Sleeping in RPG's... how to deal with fatigue?

[InfernalKeith]

I'm putting together an "RPG lite" that I'm programming on the TI 99/4A, then planning to port to the Vic 20 for my first Vic project ever. The gist of the game is that you're crawling across a long, narrow map, and you're being forced by the game to head south at a fairly rapid clip (but still buy/trade, eat, fight, explore, etc).

I've been mulling over various ways to introduce fatigue and require sleep in the game. As it's supposed to be more urgent and "fast paced" (despite being a turn-based game), I was thinking of incrementing each turn as an hour of real time. When you "sleep," obviously, the time will tick by quickly for the player, and when you "awaken," your fatigue level is lowered, your stamina increases, etc. However, the game clock has moved that much further forward too, which may hasten bad things (not to be TOO vague about it).

Does anyone see any glaring holes in this idea that I'm missing? And can you recommend (or warn of) other good/bad ways you've seen to factor fatigue and the need for sleep into an RPG? I'm sure many of you have played a lot more of them than I have.

Thanks!

P.S. If anyone cares, I'm working on a development blog for this game, and I'll put up a link soon, with a few pics of my rough TI graphics, maps, etc soon.

Keith

[TBCVIC]

Sound nice. I don't know how it's going to work in your game, but just make sure you don't have to sleep too often or else it could get boring.
Nice to here about someone programming the TI 99/4A, I recently bought one boxed in mint condition, in addition to my other one.
I'd love to read your blog about it.

[formater]

You can have a "fatigue points", incresing by move, more quickly if you fighting, if you are in deserts or polar cold .
In many games you only can sleep in Inn's or cities, I prefer sleep in whatever place, but punish with hazard's attacks or less points recover if you are in an unsafe place.

[InfernalKeith]

My initial plan is to allow sleeping anywhere, but to have it be much less safe than sleeping at an inn. And you can only SAVE at an inn (or a temple, where you can't sleep), so there's much incentive to go there.

I think I like the idea of incrementing the time by hours. Obviously, when you sleep, to the game player no time at all passes, but in this game the "clock" is important and factors into how fast your haul your butt southward down the island.

I envision a lot of play-testing and tinkering to find the right balance of keeping your character fed and rested, but never really enough, because there's always danger in staying put. Having fun with it so far, thanks for the input -- feeling a little overwhelmed, as it's my first sizable programming project since, uh, 1990? (yikes)

[Mayhem]

The SSI gold box RPGs did it this way... progress time when you slept (in that it kept track of what time of day it was as certain things only happened at certain times) and made it less safe when outside in that you could have random monster encounter.

[Ghislain]

Ah.... another possible RPG game for the VIC-20! You can never have enough of these, in my opinion.

Do you have any mock-ups, or other tidbits to tease us with?

Inquiring minds would like to know

[InfernalKeith]

Right now I have very little. I've been designing maps and characters on graph paper, writing out the general rules of the road, etc, and I've recently gotten sidetracked by another (hopefully quick) game idea. I've got a very rudimentary game development blog at http://orphantech.squarespace.com that lays out the basic idea of the game, but it's still a long way from screenshots and the like. It'll be a while till the TI 99/4A version is done, much less my Vic conversion of same... probably all in BASIC for starters, just so I can get my feet wet on some VIC programming!

Gonna try to finish up this other game quickly so I can get back to it - I want both of them to be done on the TI by winter's end, so I can get to work on the conversion.