Frostfeast 2016! moar frost, moar feast

[RepeatPan]

Core concept

The idea of Frostfeast was always a bit two-sided. On one hand, we wanted to have a jolly, nice festive mod that allows you to play around, decorate your town, and generally enjoy the festive, albeit chilly, time of the year. However, I always wanted it to be a bit challenging, but not in the way Stonehearth did it back then with scenarios/campaigns, which was basically just “Let’s throw stronger enemies at you until the village collapses or the scenario runs out of ideas”. So the two core concepts were:

• Lights! Festive! Jolly!
• A tad difficult and a constant battle against the environment

The latter shouldn’t be deadly though, or really difficult, but it should tie-in into both things. As in: By making things pretty and cheery, you’re also battling the environment. That’s how heat sources were born. You can avoid having your hearthlings freeze to death by putting up lights/braziers, making winter clothing and so forth. As a gameplay rule of thumb, things that give off heat should be “logical”, and the balancing is kind of made in a way of utilization: A chimney will give off loots of heat, a brazier will give you barely enough to stay warm. Because the first one is something you’ll head to to get warm again, the latter is just something you use to stop being cold. I think this is the most important aspect of Frostfeast: It should be a challenge, but a different one from the normal game. It should be cute, it should be festive, but it shouldn’t (necessarily) be a sandbox bit, because winter’s still dangerous.

Frostfeast itself had a lore, and I don’t know if it was ever published. The monument itself basically tells it in a visual way. I don’t know if I’m allowed to just paste the story here, or re-tell it, but the basic premise was a “christmas miracle” with people being saved from the cold. We’ve tried to tie the cultists into this whole thing by making them the baddies, by offering a - completely optional - challenge against them. You had all incentives to join them, but you’d face repercussions (mainly, it’s getting colder. A lot colder). Basically, the cultists want to summon their ice deity/monster/notquitedefinedyet, and by sacrificing gifts to them (instead of giving them to the CoP), you’re making the world a worse place and help them do just that. Basically, the monster feeds on non-festiveness. Later on, we wanted to have a titan-like battle against just this monster, in a way to tell you that “Well, that’s what you get for helping the bad guys”. We wanted to wait with that until titans were effectively implemented, so it didn’t make the cut for FF16.

GitHub Issues

These are the open issues from the repository, which includes ideas, bugs and other things from FF15 and FF16. Not all of them are 100% serious (I’m sure you’ll find out which ones aren’t), and not all of them are doable. It was a mix of “what could we do, reasonably” and “what could we do, maybe if SH allows it”. Not all of them are good ideas, not all of them were fitting, but they were tracked to be evaluated/looked on when we got the time. We didn’t. The following is the (nowadays incomplete list).

Enhancement: Move the firepit_listener from the warming service to the heat source

Currently, the warming service is listening to events to turn the heat source on/off. This is something the heat source should do itself, rather than abusing the warming service for it.

Ideally, the heat source should say whether it’s controlled by that or not. Currently, this is mandatory for all firepits.

Bug: First log put into firepit is taken out again and put into stockpiles

[insert x files theme song]
apparently only happens on the first log and the very first stockpile…

Idea: When warmth reaches a certain value, freeze the hearthling in a block of ice

If the warmth drops below a certain threshold for too long, the hearthling is encased in a block of ice and needs to be rescued by others (items like hot chocolate, maybe thawed by (special?) heat sources, or similar).

Could-have: Evaluate decay values for prepared food and jerky

So far, we’re only changing the decay values for decaying food itself, not for prepared food or jerky which has different values. Find out if/how we should adjust these values - and maybe if Frostfeast food should decay even slower. Note that with this year’s SH, we cannot adjust the rate of the decay anymore (it seems), but set an initial value.

Idea: Find some excuse to add Mexican Armadas #63

brad [11:19]
I’m good with including a Mexican Armada

Idea: Attachments

As discussed in the Slack, and already pitched as idea in 2015, it would be nice if entities could be “upgraded” with other entities.

Examples of such upgrades:

• Trees could be upgraded with lights to become frostfeast trees
• Windows could get shutters
• Doors, Windows could get decoration

Things to keep in mind:

• An entity should be able to define what kind of attachment to receive (i.e. attachments have some sort of type)
• An entity can receive multiple, different attachments
• An entity can define attachments to be mutually exclusive (i.e. you can have either window_attachment_large, window_attachment_medium or window_attachment_all, but not two or more).
• Attachments should have some control over this too; maybe attacher and attachee can have some sort of whitelist/blacklist to define where they can be placed, in addition to the tagging.
• Attachments can define one or more tags that they identify as.
• The AI needs to have actions to perform this kind of thing; which isn’t a big deal, except I have no real idea how the whole scaffolding stuff works (yet).

Idea: Trojan Presento

During the encounter with the goblins, there might be a chance that they offer you a present, which can be denied. If accepted, the goblins will (peacefully) deliver a present to the edge of your town, where it can be picked up and placed somewhere. It’s a huge present, something that the player would definitely want to place somewhere central.

If placed, every few hours during the night the present will try to see if it enough hearthlings are asleep. If they are, the present will open (in a cartoon-style approach by having each wall “falling to the side” one by one), revealing a goblin raid troop inside with a few members (maybe 2-5, depending on settlement size). They head for valuable loot inside of crates/stockpiles, pick up some, and rush back to the goblin camp. If they are successful (present was accepted and opened, at least one unit made it back alive), the encounter repeats (with a nice “Sorry for last time, this time the present is empty, I promise” message).

This mechanic is totally abusable as some sort of training/hunting ground for clever players.

Concept

• Goblins offer players an oversized present, which is actually a trojan horse
• If accepted, the present spawns a goblin raid troop.
• If the raid troop is successful, the encounter will be repeated.
• If the raid troop is unsuccessful, the encounter will not be repeated, or only after a very long time.
• If the present is denied, the present will not be offered again.

To consider

• Visible building of the present in the camp: Can we get the goblins to “build” the present and show how a few units walk in?

Idea: Adding breathing effect to other units (such as critters)

Consider if the breathing effect could be added to other units as well, such as critters (sheep, rabbits), enemies (goblins, whateverelsethereisIamreallyoutoftouchrightnow)…

Enhancement: Consider creating a popup about the content of the gifts

Create a bulletin of some sort that displays the content of the offering that was just offered. Player requested feature that sounds useful.

Idea: Have daytime and stamina affect warmth loss

Daytime and stamina could affect warmth loss:

• High stamina (or body) could reduce the warmth loss experienced
• During the day, less warmth is lost than during the night

Wire up frostfeast:admire_warmth_adjacent to stonehearth:freetime

It would be nice/useful if hearthlings could gather around special heat source (heaters, for example) like they do for firepits whenever they have nothing to do.

SH solves this with a few actions and an observer; this pattern would have to be copied.

Indicate heat sources

Players should know what is emitting heat and maybe to some extent how much too, otherwise the warmth mechanic might be reduced to firepits and braziers, although a lot more entities are emitting heat.

Make ice transparent

This actually dates back to 2015, including Chris’ answer:

@RP (2015)

Need some help from Radiant for this. Is it possible to make the ice that spawns above water sources slightly transparent?

If it isn’t, a workaround would be to spawn the ice as its own entity (similar to water). That wouldn’t be n-ice (because it couldn’t be dealt with like with normal terrain tools), but better than nothing I suppose.

@Chris (2015)

Tricky. We don’t have any mechanism for giving terrain different materials–the actual meshing process simply processes the terrain layer by layer. Further, would we really want ice to be terrain? Ice could float down water, for example, or break apart into interesting chunks. At first blush, it seems like we would want this to be some kind of entity. What ‘normal terrain tools’ were you referring to? (Like, literally the UI? Mining and building?)

@RP (2016)

Better late than never…

Yes, I’ve meant terrain tools, mostly mining. Ice provides a challenge on multiple levels:

• Should open water freeze? If so, something needs to keep track of shape changes.
• Is it possible to get rid of ice?
• Does ice melt?
• Does it float on the water, i.e. will raise/sink with the water level?
• Is ice affected by water currents or will it always stay at the place it spawned at?

I can’t even remember what I did last year - I think I’ve just replaced water with ice, or put a layer of ice above it, or didn’t touch it at all. Probably the latter…

Other things that I could think of right now

• We’re not supporting difficulties at all, or start parameters. it would be nice if maybe things like the heat simulation could be turned on/off in a setting, or maybe tied in to the difficulty (easy having no/very little cold, whereas hard would freeze your hearthlings to death within two seconds).
• All the features from 2017 and 2018 aren’t implemented in FF at all. FF17 was just a feature upgrade, with very little (I think) added in.
• The balancing for worth and appeal are probably a bit rushed and mostly outdated.
• With the introduction of rooms, chimneys and friends could be effectively changed to just heat the room, instead of a sphere. This could allow for more “realistic” heating mechanics.
• The story could be expanded a bit more. We wanted to have Jenna/the CoP physically walk into the camp some day, at least for major encounters (first time/“You’re helping the bad guys!”). Cultists could do this as well (“Hello, my name is”).
• Instead of just “eating” the presents, a CoP representative/cultist should come and pick it up. Not sure if we’re actually doing this, I feel like maybe? Cultists should throw it into their monument and then burn it.
• The goblins play just a minor role here. With the trojan presento, this would be expanded. Integrating them into the present battle would be bad, because two parties is already more than enough. But maybe they could also get a reason to exist? Maybe they want presents/decorations/whatever and if you don’t do it, they’ll declare war?
• Although I don’t think it makes sense, it might be worth investigating whether Frostfeast can be integrated into the seasonal stuff. Have the cold reign when it’s winter, and have the tree die when it becomes spring. Reset the event every year, or maybe take over some things (such as the reputation).
• Additionally, “inside” such as mines, etc. might also have different heating mechanics. Currently, they’re all treated the same.
• Now with weather, there’s also the possibility to tweak the heat/temperature using that.
• The AI in general could maybe become a bit smarter. When it’s snowing, they’d rather stay inside/next to a heat source inside somewhere. And so forth.

Most things are written down in the FF writeups I did in my RepeatFeed in December '15/'16.