![[de]](/mwf/flags/de.png "Germany")
>Harvesting knife or sickle or sth.
I still propose using the sword as said tool just for the sake of cutting down stuff with a sword!
>At the moment (besides the other buildings) I'm thinking about the appearance of the plants and trees... today I had a fun idea about the ripening of cotton :D
Me too actually - with some plans and plants already.
My idea for the plants is mostly to make the landscape more lively. That means that I will sooner or later present some already polished plants with no other use yet than eating but with unique look and feel to them (not 100 mushrooms with different colors, that is).
That alchemy etc. could make use of them is a bonus - the main target first is to have some variety in the landscape (which's obviously not just decoration, because that'd be boring) :)
![[ie]](/mwf/flags/ie.png "Ireland")
> I still propose using the sword as said tool just for the sake of cutting down stuff with a sword!
I am still strongly against that %( not only for extremly counterintuitive reasons...
I will again try to talk you out of this. Here are several reasons for not having the sword doing this:- counterintuitive: No one would expect the sword to do this. People would keep asking why the clonk don't use sickles which makes much more sense.
- non-realistic: I don't think anyone of us ever tried to cut wheat. But as far as I know your proposal is not possible in a decent way in real-life. Scythes and sickles are designed to actually cut the stalks without bending or breaking them. A heavy sword slashing at it would result in either no cut at all or a mess of broken stalks.
- imbalanced: A sword is a weapon. Let's keep it that way, seriously. There is no need to invent new awkward uses for the sword. Weapons are produced in the armory. Thus you would need to construct a whole new building just to get the sword.
- fiddly: The axe is very good example that mixing weapons and other uses is very bad. I will see to remove the attack from the axe at all. I've seen many people now accidently attacking other clonks when they actually wanted to cut down something.
- getting the wrong idea: mixing functionalities is, again, a bad idea. The berrybush is a very good example of irritating game behaviour. By showing a reaction to the doings of the player, you will confuse him. I have seen several people now, hacking at berrybushes with the axe because they thought this is the proper way only because the thing shows a reaction to hacking. You will hand out mixed signals to the player: sword -> does damage + sword -> harvest stuff. This will lead to players trying to slash at random things which at some point may result in a very bad reaction (like the simple disappearing of berrybushes)
I can't understand why you insist on this :I If the only real argument is really "the player will need a new tool" then consider this:
We aim for peaceful settlement scenarios. If the player wants to harvest something he will need a new tool regardless of which way (sword, sickle) we introduce. The sword of course will end up in the need of a new building but I don't want to stress on this. I want to stress on the fact that it doesn't make any difference because both things are in this case single-purposed tools!
I could start to argue with you about this again - but I don't want to, I am not insisting on that anymore. Even if I still would do it that way, I see that some others wouldn't. That's fine with me.Also I still disagree with everything except counterintuitive and getting the wrong idea - but let's leave it at that. :)
>I will see to remove the attack from the axe at all
Go ahead, it didn't fit anyway
Sorry for such a burst. I kept your idea in mind and respected it in the past development. The only reason I didn't include a harvesting tool in the design document was in fact your proposal because I thought that there was more stuff to discuss.But since then I hardly encountered people saying that they support your idea but rather people proposing to make a sickle resp. asking why there is no such tool. That gave me the confidence to go on with this.
> - getting the wrong idea: mixing functionalities is, again, a bad idea.
I strongly disagree with this one. I love games where you have a small number of tools, but a huge number of ways to use and combine them. Using the sword to cut berry bushes, water pipes, electricity lines, etc. is just awesome. A sawmill shouldn''t just saw trees, but anything that's soft enough to be cut (like furniture). A foundry shouldn't just melt ore and gold, but anything that can be molten (like vehicles you don't need any more). The earlier proposals of combining stuff to create vehicles is also a great way to create depth.
Of course you can create a game where there is a simple chain of tools required to complete a task, and I'm sure many people would like it. I prefer the classic Clonk way (Maybe you could also call it the Minecraft way), where the rules are not simple and laid out.
An argument for the "more complexity" way is that you can still always create a simple, shallow scenario in a deep game. But it's very difficult to create deep scenarios in a simple, shallow game.
Well, I agree with the sawmill and foundry part (and of course I already wrote this behaviour in the DD). I should have rather said to not combine functionalities which are dangerous if combined.You yourself were one of the people I've seen hacking at a berrybush thinking this was the right way to get berries (and of course thereby hitting other clonks as well), so you got trapped in this irritating behaviour yourself :)
/e
Even Minecraft does not shake free of a farming tool ;) In clonk you can plant for free but then harvest with a tool. In MC you need a tool for planting but than harvesting is free!
I didn't get trapped. I liked hacking down bushes, just as I liked hacking down Clonks. Even if the behavior was quite pointless at that time, it was a great game experience. For me, a game should also be about finding out. If bushes are really important, there can be a tutorial for teaching you the "proper" way to handle them.Also, the "proper" playing of the scenario was so straightforward, it was almost boring.
>there can be a tutorial for teaching you the "proper" way to handle them.
Not waving sharp metal at them would be a start!
But there is a distinction between nice experiences and frustrating ones. I've got more feedback from people who thought that is was stupid that axe behaves like this. See Fluff's for an example.But if you feel like this, I would like to have your input more often in gameplay related topics.
> If bushes are really important, there can be a tutorial for teaching you the "proper" way to handle them.
I don't think it's a good idea to solve weird object behaviour by adding more tutorials explaining the weird behaviour.
After all, Clonk is not as much a trial'n'error game like Minecraft or Terraria. If you screw things up in these games, you can easily move to another spot and start all over again. Because these are sandboxers. In Clonk screwing up is more or less a game over and people generally dislike game overs as long as they occured because of a minor fault which was unforeseeable (i.e. you had to try out to know).
Some people are frustrated faster than others. But I'm feeling that at the moment, Clonk is not developed so much as a game, but more as something that is supposed to "function well", as I can see from the parallels drawn to e.g. the annoying MS Office help agent. A game should allow the player to make mistakes.> I don't think it's a good idea to solve weird object behaviour by adding more tutorials explaining the weird behaviour.
No, the behavior when you strike bushes with an axe needs not be explained. In fact, I don't think bushes to be explained unless they are somehow crucial to get going in Clonk. The idea here would be to teach the player how to play, but leave lots and lots of room to experiment. This will be the case anyway - I doubt good tutorials will be developed at the same pace as new objects.
Concerning frustrating dead-ends: I'd rather fix the scenario being game over when you do something wrong. Especially if the scenario is meant to be played by beginners. Shouldn't it be possible to build a working economy from very few, basic materials anyway?
>Even Minecraft does not shake free of a farming tool ;) In clonk you can plant for free but then harvest with a tool. In MC you need a tool for planting but than harvesting is free!
Mh. Something completely different: Does it make sense to have a tool for harvesting at all? You'd need the scyte only for crops, not for mushroom/berries/etc anyway, right?
No, we don't particularly need a tool but I don't think it will do much harm if have one. Because the scythe is very single purposed on wheat harvesting, I'd prefer a sickle. That could easily be used for cotton and moss as well.
Mh, maybe not so much moss, though. It's okay to convince the player that he has to use a tool for any crops that actually feel like crops while berries/mushrooms etc do not require such tool. But saying that he has to use it for moss but not for mushrooms seems weird
![[at]](/mwf/flags/at.png "Austria")
I totally agree with Sven 2.I would suppose to solve the whole "tool problem" in a way it was solved in the game Stranded 2:
There you're able to use different tools like mallets, axes, scythes, eg. to perform the same task, but they are not all equally efficient.
For example, you could use a sword to harvest grain, but you won't get as much grains as you would have got using a scythe.
To cut down a tree, better use an axe than a mallet, and to harvest berries, just take your bare hands and not your axe unless you want to smash the bush before you get any berries from it.
Of course, special tools like the shovel or the construction hammer should only be used for their purpose.
By Anonymous ![[us]](/mwf/flags/us.png "United States")
Date 2012-03-17 07:29
It seems like that would require a fair bit of extra development to define all the efficiencies. What about something like clicking on the item icon on the bottom of the screen to cycle weapon<->harvest mode?
To state my point on this, I generally liked the idea of tools being multi-purpose as well - see my rant on a "magic system" for that. I could also imagine the sword being used to deflect incoming arrows - of course, such a thing would require very good timing ;) However, I also would not want the sword to be the farming tool, for the simple reason that I think it's stupid. It's a sword! Why would a farmer build something like that in the first place?I could also live with a certain overlap of functionality. If cutting down wheat with a sword proves less efficient (and I can somehow learn that!), thats almost ok. Be we should be careful - While this might be a nice gimmick in some cases, it can get annoying easily. If I have to fend off wild animals from my farm, but using my sword there destroys all my fields, I'd come back ranting here in an instant. So, using the sword for destroying stuff might be one of the rather bad examples. :P
I find it quite natural that you would cut a few crops while sword-fighting in the fields. Just like playing with explosives near your base may burn down a few buildings. And playing with water pipes may flood your mining tunnels.I'd call such setbacks part of the game. If actions can have positive effects only, then we'd be playing Farmville. That's not really the kind of game I enjoy for a long time.
One point I agree on is that I wouldn't want such events happen because of horrible controls. E.g.: Item magically changed slots somehow, so you accidentally threw a flint and ruined your base. Or you mixed up left and right button and accidentally killed all your crops. That's the kind of "challenge" I could gladly live without.
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