Crafting with ingredients that have inventory.

[worfc]

Crafting issue: As of Beta-2...

* Crafting a robot requires a chest.
* If you use a chest that is full of inventory, that inventory is lost/destroyed.
* You don’t get to pick which chest is used in robot-crafting.

Do we care? Or do we assume that, by the time you’re crafting robots, you should know better? Do we need to pop-up a warning?

A neat solution would be to put the chest's inventory into the newly-built robot. However, that's an oddly-complex special-case to the crafting logic, and I don't think it will make it in time for v1.0. The thing is, we'd want it "general case", so it would do something like: if the ingredients have inventory and the crafted-item has inventory, then move the ingredient-inventory into the crafted item and deal sensibly with "inventory full" issues.

...Which sounds complicated (to implement) to me. It might happen before v1.0, but I'm not currently hopeful.

So the question is: what to do with the current situation?

That I can think, Robots are the only things that require a chest to craft.

[noivad]

I think that a warning is the bare minimum. In following the rules of design:
“Designs should be very forgiving of errors.” & “Errors should be difficult to make.”
So:
1)There should be feedback.
2) If an action will cause an unrecoverable loss, it should either warn the person first, and ask for confirmation (like emptying the trash in most OSes). “Hey you'd lose 12 iron seeds, 6 wood, and a saw by doing this? you sure?” Options: “Yes: make robot & destroy items” “No: cancel building robot…”
Optimally, the design should allow the person to take measures to prevent the error directly:
i.e. a sub-pane should open up allow the person to transfer inventory that can be, and any that cannot be held should be able to be dumped on the ground, then building could proceed.

If I were a player (especially a kid) and a game screwed me by not warning me, it might “pin my frustration needle” so much that I’d quit the game entirely, write a 1-star review, delete it, then maybe even go onto social media to bad mouth it. Not that I would here, I’m just saying that a possibility of the potential consequences of not giving fair warning which could really hinder the success of any game (or unforgiving app).

[worfc]

Yeah, I'm definitely with you in the "needs a warning" camp; I'm just trying to figure out what that looks like.

And, more importantly, I'm trying to figure out a general solution that works for "anything that crafts using something else that has inventory."

While I hate accumulating technical debt, for v1.0, I might just have to special-case robot-crafting and worry about how to general-case it later.

Fancy inventory-item manipulation: "Soon!"*

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* Probably not before v1.0, but you never know!

Actually, I'm a bit behind in working with The Art Department™, so there might be a brief period where the game is ready, but I have to eradicate all of the stolen Farmville art out of it. That'd be a good time to deal with all of these types of items.

[Denis]

How long after v1.0 do you think you'd be able to implement something like inventory transfert? I can't imagine building robots in the near future (unless I'm in the worst part of the progression rate[1]) so I would expect you'd have a little bit of time to fix that after release. For now this is warning enough for us


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[worfc]

None of the scheduling stuff is hard & fast. I'm trying to get v1.0 in the store and adhere to the "minimum viable product" idea by not allowing myself to get hung up on "yes, that would be nice, but it's not required to make a decent product" ideas.

(The problem is: I could come up with those ideas all day long and never ship! In theory, shipping something that's "darned playable" and making it better over time is better than never shipping. We'll see how that works out.)

Regarding progress: I know it's an issue. I welcome your thoughts. Even the venting kind.

The thing I have to wrestle with is: I want to make things go faster for casual players, but I want the game to have some longevity for the "speed demons" (<cough, cough> "RKDA"! <G>) I've already talked about perhaps extending grow-times but reducing the materials-costs of items. While this has the desired aspect of helping casuals and slowing-down high-hour players, it has the undesired effect of making things more of a "farm grind", which sort of grates on me.

Another idea is to offer daily reward-chests that help nudge things along. That's "on the list".

The other solution, of course, is to generate tons of content (extending the long-tail of the game), which would make faster-progress early-on not a big deal. That is planned as an evolution over time, but it won't help any of you guys, since you'll perpetually be at the high-end of the content limit. (It's like the early-players of CL -- to a noob, there are 1000s of new areas to explore; to an old-timer, there are maybe a handful that are interesting.) I guess that's a downside of being an early adopter.

And, again: for your sacrifices that help make the game better for future players, I sincerely thank you.

As always, I'm open to ideas, but I can only do so much, so I beg your patience.

Thanks!