Food went in this week, and energy started coming back with time. Health was already there. The one that matters is energy, because it is the reason the game plays the way I want it to play.
Time gives it back
Every step costs energy. So does swinging at something, forcing a locked door, climbing a floor. A step on its own costs half of what a swing does. Time gives it back. It ticks up slowly, whether you’re logged in or not, until it hits a cap, and the cap is about a day of regen. That’s the fairness rule from the plan: a player who opens the game once a day and a player who checks in every twenty minutes get the same energy over that day. What playtime changes is how you spend it, one long expedition or a lot of short careful ones.
On a wide screen the top bar shows health, energy and food as thin bars with a number beside each; on a phone they sit in a strip at the bottom.
Looking is free. Panning the map, reading what you’ve heard, checking who’s around, closing the tab. The moment you move, you pay. That’s what kills the idea of wandering the whole city on a whim to see what’s out there. The bigger the bar you’ve saved up, the longer and louder the trip you’re about to take.
Right now four things you can eat, drink or take put energy back too, a jam jar, a soda, a pill and a syringe, and I don’t like it. If a can of beans puts some back, energy turns into loot, and the daily ceiling stops meaning anything.
The other two clocks
Food is a separate clock. It goes down with time, not with steps, and when it runs out your health starts going instead. Energy is the budget for a day. Food is the reason you leave the building at all. I don’t want the two to tax the same thing.
Weight is the third piece of the same budget. There’s a limit to what you can carry, and a backpack raises it. You pick up what fits and leave the rest on the floor. The gear entry looked at this from the other side, every item as a decision. This is the side where the decision has a number on it.
When you’re out of energy you stop where you stand, and if that’s half a street from the door, you wait there, in the open, until enough ticks back to finish the walk.