Discussion Balancing A Diet: Hunger as a Mechanic

[meatbag]

So there I was starting another camp with my girlfriend in the game Don't Starve Together, and while I was running around hunting the ape-bulls for their meat, it struck me how well integrated the hunger mechanic is into the gameplay loop. Especially for a survival game, a genre where hunger is often a bar that nags you every five minutes, asking to be filled up.

So what makes DST's food systems work? For one, you really need to hammer out your meal plan. Different seasons and conditions affect what kinds of food you can gather, food will spoil so you need to time when you eat so your meals don't get wasted, and you generally want to set up some garden plots and beehives to grow your own ingredients.

Furthermore, hunger itself is tied to the two core stats: health and sanity. Some food is immediately accessible and filling, but barely increase your health. You can eat raw food in a pinch, but your sanity will take a hit.

In short, cooking and eating food is fun in DST, because instead of being a chore like in other survival games, it's a core mechanic that affects everything else you can do.

So what about you, have you thought this hard about fictional food before? What games would you say have great hunger mechanics?

 

[Vookatos]

I'm not usually into balancing tons of meters or crafting in games, but Pathologic 2 is my favorite game of all time and it has both.
I suppose what makes it work for me is that it's a story based game first and foremost, so mechanics compliment its themes rather than just exist because survival is popular.
It's hard for me to describe why it works for me so well when many people cite Pathologic 2 as unfun (although I wonder how many just saw Hbomberguy's video and just assumed it works exactly as 1 and parroted his words), but I get it. The game is stressful, and just going around bartering with NPCs, going to shops or just searching in trash bins takes up valuable time which past day 1 you will NOT have for quests (I've tried fiddling with accessibility settings and even at most casual you can't complete everything) so it becomes a constant decision making even as you're walking across the street.

 

[PixelKnight]

Where i don’t like hunger is if it’s just a decreasing bar that’s alleviated with an item- Shiren the wanderer does this, and it just makes it a bit pointless. When the bar gets low, that takes ages, pop a food item. It’s the easiest condition to alleviate in a game packed with sub-systems and quirky item interactions, to the point where it’s hunger bar having the same priority as HP in the interface is a bit pointless and makes it seem more important than it is.

It feels like it’s there because the stamina mechanic a lot of other dungeon crawls use is magic- run out of it and you then can’t fight as hard or heal as easily, which then adds tension to each fight. Shiren doesn’t have that, but hunger doesn’t do this either. It’s just a mild annoyance, easily solved.

 

[big lantern ghost]

Great thread idea. I haven't played Don't Starve in forever, I can only imagine the game is about 10x bigger than when I last booted it up!

The mechanics of food are less complex, but I'm going to pitch Tokyo Jungle as the whole game is structured around the food chain. The different animals you can play as have differing caps on how much you can eat, dictating how often you need to hunt. Your speed and attack power also plays a large part in what you can effectively go after.

They should put Tokyo Jungle on something other than the PS3.

 

[Aurc]

So what about you, have you thought this hard about fictional food before? What games would you say have great hunger mechanics?

 

[big lantern ghost]

Metal Gear Solid 3 has a pretty robust food system too. Ultimately it is just about consuming an item to replenish your stamina, but there are a few wrinkles that make things more interesting. Low stamina affects your aim. Your stomach will start to grumble eventually, which can alert guards if you're close enough. Tranquilizing animals instead of killing them prevents them from spoiling. Also, uh, be careful what mushrooms you eat.

 

[meatbag]

I'm not usually into balancing tons of meters or crafting in games, but Pathologic 2 is my favorite game of all time and it has both.

I still need to play a Pathologic game. It sounds like a survival game in the truest sense and that speaks to me. I believe food supplies matter and the market prices can actually inflate as things go down the shitter? That's amazing. I just need to have some free time and a willingness to let a video game stress me out.

Where i don’t like hunger is if it’s just a decreasing bar that’s alleviated with an item- Shiren the wanderer does this, and it just makes it a bit pointless

Absolutely. I kinda alluded to it in my OP, but I definitely don't like hunger as just a bar to fill every few minutes with a couple button presses. That's not playing, that's busywork.

They should put Tokyo Jungle on something other than the PS3.

Nice shout out, and yes, it should escape the confines of the PS3!

They said it was Nuka Cola. We should not have believed them.

 

[rickyson33]

unless it's some sort of strategy resource management thing where literally the entire game is built around it I don't think hunger systems really add anything other than tediousness as a general rule

 

[big lantern ghost]

Ooh @Aurc's contribution made me think of the Stalker games! Like Fallout, you need to look out for compromised / irradiated food. You can stretch it fairly far, but not eating for a couple in-game days will start limiting your stamina quite a bit and dealing slight damage over time. The games are fairly tough overall and have several overlapping survival mechanics, so this is bad news.

 

[Vookatos]

Thinking about it now, and yeah, I believe for me food mechanic should be tied to the story for it to be enjoyable. After all, some of the best games I've played last year were Fear and Hunger titles. Granted, the second is more Fear than Hunger, and the mechanics for that stuff are fairly easy (what you can't say about other more obscure stuff from the games) but I get why it's there and am willing to engage unlike in Don't Starve Together which I've played with friends and loathed my time with it. I get why it's enjoyable for people, it's just not enjoyable for me.

I still need to play a Pathologic game. It sounds like a survival game in the truest sense and that speaks to me. I believe food supplies matter and the market prices can actually inflate as things go down the shitter? That's amazing. I just need to have some free time and a willingness to let a video game stress me out.

Yeah, the market is very unstable and you have better luck trading with town people and getting reputation up. I've played the game three times, been to the stores like 5 times across all playthrouhgs. It's not that stressful, I find, and there is a lot of comedy in being town's only normal doctor who's dying of 3 things at once trying to run through an infected district to talk to the guy about water supplies. Helps that the game IS very funny, even if a lot of the humor is quite dark and dry.

 

[PixelKnight]

Honestly Fallout’s radiation poisoning mechanics and effects (and that it’s entirely thematic for the game) are so much more interesting than the vast majority of hunger mechanics in games. Mostly as hunger always seems a bit odd to be treated as urgent in a game where combat or death is around every corner when it takes you weeks to die of hunger, but Fallout makes it more a matter of trust- it’s not a matter of whether you can find meat or packaged food, bottled drinks or water, it’s a matter of how contaminated they are. And removing rad poisoning through specific medicines that aren’t overly common is a lot harder than just eating the next edible thing you see.

Just writing this makes me wish we had Fallout 3/NV on Switch, I love those games.

 

[meatbag]

Metal Gear Solid 3 has a pretty robust food system too.

Confession time: I have also yet to play a Metal Gear! Is the Switch port of MGS3 good? It always looked interesting.

Yeah, the market is very unstable and you have better luck trading with town people and getting reputation up

Food being a significant resource is definitely one of the best ways to implement a hunger mechanic!

it’s not a matter of whether you can find meat or packaged food, bottled drinks or water, it’s a matter of how contaminated they are

Now that you say it like that, Fallout does do interesting things with food, and I hadn't been thinking about it when I made this thread!

 

[PixelKnight]

Confession time: I have also yet to play a Metal Gear! Is the Switch port of MGS3 good? It always looked interesting.


Food being a significant resource is definitely one of the best ways to implement a hunger mechanic!


Now that you say it like that, Fallout does do interesting things with food, and I hadn't been thinking about it when I made this thread!

I remember playing Fallout 3 and taking water from a toilet, praying it wasn’t irradiated. I thought ‘we are a far cry from super Mario’s regard for plumbing here’

 

[Plum]

Great thread!

I'm honestly surprised that so few (if any) survival horror games aim to implement hunger as a key mechanic. Whilst I like the genre, it does feel a bit stagnant when the only resource mechanics that ever seem to come up are 'bullets,' and 'health packs.' Binary systems that have exactly one cause and solution. You take damage, you use a health pack. You shoot a gun, you lose a bullet.

Hunger could theoretically be a way to further immerse the player in the game's horrific environments. A more 'realistic' way to discourage and punish certain mistakes and playstyles than, say, the insanity metre seen in Amnesia: The Dark Descent. Whilst it would gradually lower naturally, you could also have a hunger hit if you run too much, use melee weapons too liberally, or spend too much time around enemies. Careful navigation of the world and thrifty use of your limited energy would reward the player with an easier time when it really mattered, whilst the opposite could punish them with harder aim, stealth, and so on. Could even be the case that using health packs would sap hunger, discouraging players from simply spamming them whenever they're in a scrape. Maybe even do the same for hunger-restoring items, having the player be 'full' and - in turn - more lethargic if they eat too much at once.

I think this might also solve the issue other, bigger, games have with hunger, and that's the difficulty in balancing a constantly-decreasing statistic when the game you're interacting with is long and open. A traditional survival horror could use level design, or something like RE4's dynamic difficulty system, to carefully craft the player's experience with hunger. All to avoid cases where the player might not have enough, making the mechanic overly-punishing instead of an extra thing to consider during play.

Just throwing out ideas here, really, but I do think hunger could be a really interesting immersive mechanic if implemented in more genres than those focused purely on survival gameplay (like Don't Starve). Maybe I should do a Fallout 4 survival run or something one day.

 

[meatbag]

taking water from a toilet, praying it wasn’t irradiated

Definitely tough being stuck between dehydration and radiation poisoning

using health packs would sap hunger

That could be interesting... I'm imagining a biopunk setting where you can mend yourself by shooting yourself up with some organ-juice, but for the healing to work your body would need to have a stock of nutrients.

hunger could be a really interesting immersive mechanic if implemented in more genres than those focused purely on survival gameplay

I always had an idea for an action RPG about a gourmand managing a diner in a dungeon. He'd hunt monsters and gather ingredients, then cook meals, then you have to pick which meals to eat yourself for stat boosts and which ones you sell to your customers. Some meals will fill you up to 100% but give pitiful boosts, while some hard to cook dishes will have more exciting effects.

 

[Regulus Tera]

Personally I think MGS3 had the right idea. Hunger is separate from HP, but HP naturally heals as your Hunger meter depletes. So it’s not that the two are substitutes for each other, but that they complement.

 

[BassForever]

It's hard enough balancing my diet irl, I can't even imagine being able to find the right balance in a video game.

 

[BlackthornOrion]

One of the only games that comes to mind where a hunger meter is an interesting mechanical addition and not just one more nuisance of a stat to keep track of and manage is good ol' Minecraft

It depletes at different rates depending on what you're doing. If it gets too low, you can't regenerate health. If it gets even lower, you can't sprint. If it gets empty, you start taking damage

 

[meatbag]

Hunger is separate from HP, but HP naturally heals as your Hunger meter depletes.

Oh that's a good way to go about it.

It depletes at different rates depending on what you're doing. If it gets too low, you can't regenerate health. If it gets even lower, you can't sprint. If it gets empty, you start taking damage

Great example, and one of the methods I was thinking of for making hunger interesting. Instead of making it a binary "full = good, empty = bad", have different levels of hunger affect your character in different ways.

 

[BotenAnna]

I'm going to keep shilling Rain World at every chance I get. The hunger system is really simple, each cycle you just need to get enough food in you to hibernate, the only timer is the cycle timer. It doesn't deplete except between cycles, but it's still stressful as hell when you can't find any food and a cycle is about to end. That ends up creating a lot of cool moments, and you can learn your way around it by studying the map/ecology systems. The fact the different playable Slugcats can interact with food differently and create wildly different experiences as a result is pretty wild with how simple it all is. Good use of a hunger meter to help reinforce the better parts of your game without going crazy with it.

 

[SammyJ9]

Where i don’t like hunger is if it’s just a decreasing bar that’s alleviated with an item- Shiren the wanderer does this, and it just makes it a bit pointless. When the bar gets low, that takes ages, pop a food item. It’s the easiest condition to alleviate in a game packed with sub-systems and quirky item interactions, to the point where it’s hunger bar having the same priority as HP in the interface is a bit pointless and makes it seem more important than it is.

It feels like it’s there because the stamina mechanic a lot of other dungeon crawls use is magic- run out of it and you then can’t fight as hard or heal as easily, which then adds tension to each fight. Shiren doesn’t have that, but hunger doesn’t do this either. It’s just a mild annoyance, easily solved.

This reminds me of the mostly-pointless Thirst Meter in Dark Cloud 1 - you have a 'thirst' bar that slowly decreases over time that serves no function other than to make you drink water once in a while or you get a status effect. It's really just annoying since it makes you hold inventory slots for water and that's about it. They got rid of it in Dark Cloud 2 and it was not missed at all.

 

[ItWasMeantToBe19]

I've thought a ton about hunger meters, but I feel like you need a game in which most of the day is fast forwarded.

Any accelerated timeframe stuff (like 1 minute in real life is 10 minutes of game time) starts to feel annoying and unrealistic really fast.

 

[meatbag]

each cycle you just need to get enough food in you to hibernate, the only timer is the cycle timer

Question about that: if you only have like half the required food, is that a game over or do you still get to play, presumably just with some debuffs?

This also got me thinking about farming sims like Harvest Moon and Rune Factory. They don't have a hunger meter per se. Instead you have a stamina bar. The more stuff you do, the more your stamina you use up, and the best way to top up is with cooked meals. You also have to pick between selling those dishes vs keeping them for personal use.

 

[Prophet64]

It'd be more interesting to me if developers would integrate a mechanic that required your character to poop it all out just as much. Put that in Elder Scrolls VI please.

 

[BotenAnna]

Question about that: if you only have like half the required food, is that a game over or do you still get to play, presumably just with some debuffs?

The default slugcat can have a max of 7 food pips, and they require 4 food in order to sleep in a shelter. When you successfully do this, you consume 4 pips, save your game, and advance in a progression system. If you do not have at least 4 pips, you will go down to zero, not advance the progression system, and not save your game. You can play another cycle in this state (starved) with a significant debuff. In order to succeed in this cycle you will need to fill all 7 pips this time before finding a shelter room. You can't continue starving, you only get 1 shot, because attempting to starve 2 cycles in a row just kills you.

It's essentially a last ditch effort in case you made significant map progress without finding any food and you want to attempt to keep it. It's not that difficult managing 3-5 food a day while making progress, but a full 7 in some areas is really brutal. Starving almost always ends poorly, and it's very very unnecessary to complete the game. Best to avoid it, but as is most things in the game it's there to give you at least some small chance of turning around a bad situation if you wanna try.

 

[meatbag]

It'd be more interesting to me if developers would integrate a mechanic that required your character to poop it all out just as much. Put that in Elder Scrolls VI please.

That honestly sounds more like something Hideo Kojima would dabble in

The default slugcat can have a max of 7 food pips, and they require 4 food in order to sleep in a shelter. When you successfully do this, you consume 4 pips, save your game, and advance in a progression system. If you do not have at least 4 pips, you will go down to zero, not advance the progression system, and not save your game. You can play another cycle in this state (starved) with a significant debuff. In order to succeed in this cycle you will need to fill all 7 pips this time before finding a shelter room. You can't continue starving, you only get 1 shot, because attempting to starve 2 cycles in a row just kills you.

Makes sense! Simple but it adds a lot of weight to hunger as a stat.

 

[em]

Starvation is a viable (arguably the dominant) strategy in Stone Age. The score-related penalties are offset by the additional actions made available by having more workers/not hunting for food.

Later games with hunger/starvation/upkeep mechanics have largely gone to the other extreme, with exorbitant costs for failure to fully satisfy your people.