I started redoing the code for gifts in Kudos 2 today. The original game had a simple single ‘gift’ which you could only buy if you had a ‘romantic partner‘, and went straight to them. There was some pretty cool code regarding ‘gift cynicism’ in there, but to be honest it was put into a post-release patch and not properly thought through. I’ve set aside tommorow to code a better, slightly deeper system for Kudos 2. A day doesn’t sound long, but remember I do everything, and there are a lot of areas to polish and get finished.
My first thought is whether gifts should still be just romantic. Shouldn’t I be able to buy a gift for a friend? Maybe… but perhaps code is needed to handle how this is a different matter to romance. Would it be fair to suggest that friends feel more uncomfortable getting gifts, than romantic partners would? If You are my “significant other “and I buy you a box of chocs, thats cool, but if you are my pal and I buy you an ipod, would you not think it a bit weird? maybe feel like I’m showing off, or that I must want something. I think there is a lot of complex contextual stuff needed to handle how friends react to being given gifts. Some of this is already in Kudos (friends track how in debt they are to you in terms of offers to pay for entertainment), but it would still require a lot of extra complexity. Gifts also bring up the possibility of tracking friends and partners birthdays, and thus birthday social invites etc etc.
At the very least, the new system will have multiple gifts, at different price points, and let you buy them in advance and hand them to people later, maybe just after you turned down their invite to a romantic candlelit dinner so you could spend the night reading a book on software engineering. This sounds like it’s autobiographical now doesn’t it?
In unrelated news, I’m reading a book on ‘supercrunching‘ and andrew marrs ‘history of britain’. both are good reads. My knowledge of the Korean war, or the Attlee government was minimal. I didn’t even realize Churchill was voted out, then in again. I guess I was good at maths and crap at history as a kid…