A way to make progress bar mechanic more interesting


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I think the mechanic of screen going dark and watching progress bar is really boring and in some cases take you out of the immersion of the game. All of these cases can benefit from some form of animation / random interrupts. Right now, if you are in a progress bar, you seem to be in a bubble where wolves can't hurt you, and the weather doesn't change until you are done. Get rid of this "time bubble".

  • Cooking, boiling water, and melting snow should show cooking animation. There should be an interrupt if the fire runs low, so we can add more fuel.
  • Harvesting wood should show the chopping, and harvesting animal should show the cutting. There should be interrupted if a predator is nearby, or if the weather turns bad. The progress should be saved, so if you are 1/3 of the way through chopping, there should be 1 piece of wood on the ground.
  • It's OK to have darkness while sleeping. But there should be a chance of waking up if there is a predator nearby. There should be a small chance to wake up if you are hungry, thirsty, cold, sick, or just having a bad dream.
  • In general there should be an interrupt for freezing. If you start freezing while crafting, that should interrupt the progress bar. If you start to freeze while sleeping, that should wake you up (maybe a bit slower).
  • Crafting and repairing should show the item and some animation. We should not be able to repair or craft in the dark, so have an interrupt for that.

Thanks for reading my suggestions!

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Harvesting animal should show the cutting - I'm all for that, and I'm personally wanting the harvested carcasses to /look/ skinned etc after we're done with them, instead of sitting perfectly intact-looking on the ground. But is that a bit too much realism for some people?

Agree with all of the above. I do most of my repairing at night, though. It would be enjoyable to have some sarcastic voice acting denoting the inability to do things in the dark.

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These are good ideas but, just to play the devil's advocate, what about just paying attention to your status bars? There is an element of independence and difficulty when you have to make sure that you won't starve or dehydrate or freeze to death. Not saying that I wouldn't want a warning when the weather changes for the worse so I can manually interrupt the said process. Oh, and maybe sound cues while doing something to warn you when animals are near you while doing the interaction you mentioned. That way you can stop doing whatever it is you're doing to check which animal it is, adding to the immersion even further.

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  • 2 weeks later...

+1 for all the points, but I do think that they'd need to be tweaked as Wolfbite mentioned. :)

So basically not an automatic interrupt, but rather give us some noticeable cues by sound or some statusbars/ikons and an all around option to interrupt any of our own work if it's cold/dark/out of fule or if wildlife is nearby and the option to pick up from where we left off. Chopping wood is cool the way you said it and cooking could go into real time while we interrupt it to refuel, but we'd need to get back to it before the cooking time is done or else it would get burnt. :D

Also I'm curious as to what type of animation you had in mind. If it's something similar to the rifle reloading and we would only see the axe swinging up and down then that could be cool, but it's still a question if it could work with everything as it might be a bit jarring to only have animations for a few tasks.

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