19092019

Spent some time with Haolun tonight. It was remarkably cold and dry. I woke up this morning at around 0900 and for the next four hours drifted uneasily between states of consciousness. It’s been harder to wake up these days, and I’ve been waking up later than usual. It’s not a mental thing: I can feel it in my body. Must be seasonal.

I managed to begin implementing a resting stage based on (ie, ripped directly from) the gameplay footage for Death Stranding. Avery can now take off her pack, sit down and rest for a bit, and engage in actions like massaging her shoulders, stretching her legs and taking a nap. Resting in general significantly slows down the rate at which energy is consumed and completely stops fatigue from building, and the various actions restore burnt stamina (alternately known as fatigue). 

In general, all of this has made me reconsider the design of the stamina/fatigue system in general. Originally, the way I planned it, all actions would consume stamina and every in-game hour a set percentage of stamina used would be “burnt” (represented by fatigue accumulated), with the biggest difference in rate of depletion being tied to whether Avery was carrying her pack or not. Obviously, I imagined, the biggest drain in stamina would be walking and traversal in general. However, I’ve come to realise that in reality, that’s simply not feasible: a highly-experienced and disciplined hiker of Avery’s level would be expected to be able to pretty effortlessly cover almost 50km a day even with a considerable load under harsh weather conditions (and at night as well!), but there’s no way I can properly represent that much square mileage in-game without turning it into an absolute slog to sit (or for her, I suppose, to walk) through. 

That being said, the expedition is also not a long-range exercise and the actual area of investigation is actually pretty small, around 25km^2 (still trying to work out the precise size and scaling, I’ll discuss that in greater detail once I start posting about the world map): so she wouldn’t be operating anywhere near her maximum abilities anyways when it comes to endurance. I’m not sure how I’m going to implement stamina/fatigue in a way that simultaneously represents the scale of the world accurately while also not diminishing her considerable physical clout. 

Well, whatever I decide, it’ll have to wait until tomorrow…