The Peons – Memories – Dev Blog 89

Continuing from last weeks blog post, this week I’ll talk more about another aspect of the peons – their memories. The peons arrive in Fringe Planet with no memory of who they were from their time on Earth. They will have vague recollections of things that have happened in their past – but it will take time for these memories to come back. A peon will have three distinct memories of their life. Something from their childhood years, a memory of their teenage years and finally a memory from their adult years.

Peons waking up

Each memory has three stages, a vague recollection, a more solid memory fragment and finally the peon will remember the memory in full. You’ll be alerted when a memory stage advances – and looking at the peons detailed info sheet will let you glance at all the memories in details.

An example of the three stages for an adult memory:

  • I remember working at a computer
  • I used to draw at the computer, I used a stylus and had a huge monitor
  • I used to be a digital artist! I paid my way through university by drawing commissions online and got a job working professionally

But this is more than just flavour text – as the peon remembers more of a memory, their base stats (which I spoke about last week) will change. Mostly they will go up as the peons remember skills from their pasts. But much like the peons, not every memory is a good memory. Some memories will have a negative effect on the peons stats. This may be because a peon remembers childhood trauma, making them less friendly. Or maybe they remember a back injury and their strength decreases because they are being more cautious while lifting.

It’s important to note, memories are part of the base peon stats. This makes them much more important in the early game. Later on, after days (and seasons and even possibly drifts) the skills that the peons have learnt while living on a floating island will be more important than their original memories. A peon (much like us) aren’t defined by their pasts.

It will be very easy to mod memories in and out of the game (currently they are just stored as an XML file). Also, using the peon builder it is possible to define all the memories a peon will have before the game starts.

A peon with the new facial texture

I’ve spoke about memories before in a slightly more rambling and detailed blog post, which you can find here. Feel free to check it out!

There is a lot more to read about Fringe Planet… why not try:

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