Creating a daily schedule

#todo

In many storys your character (or a NPC you command) has a daily routine.
F.e. wakeup & breakfast in the morning, then go to work. In the afternoon use free time to follow their interests. Some reasons to do so:

• it makes the game consistent: you have to work regulary to make a living; you have to go to school not only once a week
• it forces the player into activities he wouldnt have picked an opens up possibilities to introduce new events
• it slows down the game-progress (in a manner that is not annoying but exciting)

Some reasons not to do so:

• it might conflict if your game also expects that the player explores; he might be annoyed because he has to spent a lot of time on repeating things instead of exploration
• at some point there is no new content and the player gets tired to click through repeating passages. While keeping the schedule (work until afternoon) reduce the detail of description. At the beginning you might have several passages describing each workday. But those things that are repeated each day are later only summarized "Finally your uneventful workshift ends and you take your leave."
• there are multiple schedules that would conflict, f.e. the player gets the opportunity to start studying but cannot do so because he is working fulltime. Give him the possibility to change to parttime-working or temporary stop working at all but with possibility to return

What we need:

• a time-system that tells us which day of week we are in and the actual hour or day-phase (morning/noon/afternoon..)
• be careful when designing time requirements of the jobs; some of them might never get approached if they dont fit in to badly (overlap with other more important jobs, timeslot to narrow and easy to miss)
• add a notification which job(s) has to be done next

We could implement those jobs as reoccuring 'missions' with milestones coupled to time-slot-requirements "kill the goblin in the forest cave | report back to the mayor" "work in the toys-factory at Mo. 8-16oclock | Tu. 8-16oclock | ..." If the milestone fails, punish the player in a non-lethal way:

• reduce his salary
• degrade his study progress
• lock out a connected activitiy
• degrade his relationship to his collegues up to a limit
• have him repeat the job multiple times until (skill)progress is picked up again
  Give the player the opportunity to set the mission on hold to avoid punishment. Otherwise he would feel stuck on those missions.