Suggestion: Upgradable Machines

[Runeskyr]

Imagine being able to, either automatically or after doing research, being able to upgrade Equipment you set down. It would take prolly about 50% more time to upgrade than it did to construct it. Upgrading an Algae Deoxydizer to produce more oxygen from less algae. Perhaps increasing the storage capacity of Tiny Batteries. Upgrading a research table to reduce the time it takes for research. Perhaps you want better quality food, or faster made food, or just food from fewer materials. Maybe you want to either reduce the amount of hydrogen created by your Electrolyzer, or maybe INCREASE the amount of hydrogen output, in order to better fuel your Hydrogen Generator. Perhaps something as simple as an increase in the power output from a manual generator.

*The ability to upgrade machines, possibly multiple times, with an increase in material requirement and time to upgrade.

*The ability to choose HOW they are improved

These are things I'd like to see. if it's already been mentioned before, I haven't found anything on it.

[Pancakie]

4 hours ago, Runeskyr said:

Imagine being able to, either automatically or after doing research, being able to upgrade Equipment you set down. It would take prolly about 50% more time to upgrade than it did to construct it. Upgrading an Algae Deoxydizer to produce more oxygen from less algae. Perhaps increasing the storage capacity of Tiny Batteries. Upgrading a research table to reduce the time it takes for research. Perhaps you want better quality food, or faster made food, or just food from fewer materials. Maybe you want to either reduce the amount of hydrogen created by your Electrolyzer, or maybe INCREASE the amount of hydrogen output, in order to better fuel your Hydrogen Generator. Perhaps something as simple as an increase in the power output from a manual generator.

*The ability to upgrade machines, possibly multiple times, with an increase in material requirement and time to upgrade.

*The ability to choose HOW they are improved

These are things I'd like to see. if it's already been mentioned before, I haven't found anything on it.

I LOVE this suggestion.

[Runeskyr]

I think the ability to upgrade equipment should be centered around the "Tinkering" skill. Higher values meaning fewer components and shorter upgrade times.

[Ecu]

I'll be completely honest, I don't like the idea of upgrading machines.  This was done a lot in the modded Minecraft community and really it ends up feeling very artificial.  Instead, I like how ONI is having the physics system be the advanced machines essentially.  Instead of having an advanced water cleaning machine, you boil water into steam.  This feels a lot more interesting to me.

[Runeskyr]

1 hour ago, Ecu said:

I'll be completely honest, I don't like the idea of upgrading machines.  This was done a lot in the modded Minecraft community and really it ends up feeling very artificial.  Instead, I like how ONI is having the physics system be the advanced machines essentially.  Instead of having an advanced water cleaning machine, you boil water into steam.  This feels a lot more interesting to me.

I played a lot of Supreme Commander, back when Forged Alliance came out. And the ability to upgrade buildings and troops made things considerably easier, rather than destroying something to make more room, for something more efficient.

As far as feeling "Artificial" goes.... It's kinda supposed to. It's a game. I honestly think realism in a game should be limited. Otherwise a game becomes more like work than anything else. Work that doesn't pay. Life is Feudal has that problem. Got too realistic and time consuming to the point that the game just wasn't fun anymore.

[Ecu]

Just now, Runeskyr said:

I played a lot of Supreme Commander, back when Forged Alliance came out. And the ability to upgrade buildings and troops made things considerably easier, rather than destroying something to make more room, for something more efficient.

As far as feeling "Artificial" goes.... It's kinda supposed to. It's a game. I honestly think realism in a game should be limited. Otherwise a game becomes more like work than anything else. Work that doesn't pay. Life is Feudal has that problem. Got too realistic and time consuming to the point that the game just wasn't fun anymore.

By artificial, I mean it feels like a game mechanic purely for game mechanic's sake.  It doesn't really add anything new or interesting to the gameplay experience, it just improves an existing functionality.  That feels like artificial content that is rather pointless.

Instead, I feel like the route they are going now is much better.  We have machines to help us do things like clean water, however, if we wish to clean more water or use less sand, we utilize the physics of the world to do so.  This gives a whole new puzzle to solve and encourages creativity rather than handles the increase in productivity for you.

There is a saying that I use in my game design concepts and that is "you cannot think outside the box, if there is no box".  This applies here as by allowing simple upgrade paths, you eliminate that avenue for creative thinking.  A well designed experience generally gives you a set of simple tools and leaves the solving of the puzzle to the player, rather than solving the puzzle for them.

Granted, in some games (such as a real-time strategy game), these sorts of mechanics can indeed work fine.  However, in games like ONI, where a majority of the experience is a puzzle, they tend to feel artificial and boring.

[Runeskyr]

2 minutes ago, Ecu said:

By artificial, I mean it feels like a game mechanic purely for game mechanic's sake.  It doesn't really add anything new or interesting to the gameplay experience, it just improves an existing functionality.  That feels like artificial content that is rather pointless.

Instead, I feel like the route they are going now is much better.  We have machines to help us do things like clean water, however, if we wish to clean more water or use less sand, we utilize the physics of the world to do so.  This gives a whole new puzzle to solve and encourages creativity rather than handles the increase in productivity for you.

There is a saying that I use in my game design concepts and that is "you cannot think outside the box, if there is no box".  This applies here as by allowing simple upgrade paths, you eliminate that avenue for creative thinking.  A well designed experience generally gives you a set of simple tools and leaves the solving of the puzzle to the player, rather than solving the puzzle for them.

Granted, in some games (such as a real-time strategy game), these sorts of mechanics can indeed work fine.  However, in games like ONI, where a majority of the experience is a puzzle, they tend to feel artificial and boring.

I see where you're coming from, and it makes sense. Though, having the option I feel would still be useful.

[Ecu]

2 minutes ago, Runeskyr said:

I see where you're coming from, and it makes sense. Though, having the option I feel would still be useful.

I am only commenting against this suggestion because actually rather than being useful, it actually becomes harmful to gameplay.  I experienced this heavily as a mod author from the Minecraft community.  These mechanics reduce creativity and as such actually make the game less appealing as time progresses.  This leads to requiring constant new "upgrades" needing to exist to keep things appealing.

Alternatively, by giving users a set of simple tools to manipulate a complex environment, there is less of a trend towards a single solution and as such it leaves the game open to more creative decisions.  This creativity leads users to gain more entertainment from their experience and as such play the game longer, without even needing additional content to sustain said enjoyment.

So in a sense, upgrades are actually bad for a game like this.

[Runeskyr]

Whether or not it's harmful to gameplay in this situation, feels more like an opinion. Being able to increase efficiency in equipment would allow for more exploration, rather than focusing exclusively on building more. Expansion is forced on people in this situation. Some people would prefer a smaller stabilized habitat, over having to turn every individual cog in a giant machine. If this game is meant exclusively as a puzzle with the goal of "Try to survive long enough to die", then forced expansion is the way to go. The choice of which should be available to the player.

[Ecu]

2 minutes ago, Runeskyr said:

Whether or not it's harmful to gameplay in this situation, feels more like an opinion. Being able to increase efficiency in equipment would allow for more exploration, rather than focusing exclusively on building more. Expansion is forced on people in this situation. Some people would prefer a smaller stabilized habitat, over having to turn every individual cog in a giant machine. If this game is meant exclusively as a puzzle with the goal of "Try to survive long enough to die", then forced expansion is the way to go. The choice of which should be available to the player.

The question becomes what buildings would you need to upgrade and is there a more interesting method in which we can handle this.  In many cases, the need for more resources can be handled via actually just building more producers.  In cases such as cleaning air and/or water, there are solutions via utilizing the physics system.  As such, even regarding the specific use-case that you present...the game already has solutions without resorting to upgrades.

Can you provide an example of where upgrades would be beneficial to gameplay specifically, in a way that couldn't be better represented by the physics system?

[Runeskyr]

2 minutes ago, Ecu said:

The question becomes what buildings would you need to upgrade and is there a more interesting method in which we can handle this.  In many cases, the need for more resources can be handled via actually just building more producers.  In cases such as cleaning air and/or water, there are solutions via utilizing the physics system.  As such, even regarding the specific use-case that you present...the game already has solutions without resorting to upgrades.

Can you provide an example of where upgrades would be beneficial to gameplay specifically, in a way that couldn't be better represented by the physics system?

Represented by the physics system? I'm having difficulty understanding what you're talking about. I'm not a game designer, by any means. I just know what I think is fun and would like to see.

[Ecu]

4 minutes ago, Runeskyr said:

Represented by the physics system? I'm having difficulty understanding what you're talking about. I'm not a game designer, by any means. I just know what I think is fun and would like to see.

Perhaps I'm too demanding, but I feel that suggestions for a game should take into account how such things would interact with the game environment to provide additional entertainment to the players.  In this case, I cannot think of an upgrade to any existing machine that would not be better served as a physics mechanic or separate machine.  Therefore I was asking you if you can think of one to support your suggestion.

I've personally seen upgrade mechanics ruin the appeal of experiences like this by stripping away the puzzle solving in favor of efficiency.  So I really don't want such a thing to happen to ONI as well.  As such, if you can support your suggestion with some examples of where the game could benefit well from this, perhaps I will agree.  Otherwise, I have to say this would be a poor suggestion to implement.

[Electroely]

I agree with Ecu. The fun of this game is using simple machines to get your way around doing more advanced tasks, or doing simple ones more efficiently. I had a system setup for bristle blossoms (before they got buffed) that allowed me to control their heat using 2 pumps I switch on and off when needed (one was coming from a room with wheezeworts inside and the other had a few space heaters). It was like a little mini game. Point is, we shouldn't be able to improve simple machines but instead find creative ways of using them in specific tasks.

[Troxism]

A bit of a different perspective on the issue: I think upgrades are bad for a different reason.

Why? Because I think they just make the game easier as time goes on (as you get more upgrades), which is counterproductive. Base building games of this sort tend to naturally become easier over time due to having more infrastructure in place to simplify things. While usually there are 'late game mechanics' added to keep pace, it's very hard to keep things challenging if you also have upgrades that make every building better.

Basically, games like this already tend to have the opposite difficulty curve; hard at the start and get easier over time. A well designed game starts off easy and gets harder as you play (and presumably get better and want to be challenged more). While obviously it's more complex then this, the reality is an addition like this only further pushes the game into becoming easier over time. Which is the opposite of how it should work. A game that you solve almost immediately (because once you beat the initial difficulty hump at the start it just gets easier) is a game you get bored of and drop quickly. Don't Starve had this problem (I had to heavily mod the game to scale the difficulty drastically as time went on just to make it interesting for myself) as well as it only had a few difficulty mechanics with time, and this game might end up suffering from the same problem. And adding stuff like building upgrades would only make this issue far far far worse and more difficult to balance.

As a simple example, if you could upgrade the Electrolyser to be 50% more efficient, you would basically need to have something like 'your Dupes consume up to 50% more oxygen as time goes on (lets say by cycle 200 for example)' to accommodate this change else it's literally just making things even easier once you are already set up. But then if you do that the 'artificial difficulty' brigade comes storming in to complain about how it's just 'arbitrary difficulty'. As if all video game difficulty isn't artificial; if this game was actually realistic a lot of stuff would work differently and be much easier/simpler. As a simple example 'realistically' the electrolyser would pipe out both types of gas via a gas outtake so you could filter it before it exited rather then just having it spew both types into the air constantly and forcing you to sort them via weight or actual pumps/filters yourself which is more complex/slower. But that isn't how it works ATM just to make it more complicated (and probably because pipes can't handle mixed gases in the same tile as well because it's a video game with limits in how it was coded), which is fine for a video game, but it obviously makes no sense.

But to be fair I always have a very 'hardcore' perspective on games, so I tend to focus a lot on the 'how is the player challenged/difficulty curve' aspects of the design because that is what interests me both as a player and as an observer/analyst of games.