Quest/Reward System


Now I have to lay out the quest/reward system.

@p I originally had a grid set up with job type on one axis and item type on the other, and thought it would make sense to implement those interactions. E.g., if you use a weapon on a homemaker, they become scared of you. I actually implemented a lot of those actions and it works reasonably well.

@p But what I want to do now is just a little different, I want to work in a quest/reward system. I have something similar right now but I'm going to formalize and fill it out/finish it next. Basically each person you encounter has certain things you can help them with, i.e., quests. When you complete a quest for them, you get "favour" points, i.e., they start to like you. Certain things you can do will decrease your favour points as well. This is the "good" side of the alignment. These quests won't be laid out in quite the same way as it was before, where you have a 1-1 relationship between doing something for somebody and a reward you get from them. Instead you can meet their needs, which in some cases will be special quests to earn lots of favour points but in other cases will more or less always work (e.g., give a valuable gem to a homemaker and they love you forever.)

@p Well, there has to be a flip side in the current trend of dual ethic videogames, and here it will be "fear" points. Of course, fear points and favour points are not exactly orthogonal but they aren't on the same axis quite either. At any rate, most actions you can do will affect both favour and fear points, with the idea that getting both of them high would be pretty hard if not impossible. But again they aren't totally exclusive.

@p Anyhow, the rewards you get I guess will be a bit different for having high "fear" points. I sort of have in mind that it will be hard to switch between the two, so for instance, an engineer might do one thing for you if he fears you, but other things if he favours you. So you kind of have to pick what kind of a person you want to be, and how you want to be seen by the npcs you interact with. Maybe there should be an exponentially decreasing modifier that each time you do something for somebody, the amount it affects fear/favour decreases by like 80% or so. Actually I think that's a great idea.

@p I think this system will leverage and tie together very nicely a lot of the other miscellaneous code that I didn't know why I was implementing it before =) For instance friendship code, if you do something to scare one person, they are obviously going to tell their friends about it.

@p I think I should also add more options to people to find out basically how they feel about you, or who their friends are. I.e., more default keywords.

@p I can have default keywords for each person (by job class, and even subclass) that you encounter. This represents the "rewards" that they can give you. E.g., ship upgrades, or curing diseases from you.

2004-09-06


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