The Drunken Lizard Pub

I had a thought today about adding calenders and seasons with time to the game. I understand the game computes a mater of time for each space you travel, so keeping track of how long your character has been going is pretty easy with a variable to hold the current date and time.

This leads into allowing the game to have certain things depending on the time of the current year. For instance say its december(or equiv month in game world) it could be a very rainy time(due to it being hard to implement snow in tile game) with lots of fog for areas. Or summer where it rarely rains.

Some may hink this would merely be cosmetic but it adds immersion plus I think that encounters could also be tailored to the time of the year, especailly for different monster types etc...not to mention it would be neat to have festivals and such in the cities etc.

I'm sure many more ideas could be tied into actually having the game keep track of it all, list any if you have any.

This should also be relatively easy for the tile production process, because, when BW says he renders all his tiles, he could just replace a texture, for example all trees, to make them look like its winter, or autumn.

I would love to see rain and some real atmospheric thunderstorms. they should look very good with the lighting engine eschalon has.

Another thing are natural ingrediences for alchemy like plants or mushrooms. They could reappear from time to time on the map for the player to collect. (pickable like a monster bag). This would add to a more world simulation feeling of say ultima.

Ah... the possibilities.


Edit: and why not add some timed side-quests? Could be fun.

I think this would be relatively easy on teh scale of things to do...correct me if I'm wrong.

Love this idea. Could open up some "braving the elements" game features. For example, stay out in the rain too long (i.e. n turns), have to make a skill (e.g. Survival) and attribute (e.g. End) influenced check against getting the condition "Sick", which would reduce your End, Conc, and Str until cured (another recipe for Alchemy) or a certain number of turns pass. Stay out in the snow too long, make a Survival/Spot Hidden (abstracted as "finding shelter in the storm" maybe?) & Wisdom (knowing the right things to do to avoid frostbite) influenced check against "Frostbitten", which drains health like poisoning as well as reducing Speed, Dex and Perc (snow blindness) until healed. Maybe even a small percentage chance of one of your attribute reductions remaining a permanent reduction even after healing (i.e. lost some toes).