A clock that runs in game hours
In Desktop Folk, one game hour lasts 4 seconds at normal speed. A day is about a minute and a half, a season is 7 days and a year is 28 days, about 45 minutes. Speed goes up to 2x, 4x and 8x. Folk work from 7:00 to 19:00, and night runs from 21:00 to 6:00.
A new world starts with 6 folk between 14 and 30 days old, two couples and two singles, with a store, two homes, two fields, 70 food, 45 pixels and no bytes.
What a folk needs
Hunger rises by 3.6 points per game hour, 10 percent faster in winter and 20 percent slower for children. A folk walks to the store once hunger reaches 60. A meal takes up to 2 food, and each unit removes 28 points of hunger, which works out to about 3.1 food per folk per day. The winter warning uses that same figure. When the store is empty, folk look for berry bushes instead.
Mood comes from hunger, tiredness, loneliness, boredom and health, with a few heavier items: no home costs 12 points, sickness 15, and grief comes straight off, up to 80. The Harvest Festival adds 15 for its day.
Folk die in four ways. Hunger at its maximum drains health, sickness drains it more slowly, and a folk caught outside on a winter night loses health to the cold. Old age is the fourth: from day 70 of a folk's life, the daily chance starts at 3 percent and climbs to close to a third near day 100, and nobody lives past 100.
Four jobs
- Farmers sow a plot, wait for it to ripen and bring back 5 food, 6 if they went to school. A field is 9 plots.
- Gatherers cut pixels from groves, 5 per trip plus 1 for schooled folk. A grove tile holds 8 to 16 pixels, turns into a stump when empty and grows back in 3 to 6 days.
- Builders carry pixels to a site 10 at a time, then put the building up.
- Scholars study at a school and make 1.5 bytes per 2-hour session. ASCII Script raises that by half, schooling adds 20 percent, and elders get another 20 percent.
In automatic mode, the game puts about 30 percent of the village on farming, more when the stores hold less than 6 food per folk, and outside winter never more than one farmer for every 6 field plots. It adds 1.5 builders per open building site, up to 4, and scholars at about 15 percent of the population, up to 4 per school. Everyone else gathers. Elders, from day 60, only study or rest.
Each folk also has a work trait between 0.7 and 1.3 that scales every task. Children inherit their parents' average, give or take 0.15.
Seasons and crops
A sown plot ripens after 36 hours of growth. Spring grows crops at 1.2 times the normal rate, summer at 1, autumn at 0.75 and winter not at all, and nothing can be sown in winter. So the same plot takes 30 hours in spring, 36 in summer and 48 in autumn. Fill Patterns makes crops grow 35 percent faster. In winter, farmers fish from the shore instead, for 3 food a catch, or 4 when schooled.
From day 3, an event can happen each morning at 8:00, one at most per day. Bombs (5 percent) damage one home, school, arcade, clinic or shrine, which costs 10 pixels to repair. A virus (4 percent, 8 in winter) makes 1 or 2 adults sick. Pixel rain (3 percent, never in winter) grows up to 12 new groves. A disk error (about 3 percent) wipes a quarter of the stored food, unless you have Double Sided. Summer has a 5 percent chance of a 3-day drought that cuts crop growth to 0.4, and spring a 10 percent chance of a 3-day bumper season at 1.6.
On days 1 and 5 of autumn, the game compares your food with what winter needs, 3.1 meals per folk per day for 7 days, and warns you if you are short. Day 4 of autumn is the Harvest Festival, when the folk stop work to sing.
Buildings and research
Costs are in pixels: Home 20, Store 25, Field 5, School 40, Arcade 45, Clinic 40, ROM Shrine 50 and the MEGA Monument 300, which you can only build once. A home sleeps 4 folk, and a store holds 150 food and 150 pixels. Anything above the store limit is lost. Demolishing a finished building returns half its cost.
Research is paid in bytes, so a school comes first. The nine projects cost 545 bytes in all: Fill Patterns 15, Blitter Chip 30 (builders twice as fast), ASCII Script 30, MIDI Ports 45 (unlocks the Arcade), Debugger 45 (unlocks the Clinic), Double Sided 60 (stores hold twice as much), Mega RAM 80 (homes sleep 6, needs Double Sided), OS in ROM 90 (unlocks the shrine, needs ASCII Script) and Hard Disk 150 (unlocks the Monument, needs Mega RAM).
Couples, children and generations
After a chat, two single adults at least 14 days old can become partners if their relationship has reached 55 and they are not close family. Kind folk grow close faster, and two grumpy ones can drift apart.
A couple has a 30 percent chance each day of expecting a baby when the mother is between 14 and 56 days old, a bed is free, the stores hold at least 2 food per folk and the couple's average mood is 40 or more. The baby arrives 3 days later, one generation after its parents. Children grow up at day 10. From day 4 they can go to school between 8:00 and 15:00, and six lessons make them schooled for life, with the work bonuses listed above.
The village also changes from outside. When a bed is free and either the average mood is above 50 or fewer than 6 folk are left, a wanderer may walk in from the edge of the map. An adult with no partner whose mood stays below 20 for 3 days in a row walks away. Grief hits a partner hardest (45 points), then parents and children (30), then close friends (15). A prayer at the shrine takes 20 off.
A language made from the world's seed
Every world builds its own language when it is created. It picks 7 to 12 consonants, always including 3 of m, n, t, k, l and s, and a vowel set made of a plus 2 to 5 others. Syllables are a consonant and a vowel, sometimes with a closing consonant, sometimes a vowel alone.
The grammar is drawn too. Word order is subject, object, verb in about 40 percent of worlds and subject, verb, object in about 32 percent, and the rarer orders share the rest. Adjectives come after the noun a little more often than before it. The word for "not" goes before the verb, after it or at the end of the sentence, and half the languages use a word for "is" while the other half leave it out.
The dictionary starts with 90 basic concepts, from "I" and "food" to "Pointer" and "Machine". Common words get one or two syllables and rarer ones two or three, a pattern real languages share. New words are coined later by joining two old ones: school is word plus house, arcade is game plus house, clinic is sickness plus house, shrine is god plus house and the monument is big plus machine. Two research projects add words as well: music (song plus machine) with MIDI Ports and writing (word plus hand) with ASCII Script.
At the start of each new year, the language goes through a sound change. The game tries rules such as "p becomes f", "t between two vowels becomes s" or "final consonants fall away", and applies the first one that changes at least 2 words, to every word at once. The Lexicon window lists the last four changes. Words you know stay known, though they may sound different.
How you learn it
You learn by listening. Each time a folk says a word while it is on your screen, that word counts one hearing, or two if the speaker is the folk you have selected. Four hearings and the word is understood, two after ASCII Script. Folk inside buildings do not talk, and speech off screen does not count, so zooming far out teaches you little.
What folk say depends on how they feel and what they are doing. Hungry folk talk about food, tired ones about sleep, farmers about fields and seeds, and in winter everyone talks about snow and the cold. Move the mouse close to a folk and it may talk about the Pointer, which is you. Picking a folk up and dropping it elsewhere pleases the kind ones and annoys the others. Select a folk to see its last sentence with a translation underneath: words you know appear in English, the rest as question marks.
Each word understood adds 4 points to the score, next to 25 per folk at the village's largest size, 10 per folk alive, 3 per day, 40 per research, 60 per generation after the first and 50 per milestone. Two milestones are about the language: 10 words, and half of it understood. Each milestone pays 25 Freex Coins (no monetary value), and each new season 5. More slow games are in the simulation category.