This is fun.
I managed to trap mom in a dishes loop and tried to trap dad in the bathroom: but didn't have enough time. It would have worked until the next cookie jar item came up. :P
I wanted some kind of timer or thought bubble over the parent's heads so I could make more informed decisions about routes and how much time I had to do things.
Good entry: lots of good stuff here.
I had wondered whether folks would make an effort to build a parent trap… ;)
Intention signaling is one of those things that I had to think seriously about.
On the one hand, the game is playable without it, and you can learn through observation and repetition what the routines are and approximately how long they last (at least with enough certainty for the fraction of a second you need to escape). It's a little disappointing when someone spontaneously turns around and spots you, in the Nethack "rocks fall and you're not wearing a helmet" kind of run-ending way, but when you've just managed to duck around a corner, or weave in and out of rooms just avoiding detection, that same risk drives excitement.
Signaling intention just in time (i.e. as it changes) doesn't actually help avoid any of the "spontaneous detection" scenarios, and at best gives you visibility into where the NPC is pathfinding to. How useful that is may be a reasonable subject for debate, since it's a reasonable blind spot for me.
On the other hand, if NPC intentions were signaled in advance, it's a lot easier to know whether you're going to be safe before you even move. It's not an inherently bad thing, but it does replace hard-earned knowledge with free information, and reduces the challenge of the game substantially closer to "can I move around well?". Given that the game is only just compelling with its current balance of movement and discovery, I fear that adding signaling would lead to higher scores and broader appeal but lower satisfaction overall.
Always happy to entertain the discussion, though! :D
It occurred to me this morning that I had made one concession here, which I had intended to take further: making the NPCs carry things.
As it is, there are a small handful of outward signals:
I had plans to incorporate a variety of other accouterments into their workflows, less as a signal of intention but as another layer of realism that brought life to the "house". The pieces that did get added feel really successful; I just ran out of time to add more.
(I also had plans to allow NPCs to pick up and move the stools so they wouldn't get trapped, and more generally allowing tasks to be interrupted-and-resumed later (e.g. if the stove became blocked in the middle of soup making), but that would also necessitate putting back whatever they were currently carrying, and better pathfinding logic in general. Ultimately I had to draw a line between what I could get implemented well for the deadline and what I wanted to get done… As another example, it was originally planned that you would have to jump up onto a stool to reach the upper cupboard, fridge, and cookie jar — but doing so would leave stools in positions that blocked NPC jobs, and while it was cute, it made the already difficult gameplay more challenging, so it got cut … except for the jumping on stools code.)
