Homeostasis

[p]Hey everyone! Welcome to another Tuesday dev blog for Dandelion Void.[/p][p]This week we’d like to give you a peek into a new status effect we’re working on, and discuss our general philosophy on stats in survival games![/p][p]To complement the clothing system we have in Dandelion Void, we now have a cold status effect for the player character.[/p][h3]It's best to suit up during the cold, night-like power cycles aboard the Pergola[/h3][p]Temperature management will be a relatively minor detail in our first demo – your healing is reduced and you perform actions more slowly while cold, but you're not about to lose any fingers or toes to frostbite. As we progress through development we would like to add new areas and/or ship system malfunctions that make keeping warm a matter of life and death.[/p][p]We also plan to expand the number of ways your character can keep warm, like hovering over a camp stove, cozying up in a sleeping bag, or enjoying the warm steam rolling off of a nearby reactor pool…[/p][p]“Survival” is a broad category, and there's a wide spectrum of how much individual games simulate the task of keeping your character alive. On one end you have games like Minecraft or Subnautica where you have health, a hunger meter, and maybe thirst. These titles are more focused on building and exploration, so taking care of your body is pretty simple and you will rarely if ever starve to death. On the other end, games like ZERO Sievert and Project Zomboid have stats like happiness, entertainment, drunkenness, and a variety of bodily injuries; keeping yourself alive is a task that never ends. [/p][p]Dandelion Void is somewhere in the middle, but leans towards the latter category. We are interested in the mechanical challenge and gameplay texture of managing a wide variety of needs; hunger and thirst of course, but also boredom, well-restedness, environmental comfort, and now body temperature. [/p][p]If we just gave each of these stats its own meter, our UI would quickly devolve into an overwhelming mess. Instead we use a status icon system which tells the player only what they need to know. Each stat has a unique icon with multiple variants to indicate the severity of the effect. [/p][p]Negative statuses range from mild yellow, to urgent red, to a deathly pale gray. Positive stat enhancements become a deeper green. One of the advantages of the system is that if a stat requires no action – say, if your hunger is at 90% – we can just omit it completely so as not to overwhelm the player with unimportant information. [/p][p]In designing the icons themselves, we've tried to pick playful visuals that evoke what your character might be feeling. Hunger is a depleting stomach; sleepiness is a heavy-lidded eye, etc. Others get a bit more metaphorical – boredom is a puzzle cube that becomes more and more scrambled, while your environmental comfort is a chair whose upholstery slowly repairs. [/p][p]In general we avoid over-relying on iconographic tropes – although as you can see with the cold status, sometimes it's best to stick with familiar symbols like a snowflake and a thermometer. [/p][p][/p][p]At their best, status effects add texture to gameplay, create fun minigames for players, and offer role-playing opportunities. But when overused or poorly balanced, they become irritating chores which distract from the actual fun of the game. By thinking hard about which statuses we implement, hiding irrelevant information from the player, and constantly playtesting through our development, we are working hard to make sure that these features are a net value add![/p][p]If there's ever a specific aspect of the game or our development process that you would like to learn more about, please feel free to let us know in our discord so that we can consider it for a future dev blog![/p][p][/p]