Goonhub
03-20-2024, 09:54 AM
(This post was last modified: 03-20-2024, 09:58 AM by Lord_earthfire. Edited 1 time in total.)
For diseases, i highly suggest going a bottom-up-approach.
This means getting your mechanics right first and then build the idea. Heck, maybe find something irl that would fit with what you try to accomplish gameplay-wise. But you don't want to do yourself a favor and try to shove something into an ingame disease.
The reason is simple: experience has shown that disease (pathology) are most likely not visible, lowly interactive and hard to control. This means diseases have to be designed woth these problems in mind.
Look at lungrot. The disease started with the idea of "coughing up clouds of miasma". This already covers the visibility. It's designed to be inflicted due to medical misconduct/malpractice (leaving rotting corpses in medbay) or by antags. The disease chem in question shouldn't be easily synthetiseable for scientists and the disease should have a long buildup window, so it is created slowly and only in living bodies.
And at the very last, the name and the fluff. It should make sense why a medical chem interacts with miasma. It attacks the breathing organs, so the lungs are very set. Salbutamol is a perfect candidate here. Ever better, in real life a side-effect for people which use salbutamol exists: if you don't take precautions (like washing your mouth) after taking salbutamol, the chance for mouth thrush exists: a fungus that settles in your mouth. Pretty harmless in real life, so lets push it up to 100 for our little spesmes game: a fungus found in miasma that infects the lung of people with susceptible lungs and replicates endlessly.
If you think about it, it's absolutely fucked up (and deadly fungal infections are a real thing). But it's so exaggerated in its effect that it fits into the game. And the mechanics work ingame, simply because they were there first.
Why am i telling this? Because there goes much thought into an idea until 1. it is able to be put into mechanics, 2. Convinces someone to put actual work into it to implement it and 3. Convinces the devs its a good idea to merge.
This means getting your mechanics right first and then build the idea. Heck, maybe find something irl that would fit with what you try to accomplish gameplay-wise. But you don't want to do yourself a favor and try to shove something into an ingame disease.
The reason is simple: experience has shown that disease (pathology) are most likely not visible, lowly interactive and hard to control. This means diseases have to be designed woth these problems in mind.
Look at lungrot. The disease started with the idea of "coughing up clouds of miasma". This already covers the visibility. It's designed to be inflicted due to medical misconduct/malpractice (leaving rotting corpses in medbay) or by antags. The disease chem in question shouldn't be easily synthetiseable for scientists and the disease should have a long buildup window, so it is created slowly and only in living bodies.
And at the very last, the name and the fluff. It should make sense why a medical chem interacts with miasma. It attacks the breathing organs, so the lungs are very set. Salbutamol is a perfect candidate here. Ever better, in real life a side-effect for people which use salbutamol exists: if you don't take precautions (like washing your mouth) after taking salbutamol, the chance for mouth thrush exists: a fungus that settles in your mouth. Pretty harmless in real life, so lets push it up to 100 for our little spesmes game: a fungus found in miasma that infects the lung of people with susceptible lungs and replicates endlessly.
If you think about it, it's absolutely fucked up (and deadly fungal infections are a real thing). But it's so exaggerated in its effect that it fits into the game. And the mechanics work ingame, simply because they were there first.
Why am i telling this? Because there goes much thought into an idea until 1. it is able to be put into mechanics, 2. Convinces someone to put actual work into it to implement it and 3. Convinces the devs its a good idea to merge.