Project Bob (Ravenous' Uncle)

I already had plans for user defined events to be something that could be added to the game. However, since i have made the game world completely modular and procedurally generated, I am trying to make it such that some one could completely mod the game, from adding jobs, buildings, industries, and locations; to changing distributions of the jobs, buildings, and industries in those locations. I’m currently trying to figure out how to make a actions mod-able. The base/current ones are pretty hard coded in with some more complex functions. However, whenever I get around to completely exposing everything the engine uses to make the world, what this means is someone could completely make an entire new city with new jobs, and housing, in addition to the base ones, effectively creating an entire new scenario to play in, that was not designed by me. That reminds me I should allow for npc generation customization as well.

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Don’t feature creep too hard right away, man! Build a solid foundation, let us break play with it, and then add more fancy features = P

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thanks for suggesting man really good game!

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Its not feature creep so much as 2.0 is an entire redesign of the engine to allow for the addition of the npcs. While the game will play from the player perspective very similarly to the alpha v1 series, the engine goes about this completely differently. Part of building the engine is building for future expansion, otherwise i will just be rebuilding the engine again so i can add more things. Part of why so many things are changing at once is i don’t want to constantly be going back to reprogram the ai to bring in a lot of the features i have planed anyway. Also a lot of these ideas i have had for quite a while, i just haven’t shared or revealed them to you guys.

Even if i did not make the npcs fully autonomous some form of redesign would have been necessary at some point. The alpha v1 engine was built with no expansion in mind or modularity unfortunately, because i had just leaned python and i was more focused on making a working proof of concept. It was akin to prototype to see if using renpy and the shared control with an ai gave what i was looking for. Also, I was still learning how to apply some of pythons more advanced concepts and features.

To be honest a lot of this probably could have been avoided with better planning and programming/game project development best practices, that i honesty don’t know because i am a hobby coder, who taught themselves.

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Hmm. And to be perfectly fair, I’ve never done anything nearly as ambitious as a game, and it’s been a long while since I did any coding more complicated than editing a few game files here and there (specifically, for the games Elemental: Fallen Enchantress and 7 Days to Die, to change some of the mechanics a little), which I think were in XML. I’ve never even looked at Python before.

Just don’t want to see you mire yourself in backend stuff and lose interest before producing anything playable that we, the playerbase, can get excited about and reinfect you with enthusiasm for the project = P I know I’ve done that with writing more than once.

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So todays topic is for loops and the fact that 78 of them are needed to generate all the jobs and job buildings. Can you be dizzy from tracking where and what your trying to iterate through, because I think I am? Also need to give a shoutout to @Tron and @e123b who have provided the inspiration, via Forks code for how this code works. Using a for loop in a condition statement in python, is not something I knew about or would have thought to try, till seeing it in the Forks code.

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I think I didn’t understand the game, how can I make the days go by?

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Use the start day to initiate the start of a day. It should be noted that you have to have a valid day plan, transportation, and clothing worn, for it to actually start the day and not send you back to fix your choices.

78 For loops?!

Bloody hell, that’s a lot!

But that’s just initial world setup, right? You don’t have 78 For loops executing every single day…?

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Uhh, let’s separate some things, there being 78 for loops and how many loops are executed during the 78 for loops. If one of the 78 is inside the other then the one inside executes the number of times the parent one iterates over something. So going double deep with a for loop in a for loop in a for loop, would be on a x cubed factor scale. So how many time a for loop executes during the 78 for loops is, idk haven’t done the math, it’s a lot though there are quite a few nested loops. One is 9 deep, but for it to execute it needs a certain set of conditions.

The number for loops that executes each day is in the thousands possibly millions considering just the eat function x the number of npcs. However that’s just the same single for loop executing on each npc, possibly multiple times.

Maybe I’m not reading your post right, but usually, you want to limit the number of iterations over a for loop that frequently-called code will run. Since, as you described, there’s an exponential factor with nesting for loops, it can quickly lead to performance issues.

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It worked, that was my mistake.

Right after advancing in the game I found a bug, follow the printscreen…

Error: Image ‘bg fastfood’ not found.

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Per earlier post replying to me:

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Small unimportant question but I have been wondering after my second play-through. How does the “feed cupcake” mechanic work at parties? It seemed that Once I started exercising more and lowering my greed I fed a lot less people. It seems to be independent of weight so I’m guessing its greed that controls it right?

Yes and no, depends on what your doing on each cycle of each loop. A loop counting to a million will take almost no time, however if i make it write a new file containing the number were on, on each cycle of the loop, as we count to a million, it may take quite some time due to being io bound. It’s really all about what instructions have to be executed and how long it takes to do them during the duration of the loop. Also effecting the amount of time it takes is how a processor handles each instruction. An older processor may take more clock cycles to perform certain instructions. All most programs and games are, is a series of loops and logic to create the behaviors the user sees and experience.

Not a bug per say so much as the image not existing. I have not included an image for that yet. While i continue to delude myself that i’m going to make all the art for the game, honestly I probably need to find an artist to make all the art for the game.

It is straight random chance, your just getting unlucky. Also the more people at the party the more chances for it to happen.

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how do i raise the greed stat

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The same way you change any of your stats reliably, you change your schedule to something that encourages one stat over another.

  • Greed is encouraged by work and discouraged by exercise.
    (edit: IT IS also encouraged by partying or eating, but those are both drains on your cash so work is optimal)

If you work overtime and do not exercise intensely, you will begin growing your greed. This will take longer if you start out overweight or with stronger willpower, but you will reach the same point eventually with the same strategy.

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Lol, while you have a correlation you missed the causation, and even then it’s more complicated than that. P.S. greed is solely increased by food eaten. Why is it more complicated than than eat food. Because different foods add and remove greed. I also removed player control over what you eat. Also all random events and weather you eat on those is up to the ai and not the player, and the ai decides based on the character stats. Sort making any plans to min max greed dead. While one method will work in certain situations the situation changes too rapidly to really be effective all the time. The point of this is to force players or adapt to the changes in their characters. To interpret what’s given and change tactics as needed to get what they want. There is not one methods fits all.

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This makes much more sense lol
Im glad to hear you took agency completely out of diet I found that you could micro too much by changing diet constantly and effectively keep diets one to two levels above or below what they should be which can speed up things too easily. The lack of agency got you a bit of flak but it’s the core of the game and I’m glad you didnt make the game a cakewalk.
That said I found it kind of funny that people seemed to think the game was hard or too slow, if anything it was way too easy to just get greed up, even with the hardest of starts, and balloon from there.
Anyways after playing the game for a week now Ive got to say its really fun to play for how barebones it is. The foundation is solid, a sim game without direct control, and given your stated plans for the next version I am hyped to see what comes of it. That said, because its got a lot of room to develop, Ive got quite a few ideas I wanted to float out here…

Problems: eating is a waste, “home” isnt useful, happiness is easily attainable and trivial, working is OP and the overworking penalty is negligible, Parties are too random, and cleaning… it just blows
Solutions for said problems:
Wrap “eat” activity into diet level and take it out of player control
I preface this saying that I actually like that I felt there werent enough hours in the day, thats definitely realistic lol. However I cannot say I felt that the time allotments really made all the much sense. Eating your meals should be an important part of your day in a game about weight gain, or any sim for that matter, but in this game I couldnt help but feel as though it was actually one of the worst uses of my time when I could just work and get paid to eat a meal’s worth of doughnuts and cake. the penalty for overwork is tiny and you get greedier and fatter from doing it, why ever dedicate more than a single block to a meal? The simplest solution I could think of is to simply
Remove one block of the day in exchange for a predetermined meal schedule between blocks
5 blocks a day instead of six but now you dont need to “eat”. Eating is controlled by your diet tier so if you are eating light you probably eat 2 meals a day, if you are unhealthy you probably eat 3-4 with plenty of snacking inbetween. You now eat between blocks, kinda like how travel works, so it shouldnt be too difficult to implement. The end result is if you work the standard amount of 2 blocks you end up with the same 3 blocks you would have if you just ate once a day givng you the same 3 blocks of freetime you would have had, no loss. Now the one thing that you would lose from this is the ability to just assign “eat” to every single hour of the day and just eat yourself to 500 pounds and then game over when you eventually step on a scale. I dont think thats a big loss, from what I can tell I dont think you really care for that style of gameplay either.

Happiness, while it does have the extremely serious penalty of death if you hit and stay at 0, there doesn’t really seem to be any tangible award for actually keeping yourself happy. Now maybe I am missing something and happiness does control everything, but I personally never was able to correlate anything getting better or worse because of it - was basically just a really pathetic doomsday clock. It was also just very easy to stay happy without ever using the relax activity. I could work every hour of the day but one and I would be in decent spirits, I wouldnt be at full happiness but I could keep it like 80% if I did not exceed my target weight by too much. The easiest way to give incentive to keep happiness high, Your ideal weight will be raised by a small amount, equal to the “push” of 3 friends perhaps, every day you keep your happiness >90% (if you are currently 5+ over/under it.)
Youre happy at this size, why get in a rush to get smaller (or bigger)? You could limit it to just being over ideal weight, it might be a bit of an issue if you just got really happy at the start and never wanted to gain more than 121 lbs, but I dont think that would realistically happen because the early game is by far the busiest with school and minimum wage jobs that really leave you without much free time at all, less time to ensure you are happy.
I think this would need to be in conjunction with making happiness harder to achieve in general. Ive found it far too easy to keep near full happiness completely regardless of anything but ideal weight and extraordinarily dirty houses.
Overworking penalty needs to be harsher and if it isnt already this way, the more youre overworked the more happiness you lose. Like I said happiness comes along far too easily already, the slap on the wrist that is the current overworked penalty only stresses the issue. it should really chip away at happiness like 4x as strong, it could even build up over consecutive days to become worse.
The doughnut events, cake events, pizza events, tasting events, and complimentary meal events should only happen once a day max so that you cannot get nearly as much fattening food out of working multiple shifts. Also bringing your own lunch so that you dont always fill up on snack food, even people who eat like birds bring some sort of lunch into work. For those that dont count calories, they might go out to a lunch somedays, but that goes into the more social events idea and would probably cost a lot more than a few vending machine snacks, more of a CEO thing.

Relaxing at home needs to be buffed I found myself to never really need it, it just filled an empty space occasionally. This is because happiness is currently plentiful, but if it were made to be more scarce and powerful, this would encourage the use of relaxation to help your character stay mentally healthy, also would encourage you to buy more/better stuff for the house, which means more need for money, which means more gameplay. The most important change for the home though is Snacking at “home” Kinda seemed like a no brainer to me, you endlessly snack on the jobsite but somehow when you are in the privacy of your own home lounging about you have the discipline of a monk. I think to discourage work even more you should always snack much more at home than at work because you are in private. I think this should become a mechanic in general where the comments you get about your weight get worse the more you pig out in public… but I digress.

Cleaning…it kinda blows man Its annoying to micromanage it every few days, from what I can tell its only mechanical purpose is to put a limit on how much you can party and “eat” other than your cash. It works if you have to work two blocks a day, but if you have a CEO job or any of the college ones, you cant totally just party three blocks, clean 2 and then just do that for eternity with no downsides. It does limit you from doing it every hour of the day, but money does just as good of a job already, cleaning on top of it is unnecessary and unlike money we have to manage it manually. Same goes for “eat” although you already know what I think of that one. Its just unnecessary. I thought maybe hiring a maid would be a good endgame way to deal with it, but then you just end up permanently partying which sounds cool at first but like doing all of anything forever it just gets boring after a time. I get if its for realism but this is one of those things like using the restroom that I think we could do without being a game mechanic.

Limit parties to one a day The heart of the issue here I think is just that partying kinda blows every other eating activity out of the water and its the only way to get your friends to eat so it makes sense it needs to be balanced with the high pricetag and requiring cleaning. If you limit parties it stops people from just partying all day, and more importantly they have to think about how to spend all those other blocks they would otherwise be partying in. It allows you you to live a party lifestyle if youve got the cash, without breaking the core of the game too much.
Parties should be less random I get the not all 20 of your guests can always make your 4pm party at your estate, but like you invite 4 people and dont check to see if they can come? Just give us a way to know if X can come over today or not in the invite menu, its not fun to host a party for four people and then end up with some guy you dont even know showing up just for the free food. A big reason that I just constantly partied when I played with the CEO was just that I had to throw like 4 to even get the people I wanted to come over and even then there was like a 5% chance Id actually get to feed them or “find them attractive” so I could increase my weight limit.
Need more ways to hang out: small groups or just one friend, like going out to eat or a bar should be added and have the feeder event incorporated into this instead of happening every time you see the guy on a bus lol. Also degrees of friendship so that you can invite people who are just acquaintances to become better friends, maybe evolve this to include romantic relationships at some point as well. And so guys you just barely know wont keep telling you youre fat and ugly on the way to work and force you to go on a jog with them at gunpoint. Only a real close friend could get away with saying that and not getting completely cut off or blown up on.
Sorry for the wall of text, because so much of the games mechanics are all interwoven it was really hard to think of a way to improve one system without tweaking another :sweat_smile:
Some of these things you probably already thought of some solutions for, but I am interested what ideas you had in comparison.

One question I have though is how will the grocery store be used? I have some more ideas about streamlining meals but I am curious what youve planned so far.

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I noticed there’s a variety of sizes you can get cars in and I assume you can eventually outgrow them, but even at 450lbs I never got any dialogue related to my tiny car like I did with the bus. Does the size of your car matter at all? At this point it’s basically impossible to gain as everyone keeps encouraging me to lose weight, and my character obstinately refuses to do anything that’d put on a few pounds so I can’t even grow out of clothes to increase my goal weight that way.

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