Day 3

Started the day riffing off the Maslow idea from last night; I think it's got a lot of potential. I already had parameters that mapped neatly onto the tiers, e.g.:

• Physiological: above 1/2 max health
• Security: food store above X
• Belongingness: X joy, or X joy from relationships
• Esteem: skill/dexterity check
• Self-actualisation: I've got a cute gimmick for this! 

After that, I had another idea around counterpointing these internal metrics with external ones, which can be organised in a leaderboard with the raccoons you currently have relationships with:

• Num food leader
• Num relationships leader
• Num trinkets leader
• Current joy leader
• Health leader

So overall, the GUI will look something like this:

The player can then choose which set to optimise over (a la multi-objective optimisation): should they go for the glory of topping the external leaderboards or their internal psychological needs? I still need to think of how the external ones get generated and evolve for the other raccoons and maybe I can fit a life lesson in there about futility of comparing oneself to other raccoons.

I then did some static raccoon sprites:

(The sixth one is wearing a hat with fox ears)

The rest of the day was spent on the GUI code: render the events, enabling it to make selections and expanding out the rest of the HUD. Overall, it's starting to look like a playable game!

Tomorrow, I want to:

• Get one music track done. I've been putting this off because the music's so orthogonal to the art and programming workflow but I do want at least one original track. If I can that one out of the way I'll have the option of composing more if there's slack at the end.
• Implement the other mechanics. I think I'm missing:

•     Skill development. Will stick with one skill for now - dexterity?
•     Trinkets. Raccoons love shiny things
•     Job opportunity. Will stick with just a one-off, freelancing job that nets more food (or trinkets?), as opposed to a persistent one (akin to a relationship)