Improbable Island Message of the Day (MoTD)

New Monthly Mementos, dev update
Admin CavemanJoe – 2023-12-05 18:16:40 [Permalink]
Hey everyone, December's Monthly Memento is Solstice Squirrel's Christmas Number One! We're also doing a special bonus MM to commemorate Harley, our late Improbable Island Official Cat.

So let's chat about the Stamina system for a sec. Back in 2008, you didn't have a pool of Stamina points to use - you had separate turn points for travel, fighting, building etc. If you ran out of Travel points out in the middle of nowhere then you were just stuck, even if you had ten Jungle fights left for the day. It sucked. So I wrote various Wee Thingies to let you swap jungle fights for travel points etc, and those sucked too, but they provided the basis for the Stamina system which we started using at the beginning of Season 2 in 2009.

I had big plans for the Stamina system! Originally we were going to have five main actions (Hunting, Gathering, Fighting, Travel and Crafting), you'd have sub-actions within each, and experience gained would trickle up to the main action category. For example, hitting "Look for Big Trouble" would give you XP in "Hunting for Big Trouble" and "General Hunting," and going up a level in "General Hunting" would get you Stamina cost discounts in "Hunting - Standard," "Hunting for Easy Fights" and the other sorts of looking for trouble.

So why do we have the current weird system, where there are eight friggin' different actions for Travelling, and you can be level twenty in travelling specifically over shallow water and level two in travelling specifically over swamplands? Why does Budget Horse get too tired to travel along beaches but then find more energy to travel across plains? Why doesn't Hunting for Really Big Trouble give you some XP towards Hunting for Big Trouble, which surely is the same thing but easier? Why does it cost fourteen hundred days' worth of Stamina to go from level 98 to level 99 of Travel Across Plains in order to get the same 25-point cost reduction as you got for spending 8% of your Stamina to go from level 3 to level 4?

Well, I ran out of time before the Season 2 deadline, basically. I felt the deadline looming and cobbled something together and it's kind of worked for fourteen years while pissing me off the whole time.

Anyway, I'm in the mood to Correct This Mistake because I'm working on two things; first, refreshing the way Rallies work, and second, having the Drive move around the map rather than lurk in the jungles outside outposts, and giving a bunch more cool things to do in the endgame. Both of those things involve reconsidering the calculations for monster encounters on the map - for years I've wanted to give y'all "Sneaky" and "Stompy" travel options that reduce or increase map monster encounters, but to do it Properly would involve us having twenty four friggin' different actions for Travel, and frankly fuck that so yeah, returning to the Original Plan for the Stamina system is how we're gonna do that. Expect it late this year or early next.

Have fun!

~CMJ

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