Devlog #4: Simulating hungry aliens

Today has been a long day of thinking about how to model these cantinas to be fun and exciting. Here are my thoughts so far on what this simulation will be in terms of a “minimum viable product:”

There will be 4 Cantinas, each with a different theme. Each space station gets 1 of each of the cantinas. Whitevault is currently planning on these themes: a bistro (pictured above), a tiki-bar, a cyberpunk bar, and a fancy spaceship. Each player picks a Cantina style and opens their business in a space station with other players who picked the different themes.

Each space station houses Patrons (non-playable characters). These patrons will be programmed to need to eat multiple times a day. For the initial version, patrons will stay on one space station, but ideally, in the future, they would travel and move around.

When it is time for a patron to eat, they will wait for friends for a bit, depending on how several factors. Currently, those factors I’m trying are loneliness and hunger. If a patron can’t find any friends to eat with, they will eat alone, and their loneliness stat will increase. When they are lonely, they eat alone, which means they pick cuisines that match their taste. While eating alone, they have a chance to meet other patrons who also are dining alone, thus becoming friends.

Each patron will have a set of opinions about how much they like each available cuisine. Just because two patrons happened to dine alone and pick something they enjoy doesn’t mean they both enjoy the same things. As their social circles grow, they will begin eating in groups of up to 4 people initially, and sometimes they will be taken to places they don’t like that much.

You know how it feels when you’re the one person at the office that just really doesn’t like Chik-Fil-A, but you don’t want to eat alone, so you force yourself through it? You might find that it’s not as bad as you remember, or you might dislike it enough that you don’t eat a full meal. When Patrons eat cuisine that is not high quality and/or is something they hate, their hunger amount will grow slightly, and their happiness will decrease.

The goal of simulating dining in groups is that it will encourage some Cantina owners to diversify their menu offerings, which raises the base cost of doing business because you have more spoilage to contend with due to the increased ingredients required. Or, you might try to make your fortune by being extremely high quality but only offering one cuisine. It’s your cantina, and it will be up to you to try to earn as much business as you can each day.

The simulation code is under substantial development. I ended up expanding my vision of how the patrons will operate because I felt like the group dynamic will make the simulation more interesting. Tomorrow I’ll be far enough along to start seeing the results, and I hope that my theories on how I want this to work will produce a unique management simulation.