Three Dollar Quill

I may have played too much Opus Magnum to focus on much else.

Thinking about the kinds of things this game could include:

• Recruiting randomly generated NPCs.
• Work assignments.
• Random encounters.
• Known geographical hazards.
• Stealing things.
• Having things stolen.
• Relationship meters.
• Starvation.
• Autosaves between zones.
• Manual saving.
• Diseases and curses.
• Alchemy.
• No lockpicking minigame.
• Dungeoneering.
• Carrying capacity.
• Land speed determinations.
• Rations and meal planning.
• Haggling, but abstracted.

One thing to note is that I probably want to limit the party size, and the number of NPCs that can be present in a given scene.

Basically, in a settlement, you have the following jobs you can assign:

• Given a budget and a shopping list, send a party member to buy as many supplies from the list as possible, and sell any goods.
• Pickpocket passersby.
• Case out a building.
• Rob a cased building. Optionally, bring stuff in and leave it behind. With a sufficiently bad thief, this is neither optional nor visible in the UI.
• Ask around for odd jobs.
• Get the rewards for completed tasks.
• Seek treatment for diseases or curses.
• Recruit.
• Leave.

These can have the following outcomes:

• Some or all of the party is arrested.
• Get a job that can be completed within the settlement.
• Get a job that requires traveling.
• New party members, possibly a choice of them.
• Now on the road.

On the road, the following things can happen:

• Get arrested.
• Held up.
• Attacked by wild animals.
• Encounter a navigational hazard.
• Find an unmapped dungeon.
• Find a known dungeon.
• Run low on supplies.
• Reach the destination.

The following actions are available:

• Adjust rationing.
• Hunt.

If arrested, the player can:

• Resist arrest.
• Give up.

If held up, the player can:

• Fight.
• Negotiate.
• Give up.

If attacked by animals, the player can:

• Try to pacify the animals.
• Go all-out against the animals.
• Give up???

When the player encounters a known navigational hazard:

• There may be a dedicated service that allows them to get past it.
• There may be some way to deal with it themselves.

When the player encounters a dungeon:

• They can note it for later.
• Or go in.

In a dungeon, they can assign jobs, and redo assignments as needed:

• Look for and disarm traps.
• Take point.
• I need to think about this part more.

They can encounter dungeon-related things, like:

• Locked doors.
• Blocked passages.
• I need to think about this more.

Various things can inflict diseases and curses, which:

• Often require treatment.
• May add or remove various survival-related meters.

I think when it comes to navigating between settlements, I want to give the trip a maximum length, and load it into the story to set up traversal. Potentially it could instead use some form of linked-list-style traversal, allowing for arbitrary length.