In this devlog post I will break down the hunger mechanic for FEED. I hope to provide insight into our decision-making process and how we turned a mechanic that encourages the player to engage with the level as little as possible into one that allows players to opt-in to a challenge if they want to.

The Mechanic

In FEED there are two ways to lose. The first is losing all of your HP while playing a level. The second happens between levels, if your babies' hunger bar depletes to 0. 

The hunger bar starts at 60 and depletes by 25 after every level. The villager with the lowest hunger value you can bring back is the "Harmless Villager" with a food value of 5. This means that if you brought back a harmless villager every level you would lose on level 3. The villager with the highest hunger value is the "Axeman" with a food value of 25.

There is also penalty timer that increases this hunger decrement value by 15 if you complete a level too slowly. The amount of time it takes for this penalty to kick in varies per level.

Development and Balancing The Mechanic

We wanted the game to have a feeling that it's a struggle to survive in this setting, with a "morally grey" element because you have to eat humans to survive. The theme of "a motherly creature taking care of her babies" was unashamedly inspired by one of my biggest inspirations Tri-achnid. We loved the idea of having to bring food back to your nest like a bird, but we struggled to balance the concept. The player isn't really incentivized to fight or explore anything and instead they should just pick off a stray villager and immediately bring them back to their cave to end the level. We considered having a food item like a loaf of bread in the village that you have to get to and bring back home instead of just bringing back any villager, but we really loved our gruesome setting and wanted to lean into it as much as possible.

Game difficulty is a very hard thing to get right. Many games throughout videogame history have solved this problem by having a difficulty select (Easy, Medium, Hard etc.) but these often result in flawed and unbalanced gaming experiences where some parts of the game are way too hard or way too easy depending on the difficulty. In my opinion a better solution is to have one really well balanced difficulty mode, let the player "opt-in" to challenging alternate goals. The "You Win" screen of the game should be pretty easy to get to, but if the player wants a challenge they can make it harder for themselves. A great modern example of this is basically any FromSoft game, where they always have one difficulty level, but the player can grind levels or just use easier strategies (summons, tank builds etc.) to just push through the game if they want to. 

To this end, we settled on two solutions for the hunger mechanic: 

1. Only a couple villager types can actually be used as food to make it to the end of the game, the rest provide so little food that it is not a sustainable way of progressing through the game. These villagers should be difficult to fight and/or difficult to get to and bring back to your home.
2. A single villager in each level will give an alternate score that serves as a "hard mode" for the game. (The Baron)

By having each villager worth a different amount of food, the choice of what to fill your one inventory slot with has a bigger impact on the gameplay. Also, the amount of food a villager gives you is directly related to the amount of health it gives you if you choose to consume it. This has a nice intuitive trade-off where the player sometimes finds themself in a situation where they have to eat a high-food villager for themselves because they're going to die, as opposed to bringing it back for their babies. Finally, you can only kill villagers if you can pick them up, but if you're carrying a high-value villager already you have to actually dodge and evade the other villagers on your way back.

We also added the penalty timer for an extra layer of excitement for the players who are trying to get as many Barons in a run as they can. If you're trying to end levels without any Barons, it's rare you'll be affected by the timer since you'll usually have plenty of food to spare. But, if you're trying to get all of the Barons the values are set so that you can't be penalized by the timer even once to get to the game. I determined the duration of the penalty timer by completing a level myself with the Baron, and then multiplying the time it took by 1.5. 

Conclusion

I'm very pleased with how the hunger mechanic turned out. We could have gone a more traditional route and just had a generic item at the end of the level that you have to reach/retrieve to progress, and in a sense that is what we have with the baron. But I also believe that we stuck to our original concept of feeding your babies' the local villager populace as best we could, while not compromising on entertainment. If the player just wants to see the end of the game they can use a mixture of Axeman (high food, harder to reach) on the easy levels and Archers (lower food, easier to reach) on the harder levels and get to the end pretty soon after getting a hang of the mechanics.