Late-game IMG sinks: clothes and recipes
I've been thinking about ways that high-level players could add items to the game without needing someone to design a new art asset for the new item, which seems to me to be the most obvious bottleneck. I've thought of a couple of ways that item creation might be automated, with a one-time investment of art and code.
One easy thing might be to create a set of clothing elements that could be combined into new garments, in much the way that the butlers are built from a finite pool of parts. So, for example, a player who wanted to create a new shirt design could choose from a couple of body designs (v-neck, turtleneck, peasant blouse, etc), a couple of sleeve types, and a couple of decorative elements (pocket, long tails, ruffled front, emblem, etc). All the elements would be available in a range of colors and/or patterns, which you could mix and match to create a finite but very large set of new clothing items.
To design a wardrobe item, let's say a player needs both a new level of Fiber Arts and a single-use card from the upgrade deck. The cards would be expensive in IMG and sufficiently rare that players might have to wait a while for one to come up; this would slow down the creation of new items. When you spend the card, you go to a design menu, select the garment type (shirt, coat, shoes-- it's possible that these would all need different upgrade cards), select the elements and colors you want, and name the resulting garment. That combination of elements now can't be designed by other players, but it goes into the wardrobe menu and can be acquired and worn. (Or, possibly, if you have Fiber Arts III you can make a garment just for yourself, and if you have IV you can make one everyone can wear.)
Recipes would be more complicated, because you'd have to have a pretty simple algorithm to decide how much energy they were worth as well as a more complicated one to match the recipe with appropriate art assets. From the player's side, though, they'd work similarly-- you'd spend your card, and be taken to a menu where you would choose the tool to use (saucepan, knife and board, etc), the type of recipe (sammich, salad, stew, etc), and then specify the ingredients. There would need to a set of art elements for each recipe type, which could be combined with designs for garnishes and serving dishes-- that last would probably be the biggest category, since if you had a few shapes of plate and bowl available in a wide range of colors, you could get a lot of unique looks for the same type of food item.
Serving dishes would probably be assigned automatically according to what's available, but the choice of other assets could be dependent on the ingredients. So, for a new pasta recipe, the same bowl of noodles could be shown in red if the recipe contains tomatoes, green if it has spinach, yellow if it has curry, and brown if it has mushrooms. Pickles in a sammich recipe could trigger one of a couple pickle garnishes-- left side of plate, right side, speared through top.
Both of these would take a little work to implement, but they'd run by themselves until the combinations of art elements ran out.
Thoughts? I'd love for there to be ways to create new thing in the game, and these seem like comparatively simple ways to do that.
One easy thing might be to create a set of clothing elements that could be combined into new garments, in much the way that the butlers are built from a finite pool of parts. So, for example, a player who wanted to create a new shirt design could choose from a couple of body designs (v-neck, turtleneck, peasant blouse, etc), a couple of sleeve types, and a couple of decorative elements (pocket, long tails, ruffled front, emblem, etc). All the elements would be available in a range of colors and/or patterns, which you could mix and match to create a finite but very large set of new clothing items.
To design a wardrobe item, let's say a player needs both a new level of Fiber Arts and a single-use card from the upgrade deck. The cards would be expensive in IMG and sufficiently rare that players might have to wait a while for one to come up; this would slow down the creation of new items. When you spend the card, you go to a design menu, select the garment type (shirt, coat, shoes-- it's possible that these would all need different upgrade cards), select the elements and colors you want, and name the resulting garment. That combination of elements now can't be designed by other players, but it goes into the wardrobe menu and can be acquired and worn. (Or, possibly, if you have Fiber Arts III you can make a garment just for yourself, and if you have IV you can make one everyone can wear.)
Recipes would be more complicated, because you'd have to have a pretty simple algorithm to decide how much energy they were worth as well as a more complicated one to match the recipe with appropriate art assets. From the player's side, though, they'd work similarly-- you'd spend your card, and be taken to a menu where you would choose the tool to use (saucepan, knife and board, etc), the type of recipe (sammich, salad, stew, etc), and then specify the ingredients. There would need to a set of art elements for each recipe type, which could be combined with designs for garnishes and serving dishes-- that last would probably be the biggest category, since if you had a few shapes of plate and bowl available in a wide range of colors, you could get a lot of unique looks for the same type of food item.
Serving dishes would probably be assigned automatically according to what's available, but the choice of other assets could be dependent on the ingredients. So, for a new pasta recipe, the same bowl of noodles could be shown in red if the recipe contains tomatoes, green if it has spinach, yellow if it has curry, and brown if it has mushrooms. Pickles in a sammich recipe could trigger one of a couple pickle garnishes-- left side of plate, right side, speared through top.
Both of these would take a little work to implement, but they'd run by themselves until the combinations of art elements ran out.
Thoughts? I'd love for there to be ways to create new thing in the game, and these seem like comparatively simple ways to do that.
Comments
If submissions for various items does happen, it should be accessible to all lvls, and not take parts of the game to add.
And its easiest if its items that do not change gameplay or affect balance, which food, drink, potions & powders, do. Adding new functional items is not as simple as just adding the item
If we are going to create stuff i think it should stick to deco and clothing items, since they are appearance only, the balance issues are minimal, and as long as the item is not offensive, and is voted in (or something simmilar) , it should be fairly simple to maintain / monitor / and edit
I agree that new items, at least at first, should not affect gameplay balance-- that's why I suggested designing new food, not drinks, since most food doesn't have buffs. It has energy costs to make and energy rewards for consumption, but those could be determined by a fairly simple formula-- add up the energy values of the ingredients and assign a multiplier determined by the tool used.
And while I am thinking in terms of IMG sinks, I don't think new item design should be restricted by level, but by skill attainment, which is not the same thing. But it makes sense from a player standpoint to unlock recipe design after unlocking all the available recipes, as part of one skill tree. (There'd have to be a method for determining when player-created recipes are unlocked-- possibly that's the first new Cheffery level, and recipe creation is the next one?)
Décor items and furniture could certainly work on the same mix-and-match principle as clothing design-- I'd really love to be able to design furniture, too! But when you say new decorations should be "not offensive, and [...] voted in," that sounds to me like you're thinking of having people submit their own artwork to the game? That to me sounds much more complicated and less fair than what I was suggesting-- more complicated because there'd have to be a curation process to make sure that user-submitted art assets match the tone of the game, and are available at the right sizes/scales/formats; less fair, because then you're not restricting item creation by skill attainment in the game, but in RL-- players would need to have not just the artistic skill to draw or render a new item, but the software to do so in a format compatible with the game. I feel strongly that if there's going to be a way for players to design new items, there should be at least one pathway to doing so that doesn't depend on out-of-game technical skills.
@Arkrider-- ooh, I like the flag idea! Maybe that could be the first new fiber arts skill-- first flags (and maybe rugs), then clothes.
@Seeen-- Yeah, I never got far enough in the game for IMG sinks to be an issue for me personally, but the longer the game goes on the more players will hit level 60 and need some new way to keep growing; it's a thing to start thinking about.
Community projects are great for those who enjoy them, but I think we also need things for people who come to Glitch for a rest from the stress of real world communities, those who want to interact with just a few friends quite often, rather than cope with the demands of lots of other people.
It'd probably either need an approval process or a complex building method... or we just cope with some recipes being very, very silly. Onion sno cones. Pizza daquiris. Salmon ice cream with cheesy sauce. And so on. (I'm assuming the recipe builder won't let you put Fertilidust Lite in a food.)
I also like the flag idea--while it's probably a bad idea to allow people to upload their own art, there could be a "flag builder" program, like the apparel program, that lets you customize one, with various features costing currents or credits (if we have those) to unlock, and some only being unlockable by achievements. Maybe you only get a flag when you've maxed out your homestreet size and have a tower, or when your house/tower has reached a certain size.
I agree that increasing rook attacks could be problematic. Rook attacks are a terrific diversion for higher-level players; for lower-level and casual players, they're a frustrating distraction. I'm not sure increasing the number or ferocity of rook attacks would help the game as a whole, as opposed to driving off players before they get to a point of saying "I will throw fifteen music-boxes into the shrine now." Also, they're a resource sink but not an IMG sink.
Maybe player-created recipes require rent--you have to keep paying for them to keep them in the recipe books, so that we don't wind up getting overloaded with them over time; as players' interests change, they can let them lapse. Or maybe anyone can pay the tithe to keep them available--after making a certain number of them--and a lapse shows a lack of interest.
I could also see player recipes having a limited set of images to choose from, rather than a fully-customizable picture.
Having it be a new skill to make whatever item is fine. I do not think img on top of this is necessary but that is just me. But the item would still need to be made, and this is more of a problem for food since it can be a million different shapes. Potions tend to be a bottle, so do powders, drinks are a typical shape as well,so is furniture, but food is many. Clothing you have typical shapes too, for most of it. In any case someone making an item would need some artistic skill, otherwise its "Police - Sketch - Artist - land " and by that i mean it would be people with ideas but someone else would need to guess what they actually meant.
So that would mean only a few ways it could be done, only certain basic shaped items would be the only ones you can submit to be made, say T-shirts, Pants, Skirts, Shoes, Hats, Tables, Chairs, Couches, Cabinets, SDB'S, Wallpaper, Flooring, Ceilings, Potions, Powders, Drinks, ...whereas items that vary a lot, Lamps, Floor Deco, Table Deco, Food, Jackets, Dresses, might not be ones you could submit ideas for. Another option would be a plug and play type of submission but while that would open it up to people less artistically inclined, it would also severely limit what one could create
You would still have a basic template of some sort given to you for the item but it would need to be a set shape.
But you are right that there'd need to be, if not an approval process, then at least an appeal process for object names and designs. How did the old game deal with offensive names given to animals? That must have been a thing that happened.
I frankly would just be happy if we could start with changing the colors of the pieces (even if it was a specific set of color schemes) or some very basic, changing the pictures/patterns on the Tshirts, options to be able to modify clothing Iike we can do with hair and skin. Although over time (a few years from now), I'd love the chance to do some revision/redesign of some of the items; so many of the shirts and dresses were bulky looking to me and not flattering at all. And the shoes left a lot to be desired, which is why I mostly stuck to flip flops.
And, I think I'm in agreement with b3achy. I'd love to recolour stuff in the wardrobe, and I think drawing new t shirt designs might be doable.
I think the big issue I see here in general is bloat. Yeah, we could charge rent or iMG to keep a recipe or design in existence, but I kind of see it getting unmanageable, it's like the real estate issue. But I think both ideas would be really interesting if the design or recipe was restricted to the creator or one gift recipient. It seems like it could be manageable because the devs don't have to roll out dozens, hundreds, of new recipes to everyone who is eligible to make them. And there'd be some great emergent gameplay around players sharing unique food and clothing items, recipes, and patterns.
I see this possibility working more like this:
For clothing:
Fibre arts skills, I like the idea of buying upgrade cards to customize the type of garment you want, but they'd be the type of card you get in inventory. I think you'd make a blank garment of the type you want out of an obscene amount of fabric and thread. You would spend the card to create a custom pattern, that you'd get to customize the garment the way Ellen imagined. You would apply the pattern to the garment, along with a few other elements (e.g., jellisacs for a green garment, sparkly for a glittery one) to create the custom wardrobe item. You can gift or sell patterns, but they get destroyed when you construct the garment. Maybe garment construction needs the use of a new machine - the sewing machine. I'd set it up next to the block maker
For recipes:
I think maybe you could build custom recipes as suggested but they are restricted to you, and you can make only one or a few stacks per day. But perhaps with a higher level of penpersonship you could make copies of the recipes for friends that, like patterns, would be destroyed on use.
I personally find the idea of having to vote things in to be a PiTA, and the more people you get involved the more likely you are going to offend a certain set of players because the vocal 'majority' will instill their will on others, and potentially drive away a solid chunk of good players. There are already offensive things in the game...but I think a team that has been dubed by the devs as the review board would know better how to differentiate between what is acceptably offensive and what goes against the grain of the gameplay. Whereas leaving it to a popular vote opens the door for a lot more offensive things to get put into the game rather than trusting a body of selected personal with the responsibility to review the items.
The only way i can see not voting in some manner is simply to put anything the devs approve of in game. But if the game allows submissions that will be too many things to add. Unless the selection process becomes extremely picky. Which if it does Im not sure people will want to submit stuff to begin with. In either case any item would need to be approved of by the devs before a vote would even take place, and that alone should make adding anything offensive null and void
However the idea of rent with img as suggested above might work, otherwise bloat, and way too many items to look at to approve, and then later way to many items in game is likely to happen. But all items would still need to be approved of in some manner. I see it being too problematic to actually add to be honest. But some way to change the color of items we already have, clothing and deco, and possibly something like a picture frame, would both be more plausible. Being able to actually add items to the game, nomatter how its done, while being very nice to have also creates a huge workload with it
It would give them a set time limit–two or three days, maybe–and if any of them don't vote in that time, it replaces them with a few new ones. If they don't vote soon enough, it just uses the vote ratio of the players that did.