Third entry into our dear dev diary, today we’ll uncover a feature of DiB that we felt was not satisfying enough, so we expanded it big time for DiV: the Water system.
(Everything you will see here is still early Work In Progress, assume that many things will change until the release of the game)
In DiB, water was just a simple counter: each character drank 1 water supply each day, so when the counter was below your number of alive characters, you were screwed. It was very basic, it was better than nothing, but mostly frustrating and not really realistic.
The interesting things when dealing with water in a survival situation, from our point of view, are:
- you can ration it between your companions when the stock is low, hoping that you find more later.
- you can sacrifice yourself and not drink for a day, to let other companions get your share.
- but you must take care: dehydratation can cause death within a few days time.
- potable water management: you can find sources of water, but is it potable?
- containing water: the size of your container is of importance.
Managing water is a bit different than food, because generally speaking you get a large amount at some point like when it’s raining or when you discover a source, you can assume it’s non perishable, but you must manage your reserves during a long time without resupply. That accentuated by the fact that no water means a much quicker death than no food.
So we think it’s quite interesting to have both systems running at the same time: they are similar, but different enough at the same time. And of course, they are interconnected in many ways, as we’ll see right now.
(Water Pop Up – Work In Progress)
So in Dead In Vinland, you’ll have to manage your water supplies like a true, critical resource that has many uses:
- You’ll have two containers: one for potable, and one for non-potable.
- You’ll be able to assign characters to this new Camp Structure, to send them fetch some non-potable water to a nearby river.
- You can also make some from other means, or just find some while exploring the island.
- You’ll be able to boil non-potable water into potable water, which will consume some of your prized Fire Intensity. But you can stock as much as you have room in your container.
- So any water found if your containers are full will go to waste.
The water you’ll stock will serve as other purposes than just hydrating your characters:
- You’ll need 1 supply for each character that goes on exploring the island.
- You’ll need some to cook some meals.
- And for some other activities, that we’ll talk in detail in another blog post.
(Share the Drinks – Work In Progress)
So each night, a “Share the Drinks” phase will be added to the cue of night events. A bit like the Share the Food phase, you’ll be able to ration the drinks between your alive characters. It works like this:
- A character needs 1 ration of water supply to have his daily needs filled.
- You can give him/her more or less than 1 ration, but it has consequences:
- If you give him less, he has a chance to get a level of Dehydratation Trait. It’s part of our new Trait System, that I will disclose another time.
- It’s not automatic: if you give him 1/2 ration, he has 50% to get a level of Dehydratation.
- Reaching level 3 Dehydratation, the character dies.
- You can also give a character more than he needs. With the same principle, if you give him double ration he will have 100% chances to lower 1 level of Dehydratation.
- Of course, Dehydrated characters will get some passive maluses to its skills… It wouldn’t be fun otherwise 😉
- You can only choose 1 share per night per character.
There are some more surprises left tied with this system that we didn’t talk about, making the whole thing all the more interesting and complex, but that’s for another blog post, so stay tuned!
