Advent Calendar

[infectedmochi]

It’s Halloween! The experimental build has some sleek new professions and monsters, it’s awesome but all of this will be removed after Halloween is over. Theoretically if you want to keep it you can still backup the files somewhere, but here I will propose a hopefully better solution.

It’s would be nice if we can implement some kind of “advent calendar” in the game. Do not mind the name, this calendar isn’t restricted to Christmas only, more like it applies to all holidays in North America/New England (the context of the game).
So what does this so-called calendar do? Basically it keeps track of the time in game and when it’s a holiday, the game automatically changes some of the game contents to match that holiday’s theme (for example: ghosts, werewolves for Halloween or zombie cupids for Valentine). This change will be reverted back as soon as the holiday is over.
A problem right now is the game doesn’t really specific an exact day when the character was spawned in the game world, we can circumvent this by just assign a random day (hidden from player) and let’s the game count the time passed from that day until it reaches a holiday. Though, there should be an option to disable this calendar (disable on default?) if the player don’t want a sudden break from the game’s atmosphere.

What do you think?

[kevin.granade]

Good thinking, I was thinking about making some of the holiday-themed monsters spawn on holidays automatically as easter eggs, but we’re likely going to accumulate a good number of them, so we need to manage it somehow.

Also a good candidate for inclusion via a “Crazy Cataclysm” option.

[Rivet]

A lot of video games do stuff like this.

I remember the original Rise of the Triad playing appropriate holiday music at different times of year, and as I recall the Dungeon Keeper games did neat stuff on holidays, particularly Halloween.

[vultures]

Jazz Jackrabbit franchise had a.m.a.z.i.n.g downloadables for all the above holidays. The really great thing was - if you downloaded one, you just couldn’t stop yourself unless you had ‘em all; like freakin’ cupcakes.
Still looking for a Cataclysm where everything’s made of candy!

[KA101]

[quote=“Rivet, post:3, topic:3741”]A lot of video games do stuff like this.

I remember the original Rise of the Triad playing appropriate holiday music at different times of year, and as I recall the Dungeon Keeper games did neat stuff on holidays, particularly Halloween.[/quote]

DK franchise checking your system clock? Try every full moon, FFS. Dev birthdays too.

As for the OP’s idea, it’s interesting but the Mod Manager seems a better solution.

[Hyena_Grin]

If you just use the mod manager then it’s not really… special. It’s just a holiday themed mod pack.

I think it’s a cute idea. Just make sure there’s an option to turn ‘holiday surprises’ off in the menu. Today I downloaded the Halloween experimental and ran into a werewolf that slaughtered me before the day was out. Given it’s a roguelike, some people may not appreciate surprises in a long-running game.