House customization Opinions

[Sakura02]

So we've been discussing house customization we have pretty much decided on which one we may use but to be fair we wanted to get some feedback from the community. Keep in mind this talking about the physical construction of the house.

Three ways to do Houses

1. Buy pre made houses
2. Have them be semi modular
3. Construct the entire house from scratch

Keep in mind for your house you can already customize the; furniture, walls, floor.

--------

Buying pre-made houses <--- Most likely to be implemented for the sake of time and ease.

Pros:
- A complete house you don't have to worry about constructing
- Designers can make nice/ complex designs for the exterior
- Easiest and fastest system to implement

Cons:
- A higher chance of people players similar house designs (on the exterior) so it may be boring.
- Limited to the houses we have in the shops.

Buying semi-modular
Semi modular would be adding rooms where you would want to extend your house.

---------------

Pros:
- Less chance of houses being too repetitive
- More control of where to place room

Cons:
- More complex too code and will take too long.
- Attaching rooms may not necessary look cohesive with the main design

---------------

Fully modular
Building your entire house from the ground up by attaching and connecting walls and roofs

Pros:
- Every house will be unique in the game
- More control over the rooms and look of the house
- An extra goal to work towards that would be more involved by gathering materials.

Cons:
- House designs may not look as aesthetically pleasing since you are limited by how things can be pieced together
- Will take a long time for our artists to model the pieces that connect together and will be potentially project creep and extend the deadline for completion.

So the big question is. If we implement first system will players care that there is a higher chance of someone having the same exterior house design that they have?

[Dineosoar]

If I pulled from this what I should've, "the physical construction of the house" is the outside and inside shape correct? And you can change the inside parts to whatever.

I say premade is good, but have a selection of outside "wallpapers" to choose from.
For example...

You have your brick shack,
but you also have this exact shack shape in wood form and mud form. (And so on)

All would cost the same, they're just different appearances.

I'd be okay with this, but I'd really like Semi-modular rooms but fully modular being the end goal would be cool. Some people don't like building houses though so there would have to be some presets.

I'm not comfortable with voting right now until I get some more input from others.

[Jrome]

[quote="Sakura02"]So we've been discussing house customization we have pretty much decided on which one we may use but to be fair we wanted to get some feedback from the community. Keep in mind this talking about the physical construction of the house.

Three ways to do Houses

1. Buy pre made houses
2. Have them be semi modular
3. Construct the entire house from scratch

Keep in mind for your house you can already customize the; furniture, walls, floor.
And that all options will in some way limit the total area allowed

--------

Buying pre-made houses

Pros:
- A complete house you don't have to worry about constructing
- Designers can make nice/ complex designs for the exterior


Cons:
- A higher chance of people players similar house designs (on the exterior) so it may be boring.
- Limited to the houses we have in the shops.
- *The least flexibilty
- *Forcing players to have a house that may not be desired

Buying semi-modular
Semi modular would be adding rooms where you would want to extend your house.

---------------

Pros:
- Less chance of houses being too repetitive
- More control of where to place room
- *Ability to alter the appearance of the walls
- *More flexibilty than pre-made houses
Cons:

- Attaching rooms may not necessary look cohesive with the main design
- *Difficult to prevent houses that may look unappealing from the exterior
---------------

Fully modular
Building your entire house from the ground up by attaching and connecting walls and roofs

Pros:
- *Almost Every house will be unique in the game
- *Express yourself further by creating a house that you want (Within the constraints)**
- *An extra goal to work towards that would be more involved by gathering materials. Possibly increasing the satisfaction
- *You can control the wall and floor texture appearance on a per object basis
-
Cons:
- *roofs and ceilings would have to be pre-fabricated
- House designs may not look as aesthetically pleasing since you are limited by how things can be pieced together
- *Cannot prevent players from having unappealing houses, or requiring them to make it enclosed
- *Requires much more involvement for a player to create a house (Time consuming)
- *Possibly introduces seams where the objects meet. Especially at interior outside corners

- **Current known Constraints would be:

• Walls, floors, and ceilings would be extended by a factor of 1 meter
• Walls, floors, and all ceilings are rotated by 90 degrees on the Y axis

Anything denoted by an * is solely my opinion based on my perspective. And does not reflect any decisions made by Pumpkin Interactive.

[Soifasofa]

Hm.

I guess semi would be my idea, with houses having a grid-like structure to them so you're limited to where you can connect a new room. I should try to get an example sketched out but I am in class…

Anyway, I don't particularly mind the layout of the building itself anyway. Presets are fine and dandy to me, as I imagine you guys would work hard enough to give a good amount of choose from to try to please everyone. The most important part to me is full customization of the interior, as I don't plan to spend too long staring at my house from the outside.

[Dineosoar]

Hm.

I guess semi would be my idea, with houses having a grid-like structure to them so you're limited to where you can connect a new room. I should try to get an example sketched out but I am in class…

Anyway, I don't particularly mind the layout of the building itself anyway. Presets are fine and dandy to me, as I imagine you guys would work hard enough to give a good amount of choose from to try to please everyone. The most important part to me is full customization of the interior, as I don't plan to spend too long staring at my house from the outside.

I agree, as long as the inside is fully customizable I don't mind preset homes, but semi is probably best, in my opinion.
You should probably aim for semi homes, but if there is struggle, settle for preset.

[mrs saturn]

Outside wallpapers/roof textures would be neat if you could change, but other than that, this is not something I feel very passionately about. I feel like being able to construct your own house is really far removed from what you normally expect from a game like this. To me it wouldn't be more than "a nice touch" if it worked out well, and it's likely not something that makes you want to play the game more - added to the fact that it does seem like it'd take a lot of work just to make it functional - in my opinion, that work would be better spent on things more central to the game. It's about payoff (which to me would not be big) vs effort (which seems huge).

But either way, I still put my vote as "irrelevant as long as you can customize the interior". If others would prefer more customization I wouldn't really be opposed to it, I guess.

[Dineosoar]

Outside wallpapers/roof textures would be neat if you could change, but other than that, this is not something I feel very passionately about. I feel like being able to construct your own house is really far removed from what you normally expect from a game like this. To me it wouldn't be more than "a nice touch" if it worked out well, and it's likely not something that makes you want to play the game more - added to the fact that it does seem like it'd take a lot of work just to make it functional - in my opinion, that work would be better spent on things more central to the game. It's about payoff (which to me would not be big) vs effort (which seems huge).

But either way, I still put my vote as "irrelevant as long as you can customize the interior". If others would prefer more customization I wouldn't really be opposed to it, I guess.

Yeah, I guess you're right. But some people may see this game as a calm safe-place, and having the ability to customize it fully could make them feel more comfortable.

[mrs saturn]

Yeah, I guess you're right. But some people may see this game as a calm safe-place, and having the ability to customize it fully could make them feel more comfortable.

Yeah, I can totally see that, which is why I picked the indifferent option. If others prefer it to be more customizable I'm not against it, I just don't feel strongly for it myself.

[zeffyr]

I would totally love to have fully modular housing. I enjoy building a lot and I would be kind of discouraged with presets or even semi-modular options.

I would suggest to do preset to get it finished with, and then maybe flesh it out to where eventually we could take down the preset house and build something from scratch once the systems were finished (either before or after publishing deadline).

[TheIronGod]

I like customizing and creating. It's fun. If you're giving me a choice, yeah, I'll choose to have more options to create. If the game doesn't have that, will I play it? Sure. Still, I really want those options. That said, it'd be cool to have prefab houses for a little cheaper and give us the option to rebuild later after the initial release.

Fully modular
...
Cons:
- House designs may not look as aesthetically pleasing since you are limited by how things can be pieced together

While I understand it would be more difficult to code, I'm not sure why it would necessarily lower aesthetic quality.