years and days and seasons?

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thewul
  • updated
  • Considering
Its the first time I noticed that the calendar readout  says
"2nd Day of 423" on the left side of the temperature display, and
"Year 1 of Spring" on the right side.
To me this doesn't make any sense at all...
Did I miss some fiction or is this a typo?

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Replies 8
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killabi

Awesome - thanks for the detailed and well thought out post! Planning some more here - namely changing the names of a few things to see if it helps. We'll then go from there!

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michael h

I think it's important to keep the concept of time like we do IRL. Days - Seasons - Years and not Days - Years - Seasons. This way it's natural and intuitive which seems pretty important. This is not something that annoyed me in the beginning but that I got used to; I found that I had to make a conscious effort to understand the information every time. I would like to look at the Time/Date/Weather at a glance and intuitively know my situation.

I think I understand the emphasis devs put on seasons and aging/dying in your game design and that at some point you have to break this intuitive understanding of time for the gameplay to work and then it becomes a question of where to do it.

thewul’s example of 8 days a year seems reasonable to me as well. If you have the same number of days in the life of a noble then it would cut a Noble age in half which would be around 40-50 (Don’t know the numbers here) Which is a fine old age in medieval times.

If you want to keep the age up, 2 years could be one year ingame.

I hope you don’t mind my ramblings (this post was originally 2 pages), just know it comes from a place of love for your game because this game hits all the right spots for me. I spent half an hour studying human life expectancy on wikipedea for pete’s sake! Until a friend told me that it's a fantasy setting and you can do whatever you want.

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killabi
  • Considering
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1
thewul

I get the point and I basically like the concept, but (me always having a "but", hu?):

First and foremost: make aging an option the player can disable - no need to force this on anybody

Secondly: aging without dynasties/children/education asf. is, hmm, somewhat limited to say the least...

timeframe/scale:

at the current rate of 1 year=2 days learning new receipts is very slow, taking easily 1 day

how about:

1 year = 4 seasons

1 season = 2 days -> 1 year = 8 days, seems a resonable aging tempo for me, and would need more potatoepower for farming due to faster growth rates required, what also seems reasonable to me.


may depend on playstyle, but if the colony is setup properly I end up spending a lot of time on 4xSpeed....

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clownkrieger
How would you solve it in a simulation-game that is potentially meant to stretch over a timespan of hundreds of years and several generations, and that actually offers day/night and season cycles though?
You need days cause of night and day, and seasons cause of, well seasonal effects, and years cause "history" is happening there... You could do days for well, days, shift years to months, make each season three months, and 4 seasons one year, but then you would either have the problem that the lifetime of a nobles (in gaming hours for the players) would end up ridiculous long and most would never be confronted with the death of a noble (and death and succession is an important part of noble fates imo), or nobles would only get to the age of 5 or 6 before they have to "die", and there would be other people complaining that that is immersion breaking :D

It cant be "real time", i guess we agree on that, and i cant think of a realistic representation of environmental- or life-cycles without breaking them down in one or the other way (and i am pretty sure comparable games with year/season/succession mechanics do that as well) . Reinventing new names for these metrics would also be a bit immersion breaking...

Just trying to have discussion, no offence meant btw. If you have any better suggestions im sure the dev is willing to listen! :)

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killabi

Thanks for the feedback - we plan to improve messaging in this area. The accelerated passage of time is an important part of the experience we're building, but definitely understand that it's unintuitive and foreign at first.

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thewul

Thanks for the explanation, "a bit weird" is a nice way to describe it...

No offense, but I do not like this a (weird) bit, to me its simply unintuitive and disturbing.

It really saddens me that such a GREAT game suffers from a couple of imersion breaking issues, like this one or the ugly potatoes you have to play that hate the jobs theyre talented in...


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clownkrieger

Na its not a typo, but, granted, a bit weird. A year has 2 days and a (regular) season 3 years. This way you can experience some meaningful day/night and season cycles while still letting the nobles age in a considerable amount of time to let you also experience a generation shift. It gets picked up and at least mentioned (if not explained) during the guided playthrough, when they tell you to get food for winter.


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