Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Nope—it’s another gif-laden update charting our progress with Pathologic 2!
Like we said before, many game systems have already been locked in place, and most of our resources go into content creation these days. Still, we keep fine-tuning interfaces and experimenting with sub-systems! So let’s dive right into them.
Trade and Barter
If you can’t match the price, merchants will sometimes accept items too, but you’ll likely have to overpay
People in the street won’t take money and are more selective, but you can get rare items from them
Trade and barter are the bread and butter of the game’s economy—and since it is, in many ways, a resource management game, you will likely spend a lot of time buying, selling, and trading for items. The screens for trade and especially barter took us a while to fine-tune: it’s oddly tough to visualize the idea of item value when it’s not monetary, and convey the understanding that different characters value different goods differently.
To be done: We’re happy with our current trade and barter screens and are now mostly concerned with balancing economy.
Autopsy
If you take human arteries and veins and lay them all down in a straight line, said human has a decent chance to feel slightly unwell
Remember the simpler time, when veins were straighter and organs, less numerous? And blood was drained from a knee? (This is an older version of the same screen.)
Trade, however, is a common mechanic in video games, so there’s a bunch of solutions that we can draw inspiration from. Things become more fun when we work on a unique, lore-heavy system, like autopsy. Even though the process is seemingly straightforward (you take a body, you cut an organ out, you take it), it’s not always trivial to communicate.
To be done: In this case, we want to make clearer still what “organ damage” is and how it works.
