Redemption Harem - Hunting

This almost wasn't ready to post about today, but thanks to some last-minute breakthroughs, I'm happy to say the hunting rework is now (mostly) ready!

I say mostly because I still need to implement it across the various animals you can see and update all their loot tables to reference your Hunter level correctly and it still needs a bit of testing and polish before I'm fully ready to move on to the next thing, but the mechanics all work they way I want them to. It continues to feel amazing that I haven't had to cut any corners or compromise on any mechanics for this game yet.

So, how does hunting work?

In the demo, you'd basically have to stand a good distance from the animal you're trying to catch, wait for it to corner itself in the terrain, then run at it and hope you could grab it before it disappeared. It was possible to catch animals this way, but the process was really frustrating and deeply inconsistent.

How it will work now is that animals will have a set of "vision cones" that checks where you are in relation to the animal, and your hunter level will make it easier for you to sneak up on them.

If you're in front of the animal, it'll see you right away and run off, at which point your only option is the old "try to grab it before it disappears" method in the demo.
If you're behind the animal, you'll be in its blind spot, and it won't be able to see you at all.
If you're to the side of the animal, it'll only see you if you move. As your Hunter level increases, Eckhard will get better at moving in ways the animal doesn't see as threatening, eventually allowing you to move one tile at a time as long as you're walking, then you'll be able to move all you want to as long as you're walking, then you'll be able to sprint and the animal won't care.

Being able to sneak up from the side like that starts around level 10 (if you're set to auto-sprint, you can hold Shift to walk; the same works on a game pad, though for mouse or touch controls, you'd have to turn auto-sprint off). The way this works mechanically is that there's a wait timer so if the animal sees you move from the side, it waits to see if you're still moving. At low levels, this timer is so short, the animal checks that second time before you stop moving, even if you've taken your finger off the button. However, it's set to take your Hunter level into account, so after level 10 or so, that timer is just barely long enough that - if you're careful about it - you can move one tile at a time and not scare off the animal. As your level rises, you can be less careful, walking one tile at a time as quickly as you want as long as you actually stop between steps.

This would start to backfire after a certain point due to the length of the wait timer being long enough for you to move, stop, then move again if you're quick about your button presses, but at level 60, Eckhard is sneaky enough that the animal will only notice you moving at its side if you're sprinting. At level 80, this "upgrades" again, and Eckhard has learned to move fast enough while still being stealthy that even sprinting won't scare the animal away.

As long as you're to the side - if the animal turns to look right at you, it will always register you as a threat and run away. This should make hunting the visible animals in hunt areas less of a frustrating "why can't you just stand still?!" that eventually turns into ignoring them entirely and more of a deliberate, thoughtful type of thing that gets easier with time - same as trying to capture enemies in combat. And just like trying to capture enemies in combat, animals you hunt outside of combat will drop more loot as your Hunter level increases.

That's the meat and potatoes of how hunting works, but there are a couple other things to mention.

First, you don't start the game with this profession, you get it by finding a hunter out in the world and helping them out. There'll only be one in v0.2, but more will be added as the game expands. After the first teaches you the profession, helping out the others will give you tips about how these systems work as well as a pile of hunter experience.

The second is something I'm not totally sure about implementing yet - traps (and I don't mean femboys; those definitely won't be in the game). The basics shouldn't be too difficult, and would involve you buying (or crafting) a single-use trap that you could then set in a hunt area and go back to check it to see if you caught anything, and if you have, you can harvest the animal for the same rewards you'd get for hunting it otherwise.

What makes me unsure about it is the amount of work that'd go into making the trap stay exactly where you put it, enabling trapping only on specific maps, giving the traps their own "drop tables" to determine what's possible to catch based on which map you set it on, and that it'd be difficult to make the game remember everything it needs to so old traps aren't removed when new traps are set (or alternatively, almost as difficult to limit you to a single trap so I don't have to worry about using up resources to remember everything properly).

If you have any thoughts about the possibility of trapping or any of the other parts of hunting, let me know. The only feedback I've gotten on it before this is that animals were almost impossible to catch as they were in the demo.