Investigate using the built in activity tracker to determine progress

[Torivon]

Feature design proposal:

The goal is to be able to have the activity feature have multiple checks to figure out if it should be used.

• If the watch does not support activity tracking, it is off.
• The player can turn it off manually using the options menu.
• The designer can turn the feature on for specific path or dungeon locations.

As usual, the adventure update triggers once per minute. If activity tracking is on, the player only makes progress down the path if they were active in the last minute. This can be tuned, but I'm leaning towards 30 seconds of active time in the last minute.

activeTimeLastMinute = health_service_sum(HealthMetricActiveSeconds, , );

If a path location is marked for activity tracking, but the feature is off for another reason, the game simply increments for time as normal.

Possibilities for path or dungeon locations with activity tracking and monster encounters:

• Interrupt adventuring as normal to fight the monster. This would give players motivation to stop exercising, which feels counter productive.
• Completely ignore monster encounters if the path uses activity tracking.
• If the path uses activity tracking, allow monster encounters if the player is not being active, but skip them if the player is active.
• Mixed paths where progress is made regardless of activity, but activity allows you to skip monsters.
• If the player is supposed to encounter a monster, skip the fight, but give credit for the kill anyway.
• Keep track of all monster encounters that are triggered and make all of them happen at the end.
• Disallow activity tracking locations combined with monsters.

I am leaning towards the bold option. This way, a designer can have some choices:

• Paths with monsters but no activity tracking.
• Paths with activity tracking but no monsters.
• Paths with no monsters and no activity tracking.
• Paths for normal daily activity with normal monsters and activity tracking
• Paths for serious exercise with very strong monsters to penalize the player for slacking.

[Torivon]

When a designer declares a location to allow both activity tracking and normal, time-based progress, allow them to set an increased speed for activity.

[Torivon]

Perhaps have an option to grant experience per time unit of activity. One possible extension of this would be to keep track of how long the player is active beyond the length of the path. They could potentially keep earning experience this way. The game would then not take them to the next area until they stopped being active.

[Torivon]

Fields to add to Story:

• DefaultActivityTracking - Defaults to false. If true, Locations will perform activity tracking by default. If false, activity tracking will be ignored by default.
• ActivityThreshold - defaults to 30. This is the number of seconds of activity required per minute to count as active.

Fields to add to location:

• UseActivityTracking - Defaults to the value of the story's DefaultActivityTracking
  • If the location uses activity tracking, then each minute the game will check to see if the user was active. If the user was active, behave differently depending on other parameters.
• InactiveSpeed - Defaults to 1. How much to increase progress when the user is inactive.
• ActiveSpeed - Defaults to 1. How much to increase progress when the user is active.
• SkipEncountersIfActive - Defaults to true. If the locations has no monsters, this does nothing. If the location has monsters, being active causes encounters not to happen.
• GrantXpForEncountersSkipped - Defaults to false. Grants the user experience as if they had defeated any encounter skipped due to activity.
• ExtendPathDuringActivity - Default to false. If true, the current location will not end while the player is active.

All of these fields will be checked during the adventure update tick.