This summer is so hot!
We hardly survived in the offices during the heatwave a few weeks ago, we had to buy a new PREMIUM air-conditioning device ASAP 🙂
Our characters in Dead In Vinland don’t have this luck, they must endure a new challenge: facing harsh weather conditions!
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It was one area we totally overlooked in Dead In Bermuda, we didn’t have time to implement features concerning the weather conditions, so it made it to our top priority list for the sequel.
We’ve implemented a first version of the system we designed, and it seems to be working fairly well. The system as a whole is subject to changes though, mostly due to balancing issues.
So, in Dead In Vinland, you’ll have to face 4 weather conditions that can apply each day:
- Sunny (=”normal” weather)
- Rainy
- Drought
- Storm
For each one of these conditions, we created some visual effects: the sky and clouds changes, the color changes, and we have some special effects: particles for rain, lightning effects and a bit of bloom for the drought. It makes some dynamic changes to the backgrounds we have, giving some variety to the game aesthetics.
Each weather comes with special effects that apply during the day:
- When it’s raining, your characters tend to be more depressed. Their fire will lower more than usual, and they won’t get as much benefits from sleeping. BUT, your water reserves will automatically refill! So when the reserves will be low, you’ll yearn for some rain. You’ll have to manage your water stocks too: it may not be optimal to have full water supplies when it’s raining…
- When the sun is scorching, your characters will get fatigued more easily. Every simple task will burn a lot of energy.
- Storms are really a pain in the ass… You’ll get massive negative effects on fatigue and depression of your characters, and it deteriorates a random building in your camp twice a day.
There are also more specific effects related to camp buildings. For example, during droughts food will dry quicker than normal. And other things.
We have this neat screen that recaps all the weather effects of the coming day. Some sort of viking daily weather report 🙂
At first, we implemented the weather system in a total random generation fashion, but it didn’t work very well (we knew it wouldn’t ^^), so we rapidly implemented some control means to simulate an actual weather system. Each day, the current weather has a chance table to generate a specific weather. For example, it’s more likely to go from storm to rainy than to sunny, and there are ZERO chances to go from storm to drought in a single day.
It’s simple, but it provides some sort of realism in the system that works fairly well, as well as helps balancing the whole thing (for example, you don’t have much chance to get a stormy weather during 2 straight days, as it would hinder your progression very much. But it is possible.)
Of course, you’ll be able to protect yourself from the negative effects of weather with building specific upgrades for your camp. Oh well, we didn’t talk about camp upgrades? That will be the subject of another blog post! 🙂
Found the weather system blog post. I’d recommend some controls on how the weather system cycles in the future. I just had ~10 days in a row with rainy -> stormy -> rainy weather. I get that this is a part of the challenge, but the lack of change really makes a gameplay session start to feel burdensome and boring. It’s gotten to the point where I am worried there is a bug or I missed something on the map that is generating the weather. I am at approximately day 36.
It cycled today. Great game.