3 new players on one day who start playing together. Because the game isn't so great with 3, they don't stick around for four days, so they're no longer there when the 1 average-rate new player joins. So the game can't regrow from a small seed of players.

I want this game to be able to regrow itself at any point. If you discover the game 5 years from now and try playing, even if you're alone, you should be like, "Wow, this is amazing!" and play for an entire week.

I don't know how to balance these two requirements. The game should be magical and encourage communication in the case of a large population of players, but not leave a small population of new players completely in the dark.

It's almost like the hints should be dynamic.... like, when you pick up a sharp stone, it figures out how long it's been since a hatchet has been made. If it's more than 1 hour, then it gives you a hint about sharp stones being used to make hatchets. If it's less than one hour, it expects you to learn from someone else?

Or maybe only Eve gets hints, ever?

This is only enforceable client-side, by the way, because the client has the full transition list.

I wonder about hiding the transition list on the server only, but that flies in the face of open source, PLUS the client uses the transition list to "pre-load" sprites in the background for objects that are one step away. There's no way the graphics card has room for 30K sprites, so only a fraction are kept loaded at any one time, based on what's reachable in the transition tree.

But anyway, imagine THAT version of the game, where the tech tree really is a secret.... absolutely full of surprises. Hmm....

I suppose that the tech tree could be encrypted with a key that only I and the server have. Then it could be stored in the public repo.

That still doesn't help with the dynamic loading, though...

Obviously, the client would still have the full object list. Pushing all of that stuff server side would be really messy and eat bandwidth.

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-14 22:19:49

Whoa, I just got it:

Only the oldest person on the server gets any hints at all.

That would be Eve sometimes, but also granddad or whoever other times.

So you'd really want to keep your elders alive and well. They can talk way more, and now they have something to talk about.

Hippasus · 2017-07-15 10:20:38

Imagine a situation like this though: An infertile Eve and her adult son are the only players on server. A third person logs in and of course appears as a new Eve. The chances of this Eve finding the other two is not great, especially if they are new to the game. Shouldn't this Eve, effectively totally alone, also be given "the knowledge"?

Perhaps all Eves should start with "the knowledge" and that should be passed on the oldest living member of that Eve's family tree?

By the way, on a tangential note "The Knowledge" by Lewis Dartnell is an awesome book. It sells itself as basically a step by step guide on how to rebuild civilization after an apocalyptic event. It's like somebody else already did all the research for you. It goes into great detail about the chemical processes we take for granted in civilized society. Whether you need to know what useful compounds you can fractionally distill from wood, how to produce gunpowder from scratch, the process of producing fertilizer from crude oil, or the inner workings of a combustion engine, it's all there in an easy to understand but not dumbed down format. If I was doing a project like this it would be a very a useful reference.

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-15 15:56:29

Yeah, I'm thinking about something like that. Oldest in family line, or something. So in a multi-Eve situation, both get the hints.

Also, I'm really worried about the way this system encourages matricide or fratricide or gran-matricide or uncle-cide or apple-cider.

So, I've got to figure out how "keeping your elders alive to learn from them" is encouraged, as opposed to "bumping them off so you become king."

Though maybe the generation war is interesting....

Anyway, making it "the oldest person on the server" changes things, because if your village has that elder, you want to keep them alive. The next oldest person could be in the other village. You monopolize the knowledge as long as you keep your elder alive.

Eves could always get the knowledge automatically, regardless of who's oldest on the server.

Another idea to discourage elder-cide:

When an elder dies, their "possible time left," if they're under 60, is set as a "cooling off" period before anyone else gets the knowledge. So you have to wait until the last elder's 60th birthday, whether they are alive or dead, until a new person becomes the elder.

Thus, if you kill them or neglect them so they die, it creates a knowledge gap, whereas if you support them until the end of their life, there's no gap, and the next elder ascends right away.

Anyway, this would work for family lines just fine, giving each village an elder, or maybe even a group of them, depending how the families shake out. Need to think about it more.

And yes, that book has been on my list for a while. You just reminded me of it. Will fetch from the library today!

Purumus · 2017-07-15 19:17:28

I love, love, love the idea that the elder gets a word from the "game spirit"! It's like an evolution of the word/speech amount... A baby can say a few letters, that grows with age into full words, which would be useful to short commands. However, "thinking" shows up after a while because age allows one to be contemplative. The brain works more than the body does. I've been making a game about the elderly for the better part of this year; I love this subject!

My grandparents, when I was little, would tell me what to go get so that I could then go a thing. Like get a ladder, or get a rope and get a tool... reach where they couldn't. Go catch/feed chicken, go find some eggs. Cook this this way, "make me coffee, dark, with this amount of sugar, like X person". For example, my grandma's "pinch" amount is different than my moms. Pick the chillies, don't eat them (I ate them, wanted to die). "please go get culantro". "where?" I'd ask, "where the dogs pee". "Make me a tea of xyz leaves for my stress".

Now, when I take my grandma (she's 92 minutes old out to check on her garden, she talks and talks, she lists and points to the things that are growing, how they're grown, how she planted them, care for, and how long it's taken to sprout, what kind of thing you can do with the fruit... She also says what she doesn't get to grow in Orlando's climate/dirt vs back home, what she misses, how to protect from rodents. But she can't be out very long, so it's always a short walk before we go to the shade and she tells me to go check on the flowers again, talk about how wonderful her children are, if I'm hungry, then walk out again, etc. "Move this here, fix this here. Bring this to me" all are said often. BTW, I don't get that information while inside the house, we talk about inside things. And she doesn't remember food recipes very well unless she's near food. it's always and almost exclusively while she's DOING something, or near a thing, like muscle memory singing.

When the elders die, you tend to remember their words more vividly, the things they liked, their methods, and memories of what they did or said sprout up when you're near their house/location.

Those aren't bees, they're wasps, "YOU'RE DOING IT WRONG!", Don't step on that, Don't sit down here, ... i.e. teaching! After a while they ask about my world, "how do YOU do something with a computer", but they really just want you to do it for them... Elders do kinda break past things down into what it has, what its called, and what to do with things. However, elders do both Top Down and bottom Up sharing.

What if in addition to getting the hints yourself (as the elder EVE), others do too while they share the same screen space with an elder... everyone gets near by knowledge?

zed · 2017-07-16 11:31:35

jasonrohrer:
> I wonder about hiding the transition list on the server only

I don't think you should worry too much about players being able to get hold
of the transition list. Given wikis and such, it's inevitable anyway. And
exploring the transitions outside of the game is less of a spoiler than it
might seem, because of the distinction between declarative and procedural
memory.

I did "spoil" myself for the present game by exploring the transitions in the
editor, but when I got into the game I found I could remember only a few key
surprising ideas. I discovered that steel existed in the game, but actually
producing it requires a graph of transitions so intricate that there was no
way I could learn it as a collection of facts. I'd have to learn it piecemeal
and in-game, learning how to achieve various intermediate goals by actually
performing the necessary series of steps.

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-17 14:38:24

Purumus, if everyone near the elder auto-gets knowledge, then the elder doesn't have to teach, demonstrate stuff to anyone. I'm really trying to encourage oral tradition and other types of communication in this game. Not necessarily verbose chatting, because it's tedious, but definitely showing people how to do something.

You could imagine people lining up outside the elder's house to ask questions.

"Grandpa, how do I make a hatchet?"

"Bring me four milkweed stalks, one straight branch, and a sharp stone, and I'll show you."

(Only if the elder actually learned this for real, because no top-down info is provided to them.)

"What can I do with this needle and thread?"

"Let me see it for a second."

(After holding the needle and thread, the elder will see a list of things to do with it, even if they've never seen a needle and thread before in the game.)

"Well, if you use it on two rabbit skins, it will make a hat." Or.... "Bring me two rabbit skins."

Zed, I think you're right about the way human memory works.

I imagine people "studying up" in the full tech tree before their next life. At best, they will remember how to do one or two new things. Like, "In this life, I'm really going to make a pie." That's cool. They become the "expert" who knows how to do something. Like reading books at the library before embarking on a physical project in real life.

Purumus · 2017-07-31 07:23:54

I'd like for my bones or bones of those I find to be unique of the kind of person they were while alive, especially now that all things wither, which means there's some environmental storytelling going on.

Also, not all things should deplete. For instance, it seems dissonant that there's more earth behind the grass IRL. Instead of having piles that deplete, have the ground be a square that is consumed by "tilling" or making into pliable/loose earth. Then deplete that one, and then till/plow it, at which point I can't use it anymore. Having two piles of dirt like things don't balance out well, considering that they all walk on the same earth all around. Water can be a much more precious resource, but it outlines something about the world: they'd all be dead without a river of sorts or weather that provides that water. Clay, while it may be a much more rare resource (than dirt, not water), could follow the same convention as mentioned here with dirt. In order to make the "everything exhausts" concept still be true, wither the fertile soil to where clay exists or to wheat land, which can't be loosened or be planted onto without water. It would make an additional goal of having an irrigation plan to make an environment fertile again.

jasonrohrer · 2017-07-31 20:10:38

What are you imagining regarding the bones?

I'm pretty sure your bones look a lot like my bones....

Regarding the fertile soil issue, the point of that is that you can't just farm anywhere, like in the desert or rocky biome, without importing soil. The fertile soil currently only spawns in the green biome. However, I don't want people to ONLY farm in the green biome. If they want to farm in the desert, they can, but they need to bring some better soil in.

Right now, there are two "vectors" that lead to farming running out: water and soil. This seems redundant, but water currently has a slightly different function than soil, because one piece of soil can start an eternal berry bush, which needs to be re-watered in order to maintain, but not re-soiled. Also, carrots do not deplete the soil that they grow in, whereas wheat does. So, you can re-plant carrots with more water, OR replant something else, where the berry bush "destroys" the patch of fertile soil in exchange for being a rather permanent food source, and the wheat actually consumes the soil.

Obviously, the wheat isn't a good enough food source right now to make it worth it, but multi-bite pies are coming that will give them a huge multiplier.

The point is that the food sources are fundamentally different in the way that they work, leading to more decision making. They don't just have "different paint" and "different food values."

There may be other ways to achieve this without having tillable land be limited.

In the future, there will be ways to make fertile soil (composting and manure). There will also be ways to dig wells, probably over semi-rare "soggy spots", or maybe wells require non-renewable stones. Also, wells can run out of water too.

joshwithguitar · 2017-08-02 00:16:44

jasonrohrer wrote:

Obviously, the wheat isn't a good enough food source right now to make it worth it, but multi-bite pies are coming that will give them a huge multiplier.

Are you going to implement "bread"? It seems silly that you have to put something in your dough before you can cook and eat it.

jasonrohrer · 2017-08-02 19:34:00

Yeah, bread is coming.

The many flavors of pie was promised as a joke in a very early Cordial Minuet forum post about this game.

Purumus · 2017-08-06 03:29:53

Sorry for the delay. Your bones look like my bones, except MUCH more stretched but our bones look much different than kids' bones. That would be the first difference. Between males and females, bone wise, the only real difference is the pelvis, and perhaps under the scalpel, bone densities at different ages; bone density isn't something I would focus on, though. The pelvis could be a significant difference for this game. Not too deep, just something to contemplate while roaming around the world and seeing dead people. You've spent enough time developing the different aging stages for both males and females, once they die, the game could do something minimal to establish that their lives mattered, or that their lives were not fully finished.

jasonrohrer · 2017-08-07 16:27:31

Yeah, I have thought about that.

It is extra engineering work, because the code doesn't currently support matching skeletons to age or gender. I really don't think the pelvis thing would be a visible difference at the level of abstraction that I'm going for. In fact, my current "grave" illustration has no pelvis at all!

The age is somewhat do-able. I would need something in the editor that lets me tag a grave with an age, and then the server would pick among the available graves based on age.

However, I really need to pick my battles with this game, so this is something that I'll table for now. The grave will remain an abstract "icon" for death for now.

Laggy · 2022-05-24 12:48:22

jasonrohrer wrote:

Also, I do love that after civilization gets advanced enough (people don't even have fires anymore, because they have electric heaters or whatever),

What an idea, electirc stoves, and heaters? Ohh this was almost 5 years ago

Léonard · 2022-05-24 20:06:39

"oops"

Last edited by Léonard (2022-05-24 20:06:49)

Wood · 2022-05-30 14:11:28

5 years and no stove

Arcurus · 2022-05-30 16:53:18

jasonrohrer wrote:

However, it's possible to "feel your way" up to the car from the bottom.

lol yea lets feel even if nekro

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