Ideas! (Seasons,Fishing,Worship,Food Storage,Tools ect.)

[Phaedris]

I have a few ideas

Seasons

Spring
A time of growth after the winter period could be be represented by plants starting to bud, tree's starting to get there leaves back and maybe have more rain.

Summer
Hotter longer day's (more stamina loss when outdoors during the day), tree's have recovered there leaves.

Autumn
Leaves have turned red and the weather has cooled.

Winter
Snow covers the ground, trees have lost there leaves and when outdoors or away from a fire you need to eat more because of the cold.
Certain animals would be hibernating in there lairs like bears so you would not meet them.
You would also have to store food for the winter as crops and wild fruits would not be available.


You could have plant sowing and harvest correspond to the correct season.
Maybe have a 6 hour period per season.
Im not to sure about the lenght of the seasons.

Fishing
Have stocks of fish in certain area's, there are only so many fish in a lake and they are harder to catch when they are fewer in number.
If you have a ocean in the game you could have salt water fish and fresh water fish.
Another idea is to have salmon that move from the ocean to the rivers and up into the lakes, during this time it would be alot easier to catch them in any of the rivers leading to the lakes.

Worship/Religion
You could have it so you could make sacrifices to your ancestor on alters in goods and food.
After death you could have your friends bury you they could put tools and other items into your grave these would have some effect on your next character in the same way as offering sacrifices to your ancestors.


Food decay/Storage
Food that is not stored in a container should rot thus encouraging people to use baskets and pots.

Tools
After a number of uses tools should degrade depending on the type of material it is made from a stone axe should degrade much quicker then a Iron one.
This would make it so blacksmith's and carpenter's would have a vital role in a town.

Misc
Limiting the number of branches and bark one can take from a tree until they grow back.
More types of wild fruits such as black berries.

[loftar]

Wow! Quite an impressive post. Mock-up screen-shots and everything. I must admit to being a bit impressed. :)

We have been thinking in similar tracks regarding most of your ideas:

We have indeed been thinking about seasons, and they will probably make it into the game sooner or later. Mostly, it's the issue of the tremendous amount of new graphics required (with snow-covered objects and what not), so it's a bit of work before we get there. When we implement it, the seasons will be a lot longer than 6 hours, though [even the in-game days are 8 hours long, after all ;)], but just how long is unclear. To keep with the time compression as it is otherwise, they should be one real month each, but I feel that might be a bit too long, so maybe one real week each. We haven't discussed it in detail yet. It is worth noting, though, that the fir that you use as your example is an evergreen, so it probably wont change appearance a lot. ;)

As for ancestral worship, that is something that we most definitely plan to implement in a very near future. It has been intended as a core feature from the very start, and now that we've finally implemented personal beliefs, the pieces are falling into place to getting there.

As for fishing, we're not quite sure what to do. First and foremost, the act of fishing is kind of uninteresting and boring right now, which we'd like to fix. As to that end, we're considering making some kind of mini-game for fishing, but we haven't been able to come up with any good ideas for that. Your idea of having stocks of fish is not at all a bad one though, so I may well use that. We've already considered having an ocean with salt-water, and we may get around to implementing that the next time we revisit the map generator.

Also, as you rightly say, tools and weapons should definitely have a limited lifespan. We would like to implement degrading and decay on a wider basis anyway.

As for branches from trees, we have considered the idea of limiting them, but trees are mostly so plentiful anyway that it probably would not make a great difference. We have some other plans for the reworking of parts of the wood-related resources anyway, and some such resources may well be limited.

And yes, more plants will definitely make their way into the game at various points. Rest assured in that regard. :)

[Namer]

I agree with a lot of things Phaedris is saying perhaps 48 minutes for a day as when i was online it was pretty much night time all the time, and considering how fast you can construct things it may make it gel together better, perhaps 24 hours for a month, four months = one season four days IRL per season ???
What I think I would like to see , is more of a survival game make it hard to obtain food/shelter, so player interactions are encouraged, building a house on your own should be slow and difficult thus encouraging co-op building, what i would not like to see is an Ultima Online situation where you have 100's of people running around on there own making daggers:S.
That's another thing the economy is very important thing to consider, if you can obtain tools weapons etc that never decay you will quickly run into a problem where everyone has everything.

For the fishing make it a mini game have fish easier to catch in the early morning or late at night, patience is important as it sometimes takes a while to get a fish to bite.
Then when you finally get one to bite, a symbol could appear over your character's head. Press a key as soon as you can to reel it in, have it linked with agility perhaps with a chance of having line snap etc with a few variations in fish types/size etc you'd soon have people having competitions to see who can catch the largest most exotic fish.
You would also need different depths of water so you could then add swimming as an ability.

About the wood resources they should be harder to obtain especially refining them to boards, early on, alot of stamina is needed to chop a tree down with a stone axe and time, so alot of people may barter for wood.

In regard to skill progression I dislike the collect 200 branchs level up approach, I think a better way would be to have skills increase the more you use them, so the more say you fish the higher that skill increases, if you dont say fish for along time have your character forget abit so his skills drop slowly, that way no one would become an expert at everything, and hopefully that would encourage trading and general working with others.

If your implementing permanent death ( which I like the idea of ) then have a high percentage chance that your only knocked out, and when you awaken you've lost perhaps a few stats or dropped down alittle, you could always expand this part into your ancestral worship on certain death occasion you enter an alternate death world mini game where you must proceed to escape if you wish to return to the living, how you lead your life would affect the severity of this death realm perhaps.

[Phaedris]

@loftar
Yeah I known it's a evergreen but it's the main tree in the game, would be nice to have a more varied forest.
On that note, I don't know if you have already thought about this but different types of tree's (Birch, Oak, Ash, Yew, ect.) each one having its own properties making it ideal for certain objects and also some would be rarer and take longer to grow.

I have some more ideas about fishing what about different types of bait they could increase the chances of catching different types of fish or improving your chances in different waterways.

@namer
I agree skill progression is a little broken at the moment collecting apples and branches ect. should have a ceiling to how much they can give you.
Having some way of losing skill points would be good, stops someone with the ability to do everything and encourages working together, which should be one of the main points of the game.
I like your mini game idea.
Maybe expanding mini games to more things as well.
Also if you have different sizes of fish you need to be able to mount them to show them off.

[jorb]

First off, thanks for all the input. It means a lot. Second, wow! Mock-ups. I am impressed!

Degradation and decay has already been discussed by Loftar, and I don't have a lot to add on that topic. It's going into the game at one point or another. Economic simulation, division of labor and, plainly speaking, fun, depends on it. As it is you only really have to go through the motions once, with no maintenance what so-ever required, which is no fun. While I have no personal experience of Ultima Online, I have no intention of allowing Haven & Hearth to go down the road of the many daggers. I want there to be a meaningful economy in the game.

Seasons are definitely on my wish-list, although not the biggest priority at the moment. Weather effects in general would be cool as these could be related to rituals, religion, farming and what not. It would require a bit of work to make the graphics tick along with the seasonalities, but I don't expect the work-load to be completely unmanageable. Some snow covered variants of the objects, spring and fall variants for the trees, some new tiles, maybe some animal recoloration for winter furs. No biggie if I put my mind to it. Main task right now though is getting the quest system up and running, which means I expect to be doing a lot of writing (which I don't mind).

On the topic of time, I am decidedly against shortening the length of the Day/Night cycle. The full moon wolf packs will seem so pitiful if they only hound you for a couple of minutes. I have lots of plans for astronomy/astrology.

Mini games for fishing would be fun, and I do have some ideas on that topic -- using different baits, lures, lines, hooks, sinkers, etc. -- but for now, as stated, the quest system is a sorely missing piece of functionality that I'd rather see us working on.

With regards to the skill system, my hope is that the learning skills will be acquired per quest in the future. You (namer) do have a point in that it might be more interesting to have skill values increase as the skills are used, however, this would require quite a lot more in terms of balancing than does the present learning points system.

And, a note on the quest system, my ambitions for the writing are set higher than the bromides of "Bring me TEN!!!!one1one! fox hides in a jiffy, before I go shenanigans on your sorry behind." Also, I want the quests to tie in nicely with the expanding, random generated and sand box feel of the game, without becoming repetitive. Not trivial, but I think it can be done.

Thanks again for all the thoughts!

[Phaedris]

I have a few questions about the quest system you are going to implementing are they going to be given out by Gods?
The only thing I'm worried about is that if they give out to many hard to make items they might damage the economy of the game, but if they give out to many common items then no one will do any.
I think maybe have them rarely given out by ghostly apparitions of your ancestors of maybe Gods would be fun.
Perhaps giving something other then just earthly goods it would be fun if quests effected your personal beliefs.
You where talking about PVP before about bounty hunting and other things maybe some quests could involve taking revenge on someone who has wronged many people (Murder, Theft ect.) characters with low karma would then hunted by people.
This would stop lunatics from murdering many people for no good reason but wouldn't artificially stop them just give a incentive for others too put an end to there crimes.