General Ideation: Beauty Mechanics

First, I see a trend in the solutions to how to avoid breaking player preferences, so better call it out explicitly. The trend is that you don’t put the discrimination between good and bad between the subjective stuff like style coherence, but rather in objective stuff such as player effort and item quality. I think that would be the way to do it.


For brainstormings sake:
What about multiple appeal scores for the hearthlings, like this:

  • base appeal
  • coziness
  • grandness
  • spohistication
  • wealthiness
  • comfort

Different appeal factors go into different scores, and hearthlings will have preferences for these scores. A hearthling that likes sophistication score well will like wallpapered walls, while someone who likes a high score on the opposite of sophistication might rather love untouched wood. If you like wealthiness (yes, I know the word is weird), you might like the decorations in your room to be plated in gold, while someone that wants a cozy house is not so interested in that.

Then you need to determine the happyness bonus in proportion to the deviation that a houses relevant score has from the average score of your town. This is because:

  1. Even if you build a town with only great and grand buildings, there are inevitably going to be homes which are grander than others, so this way you avoid hearthlings with certain preferences to go sad.
  2. It makes sense that a hearthling would be happy with an exceptionally grand house, if nothing is available. That is how humans work at least, you get used to certain levels of things.

I hope that made sense. It is morning, and my brain is still not completely awake.

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Why are you wary of this? Just as we have different tears of towns, this would be the same for different tears of different types of buildings.

It could add value to the home that it is in, but depending on what kind of room it’s being used in, I wouldn’t say would make it more or less appealing. Just because an office chair is made of leather doesn’t mean you want to use it more than one made of fibers. In fact the clothed one may be more appealing as it matches your suite and is more comfortable.


This actually made me think of a counter thought I want to ask you, @Brackhar. A lot of your focus has been about connecting the player with Hearthlings, and making them more…personal. What if it’s being taken too far? I can understand wanting to add personality to the Hearthlings, and the traits have gone a decent way in doing that. But if we’re getting to the point that the 'lings are telling us what to build and how to build it, how is it a game anymore, or at least how is it about the player anymore?

If we were to get a means of flooring (carpeting and the such) and wallpaper options, then we could still build the houses to our liking, but then the 'lings could have the interior look they wanted. Otherwise, I think the line needs to be drawn somewhere.

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I think the hearthlings should tell/show us what they like – then, we can build a town which is pleasing to both us and them!

I love the idea that a hearthling might not like the house we’ve built to our own standards, but it would be immensely frustrating to keep running into that situation. So, I think that hearthlings should make it very clear what they do and don’t like the look of. It could be tied directly to their traits, or it could even be visible somewhere on their character GUI… at a push, it could be hidden among their thoughts (the same as they think about food and danger and so on), but I feel like that would create work for players to find the info and many would tend to skip over it or miss it.

My ideal vision of hearthling interaction is for them to directly tell the player what’s going on with them (I’ve talked about it in other threads so I’ll try not to bang on too much about it here, LOL!), so with a system like that in place the hearthlings could outright request the kind of house they want to live in and the player then takes on a mission to build it. The reward for that would obviously include a serious morale boost, but it might also lead to something like a permanent buff… think of how the upgraded worker clothes work, for example, the tooltip of that buff is literally referring to the hearthling’s sense of belonging; if that stacked with a similar buff from a nice house then it could provide a solid insulator against negative experiences.

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I’m still somewhat against the whole idea, with an explanation exactly like SirAstrix offered earlier.

The reason is, while, say, managing food and ensuring it is diverse is a global task that benefits all hearthlings (especially meat-eaters and veggies since they get bigger debuffs from the food they don’t like) and is more or less obvious, building a house is a not-so-obvious and very time- and effort-consuming task, so it may seem we are microing our hearthlings, only in terms of construction.

The idea of clearly stating “we like X but don’t like Y” kinda speaks to me, but still… Imagine a situation where you specifically built a house for your carpenter (with a workshop and lumber stockpile and all), then he looks at it and says “Nah, I want to live in a tower, with vines and candles”.
On the other hand, sticking to stereotypes only (blasksmiths are techy, herbalists love nature, mages live in towers) limits our vision. We may miss an interesting interpretation here. This needs to be balanced somehow.
You know, @YetiChow, while I was writing this, I thought of another idea triggered by yours but directly opposite to it. What if our hearthlings give us indirect hints to possible improvements to their house, but these improvements can be done in several ways?

Example 1: Our hearthling is uncomfortable about dark places, but we put him in a house without light sources. So he says, “hey, it’s nice and all but it’s kinda dark in here, can you do something about it?”
As a solution, we may add lamps to the house. Or build a fireplace. Or add more windows to the walls/roof. Or move this hearthling to a more bright house. And the game will count all these actions as “solutions” to his problem (maybe not equal solutions, but solutions nonetheless).

Example 2: Our hearthling has a “professor” trait, and naturally, he likes to learn new stuff. So at one point he asks, “hey, I’d like something in my house to aid me in self-education”. Then we may add a chair and a bookcase full of clever books, or a telescope to watch at the stars, or a chemistry table where he can make experiments. We’re helping him but still writing our own story. Kinda.
In Starbound there is a system influencing spawning tenants in your new rooms. Every piece of furniture has several tags attached to it, and the game calculates the summary size of furniture with the same tag. For example, if we add many pieces with “science” tag, the game is more likely to spawn a scientist in this room. It’s a mechanistic approach, but maybe we can pick something from it.

Example 3: Our hearthling is a carnivore and likes costly stuff. So he says, “You know, I’d like a piece of leather-covered furniture in my house”. Then we try to find him one. It may be a fur rug, or a leather-covered chair, or something else.

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Oh, what I imagine is exactly what you describe – I did a pretty poor job of explaining it, but I totally agree that if hearthlings told us exactly what to build it would remove the fun from the equation. When I say “very clear”, I mean being clear about specific features (e.g. this hearthling doesn’t like leather and does like open spaces with good lighting); but still leaving it up to us to design the overall building.

To go with the carpenter example you describe, instead of specifically being “a tower with vines” it would be something like “this hearthling likes natural plants, being high up, stone walls, and candles rather than lamps”; so you can satisfy those requirements individually through any number of options. If there’s a template for a tower then that might be an obvious solution, but a cozy stone cottage built on a cliff-top may be equally effective at satisfying most of the requirements.

I do think that there should be some “building archetypes” accounted for in the default templates, so that players have easy access to the most common configurations (e.g. cozy stone cottage, cozy wood cottage, large open wooden ranch house, large open stone manor) and can then simply work on furnishings. However, I definitely don’t want to see a regular hearthling pop-up a quest for “hey, could you build me Cozy Stone Cottage no. 2 design?” I’m not against quests to construct a particular template, but IMO they should be larger quests with game-swinging impact (e.g. "Build the Grand Cathedral of Cid in order to attract a high priest to your town); for smaller stuff like a particular hearthling’s house the game should only ever give guidance, not a mandate.

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I think we’ll run into the least problems if the things that a player creates are only a net positive. Negatives should be reserved for things the player hasn’t interacted with (bare dirt), or for things that are obviously “wrong” (resources strewn about the ground, rotten food, etc.)

It’s a good point that cultures may view different materials to be of varying values. I hadn’t strongly considered that. That said, I think even in the example you gave it’d probably be fine for RC to keep valuing wood highly - as a culture wood is still rare, even if it’s common in this village.

Though if we did have a value system, there could be something interesting in tying it into a supply/demand trading system… hmm… food for thought later.

Exactly this.

This could work, but it’ll produce some amount of information overload. I’d like a cleaner, more concise approach.

For the same problems that have been discussed in the thread. The more as a designer I dictate that a house must have this explicit list of things, the less freedom we afford players. I want to only use this pattern in limited ways, ideally in cases where it is a necessity or a tautology (a bedroom must have a place to sleep).

This is cute, and I might pursue this further. I definitely like the one to many relationship you’re proposing instead of a one to one approach.

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