I'm currently coding the status/health/condition implementation for my medieval CRPG. (old school) (I know…) Question: Which games had the best method of handling your players health and condition. Currently, my implementation works by telling the player what they feel like, or what their symptoms are in a status list. Instead of saying "you are poisioned" my game says: You feel: Dizzy Ears bleeding Nauseous (not all at once either. Symptoms are timed, progressive, and incremental. Some are random of course, to keep things interesting) The system doesn’t tell you what is REALLY wrong with you until a healer of some kind TELLs you. I kinda liked the idea of people asking each other what certain symptoms mean, and learning what symptoms to expect after being bitten by certain monsters etc…. Question: Sound good? Or a waste of time? Edited by - ztn on July 26, 2001 7:09:51 PM

I think it sounds like a really good system! I have never seen this done in a game before. All the games like this that I have played tell you exactly what is wrong such as "poisoned", etc. But I think that the system you are talking about really adds some interesting aspects to the game. By telling the player how they feel, in order to determine theirstate on their own they would have to know what symptoms are brought on by different states.

Here are a couple suggestions if you would like to read them: make sure you use enough random feelings so that more advanced players still will not be completely sure 100% of the time what is wrong with them. Also, for random feelings, don''t pick completely random feelings all of the time when a random feeling is triggered, instead, it may be better to change the order of the pre-defined feelings. That way the player won''t be completely thrown off track all of the time (though it may be good to do so some of the time ), but at the same time, the standard set and order of symptoms will not occur as the player would immediatly recognize them.
One other thing that may be interesting to add is certain effects on-screen that can be associated with certain symptoms in case the player doesn''t notice the messages displayed on the bottom of the screen. For example, for the symptom "dizzy" you could try something like was done in the game "Perfect Dark" for N64. If you never played the game, then when the character got dizzy, the screen became blurry (I think the way the blur was done was by either not clearing the rendering target each frame, instead alpha-blending new frames over the old ones, or something like that).

Anyway, I think this sounds good, and would be VERY interesting to see in some future games.

So, to answer your original question, I don''t think that this sounds like a waste of time at all! It is a very good feature, and if you do it, it could set your game apart from most other games that I have seen.

Thanks.

I was hoping people would like the sound of it. Once you (in a sense) separate the symptoms from the disease, it becomes a very versatile system.

I think once I start looking at medical journals of existing toxins and diseases, it will be great fun to implement them…

Jaundice, Jungle Rot, Bengy Fever, bleeding from the, um, well, you get the idea…


zTn