[Suggestion]: Better Food mechanism

[dr.desastro]

Reading the post in this forum, I assume, that there are some, that find preparing food useless.
Let us keep in mind, that this is a somewhat medieval everyday's life simulator with added fantasy and dark humor added.

Food should be meaningful. Refilling your energy bar is a good thing and food should continue to do so. What I would rather have, is a system, that limits food intake, but also makes food a necessity.

My suggestion:
Imagin having a 3-fold status bar:

Health (Red)
Fullness (Green)
Energy (Blue)

Health is lost by getting injured - o.k., a no-brainer
Energy is lost by doing stuff - also a no-brainer
Fullness would depict, how starved you are. If this meter is full - so are you and cannot eat more food. Keeper would say 'I am stuffed'.
This bar will decrease over time to get hungry. If the bar reaches zero, then you get a negative status [starved], which will let you lose energy, will make you work slower, walk slower and reduces success at worktables as long as you have it. A digestion potion will make you lower the fullness bar quicker or reduce the fullness taken from food over period of intake.

Getting food is easy in the game. Eat some Apples, Honey, Berries or roast some mushrooms over fire, so no sweat - you will not stay hungry, unless you are stupid, impatient or both.

Now, food comes in certain qualities - we can divide the dishes roughly into:

- Simple dishes,

which should add small amounts of energy for moderate or high fullness. Those will keep you walking straight, but do little else. They are inefficient but the best you can have at the beginning. We are talking about stuff like roasted apples or mushrooms, plain bread or fried eggs. Simple food.

- Quality dishes,

which would require more variety in ingredients or having access to higher-tier production.
Baked fish, Soups, Pancakes and stuff like this fall under this category.
They give more energy per fullness and are more efficient.

- Gourmet dishes,

which have the best ratio of fullness/energy gain, maybe replenish the bar completely.
We are talking royal fish filets, silver-star+ dinners, cakes. Ingredients need work/money.

- Special dishes,

which might be simple to moderate in terms of nourishment, but add a perk for some time like the pasta, kebap, some soups, beer snacks or the fish nuggets.
These dishes are interesting because of their side-effect (which can be increased above 2 minutes in my book, like 5)

Currently, food is a time-consuming chore, only for grinding or generating small income. Now, we might have some meaning and immersion to it.

Yes, this game is called Graveyard Keeper - but a keeper has to eat as well. And frankly, you do very different activities, medieval-style. Which is fun! I buy this game to have hours of fun and not for speed-running it and moping around afterwards on how bad it is. The game is just my cup of tea and can be only improved over time. Now, that the devs got some income from the sales, they should add more features and develop the game even more. Remember - they are not Activision or EA, so no giant budgets. Help make the game a success and have fun with it. You could have it worse: pay-to win browser-games Farmerama-style.

[tavald.musashi]

That is just bad design for a sandbox game.
When you play a sandbox, the idea is that you can do what you want in the order that you want.
Introducing a tax sistem that forces you to make a specific resource (food) so you can keep playing is just plain anoying.

[dr.desastro]

Nope...some of the best dungeon crawlers for instance had it. Dungeon Master, Grimrock. Yes, we need some taxing mechanism. I do not want the game to be too speedy and your avatar working like a robot on nuclear fuel, never tiring and what not. And I do not want to see my avatar gobbling down 10 meals in an hour, just because he happens to cut wood meanwhile. Kills the immersion in my book. Well, not for the power-gamers around here...

And the sandbox argument is only valid partially. Yes, you can play the game endlessly, but you have an ultimate goal: get back home! Want a sandbox? Play cities skylines with unlimited money and all buildings unlocked - that is sandbox.

[Gangrene]

This sounds tedious, in a game already mired by tedium. So, no.

[dr.desastro]

Counter-question:
Why not have a 'take all organs' - buttons, because anatomy is tedious?
Why sleep and have not unlimited energy - returning to bed is tedious
Why craft items? Why not have a button and stuff is ready - even better: teleported to target location and installed. Tedious.
Why walk somewhere? Tedious! Teleportation is much better!
Why have an inventory management system and not unlimited space on character - tedious!!
Why playing a game and not sleeping or doing something constructive? Tedious...

While it is tedious, it is also immersive. Do you really want a game that is over after 5 hours? Call of Duty 4 was such a game for me...

[xkuripuri]

I don't think the game needs a "hunger" mechanic. You're meant to be eating food, because it's how you can do more then one minute of work a day. The fact people refuse to eat food because, "It's not worth it.", then complain about having a lack of energy anyway... well, forcing them to eat food isn't going to please them either.

While there's the argument that because Sunday is sermon day, which is a big important day, that you want to burn through 5 days as fast as possible to hit it again, that's really up to personal view. The game has a ton of stuff to do, and basically ignoring 5 entire days of productivity, because some people just wanna rely solely on sermons, well... that's their call.

[Armstrong]

Originally posted by dr.desastro:

Yes, this game is called Graveyard Keeper - but a keeper has to eat as well. And frankly, you do very different activities, medieval-style.

Never!
And your so-called Graveyard Keeper is immortal.

[dr.desastro]

Now, try to see it from that angle:
I want to make it impossible to eat 5 meals apiece just to work through 2 to 3 days until the exhausted perk kicks in. There is only so much you can eat, so i need the meter getting full to say 'Stop, i am stuffed'
Same meter must decrease over time, otherwise there will be bawing again.
Reching zero, there should be some minor penalty. Frankly, you cannot die in this game and cannot make faults preventing you from finishing. Do you really think, a mechanism that makes you play the game a bit more realistic would hurt?

Anyways, people complain the game is unfinished and lacks content. Adding features and content would, however, regarded as tedious.
I'd like meaning behind stuff I do. I bury corpses to finish the game - otherwise i cannot unlock cathedral level 1 and thus blue XP and means for examining the key and 2. tier.
I chop wood and collect stoned to build stuff.
I plant vegies and wine to get on with the game.
Unfortunately, alchemy and food are regarded 'a waste of time'. I'd like to correct this. And add more things you can do.

[Armstrong]

Originally posted by dr.desastro:

Do you really think, a mechanism that makes you play the game a bit more realistic would hurt?

Hurt.... No...... Kill...... Yes.

[dman_dustin]

I'm not sure I agree with the "tedious" argument because everything you do in any game is tedious.

TRUE tedium (as someone put it), is when you fail a quest for example, and you have to reset the timer for said quest and you fail again reseting the timer for the quest.

If you don't know what I'm talking about: Monster Hunter. I love Monster Hunter but if you suck at the game like I do, that gives you TRUE tedium.

Unlike other games where you don't have to spend time getting back to where you failed, you get only 40 minutes or so to kill a Monster, and if you fail, you're likely want to reset your game so you don't waste all the potions and energy you lost fighting the damn thing, and you have to reset the 40 minute timer again.

That's right, you can waste hours in Monster Hunter for absolutely literally no reward nor anything to show for it.

That is true tedium, that is soul crushing, this game and games like this, don't really have that.

Now grinding tedium, sure I'll give you that but I'm not too bothered by it.

[tavald.musashi]

Almost no one want this restrictions on the game added.
But if you really want them, they are quite easy to mod in.
Just copy the energy bar code, make it decay over time, and remove the consumption when doing tasks.
Then add the restrictions on food.
There you have, a game more the way you like it.

[oi__io]

I just wish I could give my leftover to people so that they can like me better. They say the best way to a person's heart is through their stomach. I can already do that to the ded bodies but why can't I also do that to the living?! #sadface

[dr.desastro]

'Almost no one wants this' is pretty much exaggragated, don't you think. 6 persons think it a bad idea - pretty loud - and the rest just ignored it. As told before: food works whacky currently and there are eough thinking it useless. Counter-proposals better than 'we can sell it!' - you can sell enough stuff and the game should not be about 'how to make 100 gold efficiently to buy through quests'. I am thinking immersion, the role-player's approach.