General Ideation: Beauty Mechanics

[Brackhar]

Thanks for the input everyone! Here are some broader takeaways I have, and I’ll call out specific replies below.

1. Individual hearthling preferences resonate, and likely help the system as a whole
2. There possibly should be a concept of clutter that is separate from beauty, to help reinforce creating tasteful decors. Tying decorations into the space calculation we do currently might be an elegant solution.
3. Mixing and matching thematics isn’t inherently bad, as players may self-ascribe a meaning or story that the game can not. As such, doing things like style set bonuses should be handled carefully.
4. The impact of beauty should probably be thresholded into discrete levels, as opposed to a purely analog scale. As an example, having 25-50 beauty in an area should add +5 happiness, and 50-100 should add +8. This is opposed to a system where 1 point of beauty adds +.1 happiness to a hearthling. The reasoning here is that the latter focuses the player around micro optimizations of decoration (and opens up a space for optimal solutions), whereas the former it’s just important to be beautiful enough.
5. Beauty is a little awkward for a system name. I think I’ll start using “Appeal” instead.

Thanks for all of your inputs guys! I’ll be actively working on the design doc for this this week, and I’ll see if there’s a good potential vehicle for exposing the work to you for feedback.

@SirAstrix

This could be interesting…if it wasn’t color limited to the materials. I like white houses, so does that mean I should get a penalty?

I think there’s a middle ground that we can do here. One thing we could explore is the idea between finished and unfinished walls. So, as an example, maybe stone and wood walls are treated as equally beautiful, but if you spend the extra cost to, I dunno, smooth the walls, or paint them, or wallpaper them (whatever is appropriate for the design), then that finished wall is prettier than an untreated wall. That way we could shift a lot of the color schema over to this other system and add some cost to it, while not doing something awkward like “Blue walls are more appealing than red walls.” I think we should try to avoid tying value to specific color choice, because it’s an interesting customization vector. So, then, the correct pathway may be to cost and then reward that extra effort of customization.

@coasterspaul

Slabs are going to throw another wrench into the works… It would make sense for slab wall decorations to add to beauty, but how do you know if it’s a wall decoration or just a raised floor or custom roof or stair?

This is a bit of a worry of mine, and is why I might not consider wall type in the appeal calculation. I’m unsure here.

@nikosthefan

If you balance the friction perfectly, and then use attributes/traits/thoughts (mainly traits) to push it in either direction, then you can have hearthlings who like a lot of personal space, and prefer great halls, while people who prefer small cozy homes will be more content with a little less personal space. Now the friction is a feature, not a bug, and we’ve simulated the phenomenon that beauty is different from hearthling to hearthling.

This is my honest hope for how such a system would work out.

@YetiChow

I think that one option for Stonehearth is to draw from Terraria’s “home” system – come up with a set of furniture that counts as a minimum set for a home (that might be just a bed), then have a “comfy” home set and higher levels going up to “luxurious” or even “regal” if you want to get into having royals/leaders/aristocrats. So a home with a comfy bed, a chair and a desk might be considered comfy, whereas a grand palace which only has statues might not actually be so comfy as that rustic house.

I’m a little wary of creating any sort of explicit “this house needs these specific things”, but I understand your broader point. One of the things you’re calling out here, which may be worth investigating further, is splitting the concept of appeal into multiple axiis; comfort, value, etc. I’m a little hesitant due to the complexity involved in displaying all this stuff simultaneously, but it may be an elegant approach to solving the balancing act.

@CrazyCandy

The 3 basic material types should all have the same base result on happiness, and further bonuses should come with the “fanciness” of said item and individual hearthling preferences.

There’s a balancing trick I haven’t resolved here yet. Broadly speaking, I think there may be value in associating some amount of appeal with the difficulty in creating the specific thing in question. So, something that takes longer to make or is more expensive to make should probably be better than something that is fast and cheap to make. If you accept that, then “more expensive” becomes an interesting concept, since that doesn’t simply refer to the number of resources needed, but the rarity of said resources as well. Gold is harder to find than wood, so a chair made of gold conceptually is more expensive to make than a chair made of wood. Should that gold chair be more appealing inherently as a result?

I need to think on this particular point a bit more, as if I follow this logic too far I start to run into the exact design issues you are worried about. Your proposal of treat wood, clay, and stone as equivalent may be sufficient, as then I can still layer this gold concept on top. I suppose the core question is, should wood, clay, and stone be considered equivalent? I lean towards yes, absent larger economy changes, and then adding noise to the simulation with individual hearthling preferences that can push one type over.