I like the time-pressure of having to be in the drillship or a shelter, and find that the timer and equal eruption times take away from this uncertainty since you can always plan your move.
I propose -first- that eruption times aren’t always the same, and differ one from another in length.
Second, removing the timer at the top of the screen and moving it into gameplay object.
I have few ideas about how to accomplish this, and they aren’t that good, but might be a good springboard.
Environment change:
- there should be sound cues and/or vulcano visual changes, as it gets closer and closer to eruption, for example - seismic activity, spewing ashes, etc… perhaps it would have few ‘stages’ it goes through, and each stage ends with some activity, for example:
stage 1 - between 3-5 minutes, ends with a gentle ‘rumble’
stage 2 - between 3-5 minutes, ends with spewing ashes and darkening the skies around volcano, ground slightly heats up
stage 3 - between 3-5 minutes, ends with an earthquake, ground moderately heats up
stage 4 - ground heats up a lot
stage 5 - between 3-5 minutes, eruption
Ideally, there’d be more stages and they’d have different ways to track them, so it wouldn’t all be sound dependent
Drillship changes:
- alarm that goes off at 1 minute countdown automatically, would be player controlled via lever
- there would be a device with a countdown, so players could program when the emergency alarm would sound
- there would be devices that can detect how close vulcano is to eruption, and this could be tied to an alarm
- player-usable thermometer which they can use to measure heat in the ground
- player-usable ‘air quality meter’, which they can use to measure amount of sulfur in the air