Minigames (Play Card Games, Instruments) Thread - S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Last Day mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat

Hey, this is something that isn't directly tied to the main gameplay, but I think it would smooth a few issues, and improve immersion. It's also more of an addon request than a suggestion for the main game.

As it is, if you're just grinding up some money or goodwill by doing local tasks in an area, often you'll run out of tasks and other things to do, and are sick of exploring the area, or maybe there's only a few in-game hours till nightfall and there's not much point in heading out of base. Or it's storming and you don't want to fuck around when it's hard to see. Especially for the risk averse amongs us playing Ironman, using hardcore save/life rules, or roleplaying. So you either have to just wait around killing time, or sleep for like 15 or 27 hours until it's the next morning, wasting time and burning satiety.

It would be good if there was something to fill those stretches of no real gameplay, and something (relatively) simple might be some small minigames.

The most obvious one is to be able to use those packs of cards that do nothing in game currently, as far as I can tell. It would cool to play a game of poker or blackjack with and npc here or there. Even solitare would be something.

Maybe you can play with any npc, or maybe any npc who you have a good enough reputation/goodwill with, or maybe you give it to one of the dedicated npcs at bases that do nothin but hang around all day. If you have a deck of cards, maybe for these npcs you can include a line of dialogue

I have no idea how the Stalker Engine works, aside from playing around with some lua, so maybe it's really hard to implement, but there's lots of "simple" "make your own poker game" code around the net/google. If that can be adapated for the engine and a UI put together for it, it could really liven up the game. Something to do around the campfire with companions.

An obvious immersive side-addon to this would be gambling, aside from the already-present arena. I'm sure stalkers would be gambling constantly for rubles, ammo, alcahol, probably even artefacts and weapons if there's a few high stake games going around. Adds a little extra excitement to the card game, and make a little extra money on the side. Probably overly complex for what it might add though.

There's also the guitar and harmonicas your find lying around. I was thinking some sort of quicktime events, matching keyboard keys to strings, and hitting them in time with the song, but that's probably way too complex.

I might try messing around with the poker game idea myself, but I'm not a very good coder and I'm also very lazy, so don't hold your breath. Anyone's free to beat me to it.

Just some thoughts.