I really tried to resist talking about the project up to now but eh... I'm weak ^^;... and I finally found some courage to work on it today so now I want to talk about it. Let's just hope it doesn't kill my motivation afterwards ^^;...
As I said, I want to take the focus off the simple and repetitive tasks that are Gather and Brew, and put it on the story. To achieve this, the main idea is that your actions don't decide wether the boutique works or not. Your workers will do what's needed for this. Surviving is not the main point. Growing is.
To avoid micro management some more, I'm planning on one-week-long turns too. So, what happens is that you'll give each worker a task to focus on during the week. It doesn't mean they'll do *only* that task. They'll keep doing what's needed for the boutique *and* look into what you asked them to.
This means the tasks will be a *bit* more varied too, including diplomacy of sorts and research, among others.
Let's see how it could be played :
I'll focus on a single story path so I won't say what everyone does each turn, but it's assumed that everyone gets something to do
. In this example, we're at a point where Dalma, Framboise and Pom are present. The known locations are the same as at the end of MB1 (forest, lake, plains, the town, ...).
Let's assume that we haven't really done anything with the Forest yet. We get the following activities : Gather and Hunt.
We decide to send Framboise to Gather in the forest for now. This activity is a Quota Activity. This means you need to reach a specific number of "points" before it's completed. The better your worker at the related talents, the more points you get during a turn. Framboise is good at Gathering, so it won't take too many turns.
As you fill the quota, you get an event scene : as she gathers, Framboise spots strange creatures spying on her from the depth of the forest. Intriguing... A new Activity appears : "Establish contact".
This new activity requires Diplomacy. Once again, you get a quota to fill that will take more or less turns depending on who focuses on this. Framboise is the only character with diplomatic abilities we have, so we'll have to use her.
Quota filled. Framboise tries to approach the creatures and they seem more wary than dangerous. New activity : Reinforce contact (I hope that's english XD). Once again, this is a diplomatic activity.
Framboise discovers they're dryads trying to live peacefully in the forest. They seem to know a lot about plants. New activity : Establish friendship.
Once the quota is filled, you get an event where the leader of the dryads accepts to establish an official friendship as long as you agree to lay down on the hunt. You can accept or refuse. Refusing disappoints them but they just go back into the depth of the forest, never to be seen again. Accepting yields a new activity : Learn about Plants. It allows a character to slowly become better at the Plant Knowledge talent.
Remember, though, that the friendship had a condition : if you hunt too much (think something like more than once every three turns), you'll get a warning... and if you keep up, the friendship will be broken with a result similar to refusing the friendship to begin with. Obviously, you won't be able to Learn about Plants anymore... and who knows what else
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There, it's an example of one of the little story paths you could get in MB2. It's pretty linear so far and including the whole quota thing, it'd probably take 20 turns or so to complete... assuming Framboise focuses solely on this as we said. Which is not sure since there will be other activities in other places that could strike your fancy more at the time.
One thing to note here is that choosing the friendship with the dryads means you won't be able to hunt much. While it's possible to hunt elsewhere, it's obvious there are things unique to this forest. This will be reflected by the fact you won't get many story bits related to hunting in the forest since you won't be able to fill the quotas quickly enough compared to many other activities. I think it'll be the only difficulty of the game : activities will be easy to do, but following a particular story path might be tough and require some sacrifices in other story paths.
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Another story path example based on the forest takes place after you've helped the town prosper a bit.
Putting one of your workers on the "gather rumors" activity in town will allow you to learn that thievery has gone up lately. It's to be expected since the town is producing more and more riches. The next time you hunt in the forest, Pom will avoid a trap. He discovers that it's not the only one... Someone is trying to catch a lot of animals... or trying to keep people at bay from the forest.
If you befriended the dryads, you'll immediately learn who's behind this. Otherwise, you get the activity "Investigate" which will probably require the Adventuring talent (Pom will be able to do a bit of that). In any case, you discover that the traps were placed by a newly installed group of bandits. Note that as long as the traps are there, working in the forest (Gather and Hunt mostly) will take a lot longer. You can ignore the bandits but you'll probably want to focus on some other location, then.
From then on, you get two possible activities : force the bandits out of the forest (requires Adventuring), or try to establish a contact (Diplomacy). To force them out, your adventurer will need to be of a certain level and it will be rather long... but once it succeeds, the bandits and the traps are gone and everything is back to normal.
Establishing a contact reveals that the bandits are not actively threatening but they've decided the forest is theirs. Pushing further reveals that... hm... well, I might not reveal everything eh? ^^;...
As a side note, I'll probably make it so that the dryads, if you befriended them, don't accept the presence of these bandits in the forest and ask you to get rid of them. Trying to establish a contact with them instead of forcing them out will result in losing the friendship.
To sum it up, I'll try to have as many dilemmas as possible. I don't really want to have good and evil choices... but logical choices and consequences based on the various characters.
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What I hope is visible with this is that Gather and Hunt (and Brew ultimately) are now used as triggers for stories to progress (you work some time in a place and notice something peculiar, leading to new activities). Apart from generic Gather and Hunt, there will be specific activities such as "Gather Red Moon Flowers" which will be needed to complete a story. As I wanted it, activities will now always be linked to stories. No more clueless gathering ^^;.
Also, there will be choices to make. Some direct, some indirect (such as choosing to keep hunting a lot, resulting in losing the dryad friendship)... And they should all be acceptable as valid choices... and only depend on the situation and long term goals of the player. Consequences could often be harsh such as losing complete access to a location or rendering work difficult in them. Some choices will also have long term consequences on the world. In the previous example, we chose to do various things to help the city prosper. This logically led to an increase in crime, hence the bandits. If you don't help the city, this won't happen and it could be a good thing... but it also means you will miss the parts of the story linked to the prosper town.
Unless I chicken out, the idea is that you *will* have to play again to see everything.
Now, as I said before the example, I skipped what the other characters would be doing while Framboise investigated the dryads. The plan is to have the game world filled with enough things to do to keep everyone occupied week after week. While Framboise gathers in the forest, Pom might be mining in the crevice. Framboise discovers the "creatures" while Dalmaryon has been studying books in his grandfather's room. A week later, Pom, intrigued by the high humidity in the crevice decides to check deeper and finds out... yeah... what does he find out anyway?
Concurrent activities, concurrent quota filling and various events here and there, making the story move on and unlocking new stuff to do. It's really not supposed to be a challenge... it's supposed to be fun to explore.
I also forgot one thing : while most of the time activities will be available for anyone with the appropriate talent (expect multiple characters to be able with each talent, but at different levels), some activities will be strictly reserved to specific characters. I don't know yet if I'll make these obvious or instead have them appear when you send the right character to the right place... which could make them "secrets" of sorts (though not very hard to find secrets as long as you try to send everyone to various places).
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While I talked a lot about adventuring and diplomacy, the game won't be all about that. You should still expect potions to be made and ingredients to be gathered to that effect. But you can also expect ruins to be explored, various individuals to be befriended, items to be enchanted or uncursed... and whatever else crosses my mind >.>... I guess the three keywords for MB2 could be : Magic, Social and Adventure.
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Now, these are the bases... there are still a loooot of things to discuss about how it will all play out in the end. What happens when Pom finishes the gathering quota for the forest instead of Framboise? Who sees the "creatures"? For now, I'm thinking I'll use the "implied" concept and say that while Pom focused on the task, it's Framboise who was actually gathering at that particular moment (everyone else *is* doing other tasks apart from the one they had to focus on, remember?). And just think about how many variations I'd have to do otherwise, considering there will be about 3 possible characters for each type of task... and you should understand why I decided this so far ^^;...
To make up for this, there *might* be instances where you get to choose who among your workers will deal with a particular problem. It'd only be when there *can* be variations depending on who solves the problem. Maybe you'll want to choose Pom for a swift, no-nonsense resolution... or Framboise instead for a softer, charismatic approach.
I also thought of a "Round Table" set of scenes where you're faced with a problem and you get to ask each character his/her opinion about it. Round Tables might not lead to anything (no one has any valid ideas) and it means you need to keep doing stuff until someone gets an idea. This idea has two aspects : one is that it'll show your workers' opinions which allows me to introduce a bit of silly fun from time to time (I have a feeling Pimimi's ideas will be worth some gold XD). The other one is that given the freedom given to the player (you could ignore the Forest all the time if you wanted), I'll certainly face logical problems such as "can't learn about this from A since you haven't met him yet". The Round Table allows me to leave a problem unsolved until *one* solution at least appears. The trick is that there will often be more than one solution... so it *might* be interesting to wait even more for other clues towards a better solution.
Since I have *no* idea wether this system will be interesting or frustrating, let me give an example :
Talk in town is all about the recent rat invasion. They're everywhere! Hide the cheese
. Wait, it's worse than that, they're carrying diseases too! Let's say you choose to look into this problem. Round Table time!
Now what characters will say will depend on what has happened so far, who they met and all that. At some point, Pom can meet a girl who calls birds with a wooden whistle. On the other hand, you might have befriended the dryads through Framboise which means she's been learning about plants with them (wether you focus on it or not ;p). If Pom met the girl, he'll suggest using something similar for the rats... a calling device of sorts to lead them out of town. Now to learn where to get such a device! (new activity). If you did befriend the dryads, Framboise will say that she heard they also had a rat problem in the forest (they happen to hate filthy dirty rats eeek! Ahem...) and she could ask them how they deal with them (new activity).
So... if one of these suggestions is made (or both), you get new things to pursue. If you get both, it's up to you to pursue one or the other. They'll lead to different activities, requiring different talents and may take various amount of times to complete... and may lead to even more things in the future, who knows.
Finally, if you get nothing, either the Round Table is definitely unsuccessful, or I'll put a very generic solution that can be considered the worst one (though you don't know that ^^) such as Pimimi suggesting that you create a poison to kill the rats... which will lead to various activities such as gathering the proper ingredients and brewing little poison pills. The bad point? Your generic poison being too generic and intoxicating some domestic animals too. Not great for your reputation, even though you solved the problem ^^;...
Pheeew... that's a lot of writing @_@;... If only I could write that much story instead of babbling about game concepts ^^;;;... Anyway... I hope (very!) that this clears up what I have in mind for MB2... and I hope it'll appeal to at least some of you ^^.
... Maybe the "clickclickclickclick" is part of it ^^;
If there is anything I can help with let me know... I'll be looking into your last post for any questions or problems I might think off.