Hi Igor, thank you for your suggestions. (I'll also take a look at the game you recommended, without plagiarizing it, of course.)
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Using objects: I'll make sure that really every object is going to be usable in DARGHUL, and that there'll be lots of things you can produce (including basic weapons). (You can already brew magic potions, weave cloth, fish, repair weapons, and so on, for example.) (By the way, I'd already added some of this to Teudogar, too; e.g., since version 1.01, you can use looms to weave cloth, or the tools in a smithy to repair your weapons. You may still be playing version 1.00; there's an update patch available at
http://www.teudogar.com/downl.htm.)
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Survival: In many games (and in Edgar Rice Burroughs novels), people die when they've been without food for three days. But in reality, actually even 40 days of complete starvation are unlikely to kill you. You can do without any food intake at all for quite a while; your body will live off its reserves up to the point where you've lost about 50% of your body weight. However, such a lifestyle would of course have consequences; it'd take a long time for you to regain your former weight and strength - and that's something I'll implement: If you go without food for too long, your strength attribute will afterwards remain impaired for a long period of time.
While few people die of starvation in the real world, you can't be without water for more than three days, depending on temperature. I might implement something like a water bag (rations for x days) that you'd need to fill and carry with you; however, in a more or less northern, rainy climate like the one in Teudogar (and in Darghul too), with rivers and brooks everywhere, that might be a bit pointless; besides, it could get cumbersome. I'll experiment a bit with this, though.
I've also yet to define distances and traveling times: The Darghul game world is about 4080x4080 fields/steps (that's 255 linked locations, each of which has 255x255 fields. (In comparison, Teudogar's two dozen locations (villages etc, the range you see in the Automap scren) were only 150x150 fields each.) So the Darghul game world is quite large (larger than Ultima's, I think), and definitely takes a while to explore (and a long while to create).
But even if I assume 255 fields to be 10 km, the entire 'continent' would still measure only 160 km - and that's a distance a hero (or even a software developer like myself) could conveniently cross on foot within less than a week, i.e., it'd be a bit hard to starve in such a world. (I may define the distances a bit more generously (say 25 km per 255 fields); but there's a limit to that; it'd look odd if it'd take you an entire day to walk from one end of a village to the other; and even then, overall distances would still be too short for real starving.)
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Wounds, differentiating between cuts/stabs/bruises/broken bones: That's a nice idea; I'll implement that (hits are already differentiated between cuts/stabs anyway; the hit you take then depends on the level of protection your particular kind of armor offers against that kind of attack; but the result is, up to now, just a general, unspecific loss of vitality).
Bleeding to death: You already do that in Teudogar if you've received several severe wounds. In real life, bleeding even from heavy wounds often seems to stop by itself once you've lost a certain amount of blood (due to falling blood pressure?) - so depending on how much you've lost, it may or may not be lethal. (Of course with some forms of internal bleeding, you may actually drown in your own blood.)
Healing: Since there's magic in Darghul, there'll be healing spells, perhaps even instant-healing. I'll have to decide that during gametesting (depending on how difficult it turns out to be to cope with all the monsters and other enemies you encounter). There'll be more you can do to heal yourself than in Teudogar, magically or otherwise.
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Thank you! Anyone else any suggestions / thoughts?
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