Re: Eating and Sleeping


Sun, 05 Nov 95 11:19:09 GMT

In article <uKsmwwIeEvyP085yn@southwind.net>
ravenpub@southwind.net "Carl D. Cravens" writes:

> What are your opinions on hunger and the need to sleep in IF? I've
> often had the feeling that hunger (dying of starvation) is punishment
> for taking too long... when you run out of food, saving doesn't always
> help; you have to back up and play through some large chunks more
> "efficiently" to get to the previous point with less hunger. Are there
> any good reasons to have a major-nuisance hunger in a game?
> I kind of feel the same way about sleeping. What purpose does forcing
> the character to sleep serve? If the game needs a dream sequence,
> simply hinting to the character that they should sleep somewhere seems
> adequate. (In Curses, whenever you look at the servant's cot, you're
> told you feel drowsy. What player will neglect to sleep there?) Does
> the need for sleep on a regular basis simply force the player to take
> unnecessary and bothersome actions?
> Can anyone show me where needing to eat and sleep every X turns (as
> opposed to eating and sleeping when it fits the plot) is beneficial to
> the game?

Starvation is a pain in the backside. In fact, any time-limit that makes
you play chunks of game "efficiently" can be annoying unless there's a clear
warning that it's going to need to be done like that. It's really no fun
to have to run through a section you've already solved. If it's actually a
puzzle to have to do it as quickly as possible (ie, there's some special
way of doing it in extra time), things are better. It also tends to be a
fairly unreasonable reason to kill the player - it takes a *long* time to
starve to death, so having a game where you can starve in a matter of turns
would NOT seem logical. (The archetypal example of how not to use hunger is
in the old versions of Save Princeton, which is a considerably better game
now that puzzle has been taken out. There is a tight hunger timer from the
start, two valid-seeming food sources turn out to be poisonous, and the
player starves within a time period of 1 day, despite apparantly having
eaten prior to the game period!! ;) )
Sleeping, on the other hand, is more reasonable. I only know of a few
games that actually had a sleep timer, and most of them used them to
"formalize" a passing-days timer. Plus, the penalty for not sleeping
"correctly" is less; only one of those games actually killed the player for
not sleeping properly (and that was reasonable - you were warned of a danger
around the area that was easily avoided while awake, so it wasn't too hard
to guess what would happen if you slept in the open).

Mg

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