Whynot missions

[bell07]

The comment https://content.minetest.net/threads/1054/#reply-2464 does not leave my mind..

Hugues Ross describes the whynot as mod soup but not a game. This is no surprise, since the whynot is a "game in mods collection style". But I fully agree it is not a good game. Maybe that is the reason why my child's and me lost interest in the game.

Abstract: What is a good game? A good game provides different missions. Any mission must have

• Observable [S]tart event
• Observable [P]rogress status
• Observable [G]oal / end
• Observable [R]eward

In linear games just one mission is in progress.

For example: Mario Jump&Run:

• S: Enter a Level
• P: Time and indicator for location inside the level
• G: Touch the finish flag
• R: Next level unlocked

In non linear games multiple missions can be active at the same time.

Whynot: What we have

craftguide reveal system. Each recipe is a mission.

• S: All mission starts at once. Nothing Observable
• P: No progress visible
• G: Craft a new item
• R: The crafted item - Maybe new recipes (= missions) revealed

If wood, stone and iron are revealed, nothing is observable anymore. The craftguide contain a lot of pages with items. The player does not see which of them are already crafted (mission completed) or not

awards mod - lot of missions

• S: All mission starts at once. Observable in the awards inventory plug-in
• P: Progress visible in inventory plug-in
• G: Goals visible in inventory plug-in
• R: Nothing

Awards mod seems to provide missions but no awards :-(

The Wynot is a collection of mods, with the mind the player decides which of them he like to play. Abstract the testing mods are the whynot missions.

• S: All mods are active since beginning. There is no mission start like "Please craft ccompass"
• P: There is no progress visible like "You got already 70% of items required for laptop"
• G: Goal is "Craft items from mod and play with them". But there is no "Mission Completed" event
• R: The rewards are the crafted items and their capabilities. For example teleporting with ccompass, playing tetris with laptop...

How we can improve the missions in whynot? Do we need additional whynot rules for that?

[Lazerbeak12345]

I’m pretty sure awards notifies the user. In Minecraft, that’s all that their awards do - though most of their awards are sequential, and teach the player how to play.

The awards mod does support custom awards, and it also supports sequential awards. Most of their award goals are pretty stupid tbh. “Build 10,000 of x” where x is cobblestone, torches, furnaces, wood, and many many many more. We could use the api, and a member of the team could release a mod (that should be on contentdb) to have, in addition to the current awards, awards that guide the user around mtg. After that, we can either send code to mods we use to add quality awards, or just make it a part of our mod (called something like quality-awards).

Of course, the “place 10,000 furnaces” and related awards should not be removed for compatibility reasons. They can also serve as (low quality) mid-to-late-game goals.

By “quality goal” I mean this:

• A goal should not feel like busywork. Placing 10,000 furnaces is not fun.
• A goal should serve as a tutorial. Goals build upon knowledge or resources gained from completing earlier goals to teach the user something new.
• Unless partially completed, goals that require, say, having visited a desert, should not be shown to the user. Keep the amount of visible goals low for early game.
• Goals should be made for every mechanic of the game, from punching trees, to mining ores, to crafting mesecons, to making foods and killing enemy mobs with techniques (sidle a projectile). This is also why we should give future development responsibility of these awards to the developers of these mods (even if one of us is the one adding that code initially). As new mechanics are added to their mod, new awards would also need to be added.

[dacmot]

I can see how the negative "mod soup" comment can get you thinking. It questions the very meaning of Why Not's existence (raison d'être).

I've always seen Why Not as a curated collection of high-quality mods that represent the best MT can offer in terms of a minecraft-like mining game. Maybe we can do better than that, by adding to it so it becomes a more enjoyable survival game.

I do find that the creative mode is stronger than the survival mode, despite the "clashing styles" Mr. Ross mentions. For survival, the progress and goals make a very short list. Repeating and building on what Mr. Ross said:

• Don't starve: finding a deciduous forest biome very quickly resolves that issue.
• Make a bed (respawn point):
  • Depending on the map, the default spawn point can make the game really hard and tedious. Spawning far from trees (tundra/desert) is essentially a map restart/regen condition for me. Without a bed, it means you have to travel to more "survival friendly" biomes everytime you die which really sucks.
  • I always find making a bed one of the trickier things to do based on the map created. You have to find cotton (jungle) which isn't always easy. The minimap from the cartography kit helps, but making it requires a lot more work than looking for a jungle.
• Crafting: This is the only aspect I find that offers decent progress and goals. But as you mentioned bell07, getting cobblestone, wood and iron quickly overwhelms the craft guide, and distinguishing the goals in order to make progress is messy.
• Don't die from mobs:
  • A bit difficult at the beginning (night).
  • Build a shelter (dirt hole/cave/house), light source (torches), armour (wood) and sword (wood and stone) provides decent initial self-defense goal
  • Not much difficulty progression: as soon as you can make bronze and, not long after that steel, it gets very easy. The only mob that creates a challenge is the dungeon master. And it's rather brutal. Until you find diamonds, it's a bit more of a run and hide situation. And diamonds only start below -1200 I think. So between -300 and -1200, progress is slow, tedious and without much reward. You find mese somewhere in there which will help with tools and weapons, but not for defense.
• Exploration: basically vanilla MTG, with floatlands. Terrain generators can offer caverns (which is my favorite part of the underground) and dungeons (seen one, seen them all)

After that, survival and mining is basically over. It becomes creative mode without the unlimited resources, which forces you to mine.

P.S. @Lazerbeak12345, would you mind editing your previous message and removing bell07's recopied part?

[dacmot]

So, if I may summarize your initial ideas:

• Better awards:
  • make them less tedious (not build 10000 furnaces)
  • more sequential (hidden/reveal?) to give more focus, especially early on
  • enhance as a way to teach game mechanics
  • reward progression towards useful goals, like crafting certain items that unlock game features, killing more difficult mobs, reaching new depths or new heights
  • Better craft guide:
  • Keep reveal feature to maintain the start, goal, progress
  • Add a way to highlight uncrafted from crafted items to keep sight of goals, and better track progress

[dacmot]

If I may add to that list (ideas in no particular order, just brainstorming. And yes, I know, some of these would require A LOT of work):

• Improve progression
  • Even difficulty across playtime (ex. more mobs spawn, increase mob toughness with depth)
  • Even challenge across playtime
  • Easier way to make a bed (leafs?) or other respawn point
  • Deciduous forest offers too much compared to other biomes. Also makes survival too easy. Reduce wild food growth, even out the vegetable growth among biomes (ex. potatoes and onions could grow only in the tundra)
  • Farming provides a lot of food very quickly. Maybe find a way to make it more difficult (ex. longer growth time, lower yields, crop loss), make food less filling, spoiling/rotting or hunger come faster---consume more.
  • More recipes that are multi-step (ex. cartography kit, potato salad, etc.)
• Expand on exploration opportunities
  • More dirt (it annoys me that almost everywhere, you have 2-3 blocks of dirt/sand and then rock). I'd like to see dirt depth anywhere between 10 - 50 blocks. Digging dirt can yield bones.
  • Underground biomes (caverealm lite, nether, underch)
  • Space/sky biomes
  • Uniqueness to floating islands
  • Higher up, so it is impractical to reach by stacking
  • Unique way to get there (ex. ancient stone portal found in the nether, meaning we have to get to the nether before reaching floating islands)
  • New materials, mobs, animals
  • Surface features (villages, castles, roads, bridges, inukshuk, stonehenge, meseor, etc.)
  • Better dungeons
  • Underground oil/petrol lakes, can be used as fuel, or set on fire with flint.
• Expand on gameplay features
  • Animals (adds a food source, wool to make beds and clothing, animal farming) -- building an animal farm could be a mission. Currently animals don't need to be fed. Could be interesting balance to grain/vegetable farming.
  • Storyline progression, similar to the elder scroll, where you are free to follow it or not.
  • Add milestones and/or bosses like in Terraria where defeating a boss reveals new opportunities or game features
  • Quests/challenges (build a house, a bridge, find cocoa,...)
  • Some kind of Civilization-like science progression system to build aqueducts, granary, temple, wheel, ... industrial machines, trains, flying carpets, rockets ...
  • Thirst
  • Biome weather effects on player (cold, hot, increase hunger, thirst, hypothermia, heat stroke, etc.)
  • Disasters (tornadoes, earthquakes, forest fires, tsunamis, (more frequent) meseor).
  • NPC/Villagers

[bell07]

Great ideas at all!

I like the idea the awards mod should be used to guide the player trough the game. Since the game is a mods collection, the guide should go trough each mod. The each mission start condition, progress, goal and reward we need to define.

The default awards should be set to "invisible". Means the award appears and gets visible, if reached already.

About creative: I have no eye for aesthetics so I see only 2 styles: MTG and Homedecor. Maybe we solve it by remove homdecor-like things. The smart_sfinv contains enhancement you can filter the creative inventory by mod. Maybe we need to extend it to sort the creative inventory by art-style? Then we need hard-coded table which mod is which art style.

Idea to enhance the craftguide reveal system: Currently the crasftguide is overhelmed shortly. The idea now is to define for each goal which items are revealed. Maybe combine the old logic with the new one. Additional idea is to add the same "by-mod" logic to the craftguide as exists already for creative. (The smart_sfinv is my modpack ;-)) But the feature of craftguide is not clear currently because of #53

The game is not balanced. But I did not forked and modified the mods yet to get the game balanced. Exceptions are some settings in minetest.conf and some changed recipes in whynot_compat. I think a lot of forks for beter game balance we three can't do maintenance.

Mobs and biomes are already in discussion, we have already issues #21 #23 #32

[Lazerbeak12345]

I think forking a mod could be a bad long-term idea. That would make whynot the "new home" of that mod. Making a new mod (and publishing it separately from whynot) expressly for whynot seems like a better idea - if pushes for config settings or other things don't make it in upstream.

[dacmot]

About the art style: I also think Mr. Ross was talking about homedecor which is more high-resolution, less in the blocky/pixelated style of MTG.

I agree that forking should be done as a last resort, and very rarely. I'm hoping a lot of the customization can be done either by submitting patches upstream, or using config files to override the mod's defaults.

Is there a way to assign priorities to issues? I think maybe that could help us focus on what we want to do first. I think #53 should probably be the top priority. Then maybe awards. What do you think?

[Lazerbeak12345]

Is there a way to assign priorities to issues?

There isn't an "official" way to assign priorities (unless the new GH projects have it) but there is kanban, simple projects, milestones and tags. Tags or milestones might be the best approach. (though we can use a mix)

53 is a good choice for top prio. I like the idea of awards after that. Following awards, I'd say #49

[Lazerbeak12345]

Perhaps the awards needs categories?

I can easily imagine awards getting out of hand if we add every idea that @dacmot suggested. (Not to say I don't like them - I really really like them. The missions system should touch every playable aspect of the game)

[Lazerbeak12345]

I've been thinking about using github labels or to organize the issues by what work needs done on them.

Looking through the issues, I think here could be some categories:

• Needs code review
• Needs playtest
• Needs rule-review (IE we need to make sure we go over all of the current whynot rules)
• An issue or PR needs to be made to someone upstream

Also, some metadata

• Role to indicate if it's a modpack

[dacmot]

Sure. Though I think this conversation belongs in another issue. #88 or #47 maybe?

[Lazerbeak12345]

Ah right. It was more on-topic when I was orignally writing it, but it sortof broadened in scope....

[dacmot]

I've attempted to modify the mapgen settings to improve (in my opinion) the game: https://github.com/minetest-whynot/whynot-game/compare/main...dacmot:minetest-game-whynot:mapgen

So far I've:

• Added more dirt/sand to the top layer so we don't hit rock after 2 blocks
• Made cold/barren mountain tops above 60 (looks neat)
• Changed the mineral depths so there is a more defined progression. Makes it more useful to create tools of each type before getting to the next.
• Make dungeon material match the biome
• Remove boring biomes from floatlands

A couple of notes: there doesn't seem to be dungeons in the floatlands so using the "princess themed" blocks doesn't do anything. I'd like to push the mese_crystals further down, so that people don't jump from stone tools to mese tools.

I'm trying to use settings as much as possible so that it can be experimented with different values more easily.

[Lazerbeak12345]

I like these changes. My only complaint is the increasing trend to have code unique to whynot that can't be found on contentdb.

[dacmot]

Good point. I should make a separate mod then.