Dev Log 3: Death and Breaking points
There are going to be two main ways to lose crew members. The first of which is good old fashioned death, which will occur if they go too long without food, become injured and go untreated, or get sick and don't rest to get better. The second way is a bit more interesting, as the situation gets worse and worse individuals will snap and refuse to cooperate with the rest of the crew and leave to try to make it on their own which will result in their demise. There are ways to prevent people from reaching this state usually through letting them take a day to rest from working, or making sure the heater is well maintained to keep the environment comfortable.
The features that I managed to implement recently were the deterioration of the survival area as well as death of crew members and the reduction of their mental state. If left alone the water filter, generator and heater will all begin to fail, bringing their own problems with them. As the water filter fails the quality of the drinkable water is lowered increasing the likelihood that someone will get sick. When the heater fails crewmembers will lose morale as the environment that they are in will become extremely cold. And finally when the generator fails it will create a power outage that combines the effects of the water filtration system and the heater.
When a crew member gets sick from the drinking tainted water they can continue to work but their health and morale will drain, the only way to remove the sickness status is to rest for day or two. However when injury occurs it is a much more serious situation, if the crew member goes untreated they will most certainly die within a few days. The only one who can remove the injury status is the doctor.
I have also implemented the distribution of rations to the crew, after the player is finished assigning jobs they can choose who will get to eat that day, if a crew member goes without food for too long or doesn't eat very often they can start to starve. If you let someone starve for 3 or 4 days they will perish and the crew will have to continue on without them.
I feel I have finally gotten the game in a position that I am comfortable with as most of the main features I wanted are implemented, so now I can start work on extras like random events, balance, audio, and fixing my spaghetti code.