Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!

Would it be possible to add a check (could even be percentage based) on the combinable food items for a given first item if you have already tried the combination before?

I swear that over the last few months I have tried to combine tofu and soy sauce, which is something that I eat fairly regularly (although, in real life I typically add ginger and green onions) to no avail. Each failure I think to myself, "Dammit, I should write this down". Then I think, man, this character should already know that she tried to cook it like four times already.

I'm thinking that when you pick the first item unknown combos would be the only ones that show up. That would seem to be less cumbersome than an entire list of failed attempts, which would be ridiculous, and imply that our heros are extraordinarily anal.

Alternately, a hint that you've already tried this.

It's just painful to lose both ingredients over and over again. There are a million combos with some completely less obvious than others and some seemingly obvious not being supported for any particular reason.

It was touched upon over yonder that it'd be nice to have a hint that you've tried a recipe before. One of the problems at the time was that was before fiddling existed, so I didn't have a good method of displaying said hints, but that's not really an issue anymore. The other problem is that when new combinations are added, some of the recipes you've tried before that failed may now actually be valid combinations.

What I'm thinking about for this (mostly as suggested in the aforementioned thread) is having your character remember combinations they've tried, but clearing that list whenever new combinations are added, as your list is probably no longer accurate at that point. As for displaying the hints, after you've picked an item to fiddle with, each of the tried links would be a colour other than blue to indicate that they've already been tried.

Having said that, I don't know that that would really help in your particular case, certainly several rounds of new combinations have been added in the last few months, thus you probably wouldn't have seen the already tried hint. What do you think?

I haven't tried fiddling with regards to cooking, I might be missing the boat on that one.

What I think would work, though, in the cooking interface, is to not list known bad combos as a percentage of "bad recipe recall". Game! could then re-add new combos as they are created, folding them in with the hero misremembering things.

Basically, user selects ingredient one and the drop-down list of possible combinations would be filled out as a function of previously tried recipes and inventory.

This is all about shifting work from the player onto the system.

sryn wrote:I haven't tried fiddling with regards to cooking, I might be missing the boat on that one.

What I think would work, though, in the cooking interface, is to not list known bad combos as a percentage of "bad recipe recall". Game! could then re-add new combos as they are created, folding them in with the hero misremembering things.

Basically, user selects ingredient one and the drop-down list of possible combinations would be filled out as a function of previously tried recipes and inventory.

This is all about shifting work from the player onto the system.

For cooking via fiddling, it's exactly like combining via fiddling in every respect, except you're cooking instead of combining. Definitely worth trying if you're exploring potential recipes (just try fiddling with something cookable), but otherwise just a more convenient interface.

I think I see what you're saying though. If you've just tried a recipe and it failed, don't show that particular recipe as an option. However, as time passes, have an increasing chance of showing that recipe as an option, say tapering off to a complete loss of memory after a few months. This eliminates the dilemma of whether or not to clear recipes on update, which is good.

Though, the one thing I don't like is completely hiding any given recipe, even if it just failed seconds ago. Say you try Tofu + Soy Sauce and it fails, then 5 minutes later I actually add that combo, but you can't actually try it for awhile, which kinda sucks. For the cook page there's not a lot you can do as dropdown boxes aren't terribly flexible, so either you change the text of the item (not ideal), or it's there or not there. For the fiddle page you can alter the colour of a specific recipe link and add a tooltip of, say "this didn't work yesterday", or "I think this didn't work, but it's been awhile...", etc, based on how long ago you tried it.

Maybe you could expand what Cookbooks and Stat books do. Instead of saying "You can make R with i1 and i2 [but you already knew that]" they could say "There's a recipe you haven't learned yet, one of the ingredients is i1, mess around and find it."

Terrific Noise wrote:Maybe you could expand what Cookbooks and Stat books do. Instead of saying "You can make R with i1 and i2 [but you already knew that]" they could say "There's a recipe you haven't learned yet, one of the ingredients is i1, mess around and find it."

I think that this would be best suited as a separate item (Torn Recipe Card and Missing Assembly Instructions ("You know you had these in the box Christmas Morning, but haven't found them until now"), perhaps?) that would combine well into Cook/Stats books.

Cy wrote:

Terrific Noise wrote:Maybe you could expand what Cookbooks and Stat books do. Instead of saying "You can make R with i1 and i2 [but you already knew that]" they could say "There's a recipe you haven't learned yet, one of the ingredients is i1, mess around and find it."

I think that this would be best suited as a separate item (Torn Recipe Card and Missing Assembly Instructions ("You know you had these in the box Christmas Morning, but haven't found them until now"), perhaps?) that would combine well into Cook/Stats books.

I like the idea, though I was definitely leaning towards making it a new item instead of tweaking an existing item.

Well, since you would like to make it possible to not hide recipes, since you might add one at any given time, maybe it would be sufficient to make a special result, like, "You seem to remember trying this before." and it would have no chance of destroying ingredients.

That message would only appear with the same sort of probability that we were talking about earlier for eliminating secondary options, and it could also be used for fiddling without making certain options blue or purple or whatnot.

Also, you could extend the situation if a new recipe or combo is added to something like, "You vaguely remember trying to cook/combine these before but decide to give it another shot."

sryn wrote:Well, since you would like to make it possible to not hide recipes, since you might add one at any given time, maybe it would be sufficient to make a special result, like, "You seem to remember trying this before." and it would have no chance of destroying ingredients.

That message would only appear with the same sort of probability that we were talking about earlier for eliminating secondary options, and it could also be used for fiddling without making certain options blue or purple or whatnot.

Also, you could extend the situation if a new recipe or combo is added to something like, "You vaguely remember trying to cook/combine these before but decide to give it another shot."

Ah! This is an even better idea. Simple and unobtrusive.

But if there's no penalty for failure, you could just try every combination once, couldn't you?

Terrific Noise wrote:But if there's no penalty for failure, you could just try every combination once, couldn't you?

No no, there would be no penalty for repeated failure in quick succession. The less quick, the higher the chances of penalty (up to the current chance), and combinations that aren't identical to previously tried ones function as they do now.

For example, if we assume that a, b and c don't combine in any way and haven't been tried before by that character, then a scenario could play out like this:

1. combine a with b (chance of item loss)
2. combine a with b (no chance of item loss)
3. combine a with c (chance of item loss)
4. wait 5 days
5. combine a with b (chance of item loss, but smaller than usual)

Sounds great. That's exactly what I had in mind.

Thanks for such a fun game, Game!!

This is done now, although it's slightly different than initially proposed. The key difference is that you only remember failed combos when they fail catastrophically (ie, they consume the combined items), otherwise you could just try all combos every day and have no fear of ever losing items again.

You'll remember a failed recipe for sixty days, with a linearly decreasing chance of actually remembering that it failed last time before trying it again. It should be obvious when your sense of item preservation kicks in, as you'll get one of a few new messages.

Whoa, whoa, whoa...why sixty days? Arbitrariness alert.

Terrific Noise wrote:Whoa, whoa, whoa...why sixty days? Arbitrariness alert.

It is indeed completely arbitrary, but I had to pick some period of time...