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+--- Thread: [PR] Consistent and Fun Surgery Improvements (/showthread.php?tid=17499)
[PR] Consistent and Fun Surgery Improvements - Crystalwarrior - 11-10-2021
RELEVANT PR: https://github.com/goonstation/goonstation/pull/6659
First off, I want to preface by saying this is not a rework or an overhaul - to make these changes work should be trivial and easy!
With that being said, after a lengthy discussion over the discord I think current surgery has a good foundation that is sometimes betrayed for no benefit. Lots of room for skill expression and robustness by gaming the fail checks, but problem is communication to the user is poor, some elements are completely inconsistent and break established core, and at least one tool only exists for one specific surgery and nothing else.
Onto the changes:1. Change "You messed up!" messages to be more informative - tell me why I messed up, so I can mess up less. For example, "step failed - patient squirmed due to extreme pain!"
"step failed - you're not trained for this, you'll have to try again!"
2. Make eye surgery behave exactly like the Lung and Kidney surgery - only the final step decides which eye I change.
3. If the patient starts bleeding, suggest what I can do to stop it.
"Your patient starts bleeding - you need a hemostat in your off hand to clamp the bleeders to reduce this!"
"your patient bleeds a little - your hemostat helped reduce the severity."
4. Give me fail chance as a visible percentage if I'm using an operating table. Either by clicking on the table or with a visual pop up under the patient like the health scanners, tell me exactly how likely I am to succeed, and why I have less than 100% success so I can try fixing the issue or simply risking the penalty. I don't want to go skimming through the code just to understand why I'm failing with no feedback why.
5. Make all surgeries consistent.
For intent, it is mostly consistent like so:
Help intent - precision, care
Disarm intent - carelessness, sabotage (100% fail chance)
Grab intent - only used for chest implants, presumably grabbing.
Harm intent - strength, aggression (Dismemberment, decapitation, butt removal)
Another convention is your active hand matters but only for the final step of the surgery (left lung vs right lung, left kidney vs right kidney). You can do the whole surgery with your right hand, but take the organ out with your left hand - it'll take the left organ out.
Most of surgeries follow this convention, except for... * Limb surgery - intent doesn't matter. This makes sense because that's the only thing you can do with a limb... Currently. If more surgeries are added though delimbing should be HARM intent.
* Eye surgery - intent doesn't matter. Must only use one hand for the surgery or your character will get "confused" - doesn't happen anywhere else. Why isn't it like lungs and kidneys? Shouldn't only the final step matter which eye it is? Another issue - this is the only surgery that needs the spoon. Cog1 also has no spoon by default, you have to fabricate it and know to do so - why is there a tool that a grand total of 1 surgery uses? Doesn't it make more sense to just replace it with a more useful tool like the scissors?
* Chest item - only surgery to use grab intent. Guide is terrible and fails to mention how to secure the item (must use sutures in HELP intent). Unlike every other surgery, bafflingly you must use sutures in GRAB intent to sew the chest shut. Breaks every single previously established convention... Why, exactly? Can't it just be HELP scissors - GRAB item - HELP suture (No securing) , or HELP scissors - GRAB item - GRAB suture - HELP suture? Shouldn't it always be "HELP suture) finish surgery"? I think it should be scissors instead of scalpel because the scalpel is already used to remove shrapnel, implants and head spider.
Fix all this, and the surgery becomes more consistent and less frustrating.
RE: Consistent and Fun Surgery Improvements - saccharineChampion - 11-10-2021
I agree with some of your ideas, though I have a few quibbles with the methods of improvement.
Messed-up Messages: I do not like the current way in which the feedback only says that a step is failed or that you messed up, but for a different reason than you state. The current messages are somewhat vague; while it is hard to put oneself in the mind of someone who does not know much about the system as a whole, I believe both new and experienced surgeons would benefit from the messages being more clear that you should just try the same thing again. I do like the idea of adding why the messup occurred. My preferred substitution would be "Step needs reattempting - failed due to [patient consciousness/lack of medical training]. This maintains the passive voice; generally messages caused by an action either state what you did or what happened as a result - directly telling the player to "try again" runs counter to that.
Hand Importance: I agree that it should be more consistent, but I disagree that only the last cut should matter. It doesn't really make sense that you can spoon out and cut one eye to do the finishing spooning on the other; while it does make sense that you would need to focus on a particular side of the chest to remove an organ. Indeed, until now I thought it already was consistent in requiring the same hand to be used for left/right organs!
Bleeding: I disagree with the player being given those explicit instructions. Clamping is helpful but not necessary, so I believe the source of knowing that they help should lie in the instructor - whether it's the surgery textbook or another player teaching you. If I'm not mistaken, there is already a message for when you do use the hemostat, which is good feedback.
Fail Chance Explanation: Redundant with improvements to the messup messages.
Intents: I assume by able intent (in the section about limb surgery) you mean harm intent; if so, I agree. Not just for consistency with head and butt removal, but also to help a beginning surgeon be more mindful of intents from the start.
Eye Surgery: Per above for handedness. As for the spoon, I don't really see much of an issue with it having a unique surgery item. The Cog1 lack of spoon just sounds like a mapping error. In defense of the spoon, it also completes the trifecta of utensil tools - where you can use knives for scalpels and forks for saws. I also find it strange to extend the scissors to a function outside of the chest organs, though that might just be an artifact of my personal experience of being around for the update that added said surgeries.
Chest Item Surgery: I agree up to the scissors part. If anything, it being a scalpel job neatly separates help-intent scissors and lack-of-scissors along organ vs. external stuff lines.
Thank you for making your post. I may disagree at some points, but overall it has given me a fair bit to think about, and I hope improvements can be agreed upon and implemented as a result of it.
RE: Consistent and Fun Surgery Improvements - Crystalwarrior - 11-10-2021
I agree with your passive voice suggestion. Having exact fail % could at least be useful for the guides so you are more informed, but I agree it's not as necessary as better explanation why you fail in the first place.
I want to be able to do multi hand surgery, as the whole rest of the game is ambidextrous and lets me juggle tools the whole way through. Why not surgery? I prefer lung and kidney surgery to eye surgery because the system only really needs to know the final step to have an idea which organ I'm operating on. It's really annoying otherwise and intentionally gimps you for little benefit overall.
Clamping will be better solved through more informative fail messages so you at least know where to start looking for a solution why your patient keeps bleeding so much.
Harm intent for limbs to remove them, but what does that make of other intents? What would help intent do, blood letting? Severing nerves?
The spoon can't just be used for one surgery and nowhere else. It needs to have more purpose like the rest of the tools - scalpel saw scissors see a lot of use even outside of surgery. What value does the spoon even have if you're not doing the eyes? Shouldn't tools be more versatile than this?
For chest item surgery, if it can just be scalpel with no overlap with other implant surgeries like removing bullets then I have no issues. Otherwise I suggested the scissors to separate the two so it's easier to tell what the surgeon wants.
Thx for your post and a new perspective on the issue! I agree with you on having better information delivered to the player so first time surgeons at least have a general idea what they can do better.
RE: Consistent and Fun Surgery Improvements - Cal - 11-10-2021
Suggestion: the surgery table acts as a medical guide, this is WHY you would be told "Surgery failed because of x, re attempt step"
Another suggestion: only harm intent should cause sabotage, disarm should literally be dis-arm/head and all of those things should be moved to it
Doctors should be doing no 'harm'!
RE: Consistent and Fun Surgery Improvements - Crystalwarrior - 11-11-2021
(11-10-2021, 10:23 PM)Cal Wrote: Suggestion: the surgery table acts as a medical guide, this is WHY you would be told "Surgery failed because of x, re attempt step"
Another suggestion: only harm intent should cause sabotage, disarm should literally be dis-arm/head and all of those things should be moved to it
Doctors should be doing no 'harm'!
Both are fantastic ideas, I love the "disarm" pun, that's massively cheeky
RE: Consistent and Fun Surgery Improvements - Kelpo - 11-11-2021
I just wish that it didnt matter which hand you used for surgeries
RE: Consistent and Fun Surgery Improvements - Crystalwarrior - 11-11-2021
(11-11-2021, 05:42 AM)Kelpo Wrote: I just wish that it didnt matter which hand you used for surgerieshonestly I agree with you. Why not just have a pop-up list asking you which side you wanna modify as far as organs go?
RE: Consistent and Fun Surgery Improvements - THISISANICEGAME - 11-11-2021
Pop up bad, never put pop ups in surgery, they are too slow
RE: Consistent and Fun Surgery Improvements - Crystalwarrior - 11-12-2021
Fair enough tbh. They're kinda ancient too