Knowing when to throw away ideas (for now): Navigation

Since my last update, I’ve added on a sleeping mechanic and an attempt at having the player navigate:

Sleeping mechanic:

• Calendar / clock + sleeping + energy health bar

  • You can sleep in a special area. When you do, the time will progress +8 hours into the future. When there’s a fire nearby, you’ll add on warmth and energy, and if not, you’ll only add on a bit of energy and have some warmth deducted.

Navigation mechanic:

• Light + world rotation

  • Sunlight and shadows to allow players to identify the cardinal directions, and a world rotation to make it more challenging to just keep walking in one direction.

The idea with the navigation mechanic was to mimic the reality of a left or right tilt as you walk in one direction - people generally end up looping around in circles. However, as you’ll see in the video, implementing the world rotation proves to be quite challenging.

As you can see in the video, it ends up being a fairly uncomfortable experience. I hated every moment of it.

The idea was to have players correctly identify north in a mini game where you indicate the direction on the ground with shadows or stars to help you. This would stop the rotation. If you failed, the next day would have your world rotate maybe 1-2 degrees as you walked. Or when you woke up, the world would automatically rotate by 90 degrees. But this is an extremely annoying experience.

I’ll likely be ditching this mechanic for now, as I don’t seem to have the skills to implement this correctly. This seems to be something better suited for an expert. There’s always a trade-off between choosing what to pursue and not, and I think at the moment, the navigation mechanic isn’t as critical to the gameplay as some of my other ideas. The way how I’ve been implementing it is just not fun, and I think there likely is a better way.

When I’m ready to revisit this, it would probably be better to redo the game such that it’s 2.5D, so that navigation itself will be possible without rotating the map, being able to look up at the stars, etc.