On the many uses of plants – Dev Blog 5
Another busy week, and another Friday blog post covering all the development work done on Fringe Planet this week. This week has been focused on the AI of the peons, and finishing the plant work that was started last week.
Peon AI is now very aware of meals, and how tasty they are – as well as being aware if there are better quality clothes available to wear.
When hungry, a peon has two options for sustenance – one is eating raw ingredients. This is pretty nasty as far as the peon is concerned and will result in a mood debuff. Additionally it won’t fill the peon up much – meaning that unless meals are created they will have to eat more raw ingredients which will result in a debuff spiral, making for one very depressed peon. This should be avoided if at all possible.
The second option is to eat a prepared meal. These meals are created at the Stone Oven and stored in the inventory once they have been created (providing a peon doesn’t eat it straight away). Prepared meals are not only tasty, but they will fill the peon up pretty much completely. Every prepared meal is potentially unique – the taste and calorie intake of each meal depends on the ingredients used to make it. A peon will get a mood buff on eating a prepared meal. Having the stone oven central to a base is a good idea – all peons in the area surrounding an oven when a meal is created will get a small mood bonus as well – cooking generally smells delicious and will cheer anyone up.
Peons, generally being an honest and hard working lot will tend to take meals of the lowest quality out of the inventory when meal time comes around. However, there are two traits which can change this priority. The “Lazy” trait will randomise what meal a peon takes from the inventory – “Lazy” peons don’t care what they eat just as long as it doesn’t take too much effort to find. A peon with the “Greedy” trait will always take the highest quality meals available – after all, they are more important than the others.
After some plant fiber has been harvested from the rapidly growing fiber plants, the player can now instruct the peons to create clothes. Coats, shirts, trousers, shoes and undershirts can be made from plant fiber. These clothes are crafted at a crafting table and then moved into the inventory. However, peons are very aware of new garments and their quality compared to the clothes they are wearing. So they will often change into these new clothes if their current ones are damaged or dirty. The current clothes will be discarded and the new clothes will be put on. What is very exciting about this is with the dynamic clothing system that has been implemented, a player can see this change in clothes visually. Creating a bunch of plant fiber clothes and waiting for the peons to change into the new clothes will result in a lot more green on the peons!
Changing clothes is a very low priority task, so peons won’t stop important work to change clothes. Additionally, discarded clothes that are put into the inventory after a peon changes into new clothes become available for other peons to put on.
Finally we have been working on some minor quality of life UI updates – updating icons to make them more consistent with each other and we have also added a mouse over to plants, the mouse over will tell you what type of plant it is, as well as how many fruits are ready to be harvested.
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