#115: Work and parttime jobs

This week I focused on the minor work / parttime job system.

I talked about this before. Basicaly, your character will be able to do multiple time consuming things besides just working, training or resting. But some of these activities wouldn’t really make sence if they took one week to do. So I made the minor work window some months ago. This window is used for things like mining, woodcutting or lockpicking. While lockpicking takes (in the game) no time whatsoever, mining should take some time, but not really seven days.

So I decided to do the following. Every free day you, you have one “point” you can use on one of those activities. This means that after working, training or resting, you are free to walk around and explore, visit people and so on. But apart from deciding what your character is going to do for the entire next week, you can also decide what your character is going to do for a few hours on the free day.

At first, I wanted to add another line of text into the menu screen that would show you if you used you “work point”, but then I got a much better idea. I will simply advance time, make the screen darker, put some light sources into the game and make the thing much more natural. This is how it looks right now.

Again, this is just work in progress, but the foundation is solid and everything works as intended for now.

Notice the torch in the lower part of the screen. It isn’t lit and emits no light in the first screenshot, but emits faint light and gets lit in the last screenshot. This is just a minor thing but it makes the world seem more alive.

Bear in mind that changes brought by this kind of time advancement will be only cosmetic. NPCs will be at the same place they were at the morning. Only things that change will be the lighting, lights and the introductory dialogue of some NPCs.

Another thing I want to add are parttime jobs. These will take only few hours, will require no food and  reward you with money or some items depending on the job. They will not raise your stats though.

I will most likely be talking about these more in depth the next week.