Devblog 2: Mmm, food

tl;dr: Base stats in Fehu come from what you ate that day. Food is a central mechanic that can’t really be ignored.

Today, I want to delve a little bit into the early design prototypes for one of my favorite systems in Fehu: food! The way other life sim games handle food has always been a bit disappointing to me. When I wake up in the morning, what I’m going to eat is generally one of the first things I think about. Throughout the day, the promise of little treats or a nice dinner can be the thing keeping me going sometimes. I develop a relationship with my favorite little hole-in-the-wall bistros.

First, let’s compare some examples from the roster of games that inspired me and how I find them lacking.

• The Sims: Food is eaten to fill a Hunger bar, which will make you suffer and die if it runs out. This is also the template for most survival games. In Fehu, it will not be possible to die due to neglecting your character’s biological processes. So that’s not the main motivator to eat. I am, however, borrowing a bit from Sims 4’s University expansion, which introduced a negative moodlet if your sloppy freshman only ate cheez puffs or whatever, day after day. Quality of life is a major mechanic, so you can’t get away with that.
• Yakuza 0: The main reason to eat is to restore your health, which comes up fairly often since people on the street are always wanting to beat you up. There’s also an achievement you can earn for trying every dish at every eatery on the map that gives you some completion points. But this is basically “food is a healing potion,” and that’s also not the direction we’re going here.
• Cyberpunk 2077: Food and drink can give you a temporary modifier like “Nourished” or “Hydrated.” This is probably my least favorite way of doing food in video games, where it’s just a consumable that offers a small, temporary buff. Fehu does have mechanics similar to this, but they’re secondary effects of special recipes, usually. They’re never the only reason — or even the main reason — to eat something.
• Stardew Valley: Food is a healing potion, but it can also refill your Energy bar, which lets you get more done in a day. Now we’re getting somewhere. But we’re not quite there yet.

The winner, and ultimately the game with a food system closest to what I’m aiming for in Fehu, is actually the survival game Valheim, where base character stats and progression are very directly tied to unlocking better food.

HOW FOOD WORKS IN FEHU

As of the current indev prototype, you have three core stats: Energy, Vitality, and Power.

• Energy is a measure of how much you can get done in a day. Different tasks take more energy, and there are ways to burn extra energy for increased effect. This also serves as your mana/SP in otherworld areas. Energy primarily comes from dishes that are high in carbs/calories in the real world.
• Vitality is a measure of your overall level of physical health, and contributes to your quality-of-life as well as serving as your HP pool in otherworld areas. Vitality primarily comes from dishes that are high in vitamins and other essential micronutrients. The effects of neglecting Vitality over time are similar to that debuff I mentioned from Sims 4 where you get a negative moodlet for only eating snack foods.
• Power is a modifier representing how well you can do things, almost like a Base Attack Bonus in Dungeons & Dragons that applies to both bashing monsters and getting a good performance review at your job. Almost every important task you take on has a variable measure of success related to Power. It primarily comes from dishes that are high in protein.

Your baseline for these three stats is incredibly low (currently set at 2, whereas 8–10 is where you probably want to be early game), so fasting will make it nearly impossible to accomplish anything. That means you should start each day by thinking about what you want to eat. There is a slight grace period on stat decay if you ate a big meal the night before, but you definitely don’t want to skip lunch.

Going without food for very long periods of time will also give you a stacking negative moodlet on top of this.

Character advancement for these base stats largely comes from increasing their maximum values, the amount you get from different foods, and learning advanced recipes through the Cooking skill. This is the closest thing you have to a “character level.” You will eventually hit a point of being full, so it won’t always be possible to cap out all three at the same time. There should be some decision-making involved.

Power and Vitality are mostly set for the day when you eat something, though they do decay slowly and can be lost due to some actions or events. It’s hard to cap them out in one meal, though, and I want to avoid a meta where you just eat 55 sausages and 55 broccoli for breakfast and then can just coast on cheez puffs for the rest of the day.

Energy, on the other hand, depletes much faster, and is also consumed by most activities, from walking between districts, playing job minigames, cleaning your apartment, cooking, etc. This is also why the rail pass I mentioned in Devblog 1 is valuable: you won’t get access to a personal vehicle in Fehu, so riding the metro is a great way to conserve Energy.

Special dishes, including the ones you learn at higher Cooking levels and more expensive offerings at local eateries, also offer passive, secondary benefits that last the whole day, though there will be a limit to how many of those you can have at a time. If you’re going into an otherworld area with ice-themed enemies, you may want to grab some 5x Spicy Noodles from the place up the street to give you a bonus to fire damage, for example. Just be aware that some dishes are so spicy, they will also deal fire damage to you every combat turn in exchange. Maybe there’s a way to get around that if you train yourself to resist the heat…

The other thing food gives you is what I’m calling, for the moment, “Light.” If you see that term capitalized, I’m referring to what could roughly be called our Happiness system, but there’s more to it than that I’m not ready to talk about yet. This represents the enjoyment you get out of the food, and it will be possible to develop personal favorites to add some customization to this system. Eating a pint of ice cream is sometimes just what you need after a really rough week. It might give you a stomach ache later, but a big theme of Fehu is that you aren’t just a machine optimized for survival.

It’s also why you min-maxers out there can’t just make a big protein powder and kale smoothie every day and call it good. You need to indulge in something a bit tastier now and then.

Of course, food costs money and cooking takes time, which are two of your main resources to manage in Fehu. There will always be a balancing act between grabbing something pre-made on the way home, sacrificing money, or getting ingredients and cooking yourself, sacrificing time. Higher levels of the Cooking skill will allow you to make tastier, more nutritious meals in less time, of course. So that’s going to be an important one. Being too much of a homebody means you’ll miss out on building S-links with local businesses though. That’s right: S-links for places! It’s a thing!

I’ll get into more detail on some of the specifics in the dev diary about the Cooking skill, but my goal at the moment is to have 100+ recipes (including those you can cook yourself and those you can order at eateries) from a variety of real-world cultures at launch.

That’s it for this week! As always, if you’d like to support the development, I have a ko-fi page at ko-fi.com/leana where you can chip in a few bucks here and there, or help me try to reach my monthly goals by contributing regularly. I have made a firm decision that I’m not going to charge any money until I have a game that is fun to play, so this is purely out of a desire to help an independent artist make something that’s going to be really cool some day. I really appreciate it. And thanks for taking an interest!

~Len