Triskell Interactive » Food for thoughts

Food for thoughts

17 Sep 2018
by Sinsem
10 comments
Art, Blabla, Design, Gameplay

If there is one thing France is known for, except for its rude waiters, it’s its Cuisine. And we absolutely want all citizens of Lethis to enjoy that. In the first game, food was handled in a very basic way. The more houses evolved, the more the inhabitants wanted variety. And yes, variety is a good thing, but is it enough?

Here is a work in progress table of the food elements you would be able to produce in Lethis – Path of Progress II.

Cheese
Fish
Potatoes
Pumpkins
Meat
Bread		 Olives
Grapes
Tomatoes
Honey
Milk
Mushrooms		 Condiment

Olive Oil

Spices

What’s different, you would ask?

Well, this is not just resources to harvest, this is the first step to enter the world of unlimited possibilities of French cuisine!

In Lethis – Path of Progress II, you’ll have fields of wheat that will help produce flour for the windmill, or feed the animals at the farm to produce meat, or milk. You can then use the milk to make cheese, while your foresters are busy harvesting mushrooms. But then instead of putting it all in the granary waiting for your shop’s delivery guy to transfer it to the houses, we shake things up with a new building: the Canteen!
The Canteen is a service building that will -assuming it has food in stock- produce a cook, a walker that will distribute meals to your inhabitants.

Graphic researches for the 3 different levels of the canteen

More elements associated to food to add to the building

Instead of just adding one more element to the food you distribute to the inhabitants of your city to fullfill the requirements for houses evolution, you’ll have to make the right combinations of elements to produce a brand new meal.
We take our inspirations from books of gastronomic cooking. I just received a new one for my birthday which is going to help with finding new crazy recipes (for the curious: https://www.ferrandi-paris.fr/le-grand-cours-de-cuisine-ferrandi-paris beware, it’s in French).

Warning! We do oversimplify the process a LOT.

What can we do with some fish, potatoes, mushrooms and condiment?
You guessed it! A “Canon de Truite au Riesling”

Credits: Ferrandi Paris

Now what if I only have some meat, some mushrooms and condiment again?
A “Carré de veau en écailles de cèpes” obviously (please disregard the additional Brochette Margaridou on the picture).

Credits: Ferrandi Paris

We plan on keeping the name of the meal in French, you know, for cachet.
We’re working on what basic resources to include to have the maximum of possibilities, the idea is to give you a variety of meals to choose from, but still make a few combinations impossible. Of course, you can just give the citizens bread, but people got (literally) beheaded with this kind of attitude, so you better think about improving the quality of the meal you distribute over time.
The kind of meal a house receives will also give it specific bonuses, so it will be interesting to have your canteens distributing different meals to different neighborhoods, but this is already the end of this article so we’ll have to talk about these bonuses another time. 😉

Take care!

Sinsem

10 Comments:

  • Jorge Ropero on January 4, 2019 at 1:59 am Reply

    It reminds my about the “food quality” system presente in Emperor. Nice touch!

  • Tuttu on September 19, 2018 at 12:43 pm Reply

    Sounds like a really interesting take on food. I’m eager to see it in action. 🙂

  • muttala on September 19, 2018 at 9:22 am Reply

    Just 2 request from me as we talked about food,
    1) turn off the unemployment problem as the food production / farms completed in POP 1 which is very troublesome.
    2) Can we take an inspiration to how Emperor Rise of Middle Kingdom handle to UI combining the statistic data / aspect filter view into the construction panel ? It is a lot more faster / neat / elegant than how Caesar 3 / POP 1 handle all the statistic in 1 separate screen.

    • Sinsem on September 19, 2018 at 2:09 pm Reply

      1) Farm’s food production will be handled in a different way.
      2) I haven’t played Emperor in a while, I’ll look into how they managed that.

  • Rui Deyllot on September 18, 2018 at 12:41 pm Reply

    Seems like an interesting way to do the food production and distribution systems.

    A couple of questions about the recipes:

    1 – Will higher level houses require multiple different meals, or just one “more complex” meal?

    2 – Will there be hidden recipes that the player will have to discover?
    2.1 – Will the player unlock hidden recipes by experimenting manually with different ingredients? or will there be some research system for the different meals? Or maybe some recipes are discovered as part of the story in the campaign?

    • Sinsem on September 19, 2018 at 2:07 pm Reply

      1 – Right now we’re thinking more complex meals. Might evolve though, depends on testing.
      2 – We have not set this yet. There are good arguments for hiding some recipes, but I’m not completely confortable with it so again, we’ll see when we test the first version of the system
      2.1 – We don’t want to have gameplay elements locked depending on the progression of the campaign.

  • intelligensaur on September 18, 2018 at 9:19 am Reply

    That’s an exciting new take on the food production aspect of these games, and between this and building upgrades it looks like Path of Progress 2 is going to have some very meaty new mechanics to bite into.

    Is there any chance that some of the less used ideas in the first game will get some extra love, too? I really enjoyed how the washouse and mines weren’t square and gave the rotate button a purpose beyond aesthetics, but then it wasn’t used anywhere else. I also loved the steam pipes, but it felt like they could have been directly plugged into more than just the condenser and automaton factory.

    I’m looking forward to PoP2 regardless, and every update on here just makes me more excited, so thanks for sharing!

    • Sinsem on September 19, 2018 at 2:04 pm Reply

      They may be new non-squared buildings, but it would have to make sense, and right now that’s not the case for what we’ve developped so far.
      We plan on getting rid of rotation though and allow you to peak behind buildings to see what’s hidden there when you need it.
      We’ll have a complete article on steam pipes in the coming months, so I can already say it’s going to get extended too.

  • Sarbovan Ioan on September 18, 2018 at 9:18 am Reply

    wow, progress is going great, i can hardly wait for the game to come out 🙂
    let me know if you need any help in developing, i’m interested in joining a team of game developers, we can talk more detail in private

    • Sinsem on September 19, 2018 at 2:01 pm Reply

      Hi!
      And thank you!
      We’re not looking to expand the team at the moment though.

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