Anyways, I've got a REALLY great idea, but it's probably a fair bit bigger and will take longer to implement than one might prefer. but when it is done, it will be worth it and it will be AWESOME.
Anyway, the core principle behind Cloudscream as far as I have understood it is procedural generation, so I say it should be caries to it's conclusion. What I'm suggesting is randomized species. rater than ha having different creatures hard coded, there should be a bunch of attributes that is randomly selected, and each plate could have it's own completely unique ecology. You might even have emergent plots from invasive species and so on! What more is, being sapient and civilized should be just one of these randomized attributes.
So, here are some examples of attributes each species might have and values of them:
* Intelligence:
- dumb; straight line path finding, unaware of things outside it's current line of sight, lacking all but the most fundamental AI.
- clever; a smart animal, can intelligently path find around obstacles, estimate threats and decide to flee or attack, hunt in packs, remember stuff, etc.
- sapient; Can talk, do politics, use objects, and in general are persons.
- civilized (rare); can manufacture items, dig or build buildings, and are hunted by the evil sky stuff.
* Diet:
- photosynthetic (rare); just needs to be in sunlight occasionally.
- grazing; removes grass from tiles for food
- herbivore; eats the green bits from trees and bushes.
- carnivore; hunts and kills animals
- omnivore; can eat like either a herbi- or carnivore
* locomotion:
- aquatic; can only swim
- land; walks on top of solid tiles
- acrobatic; can in addition to walking on top of solid tiles jump and climb with solid tiles just to one side. often found in treetops.
- flying; can fly in empty space or walk on solid tiles, has inertia in the air.
- digging; can dig rapidly through dirt (digging like Orange does with carrying material all the way out is something dependant only on intelligence)
* Sociability:
- berserk; will attack anything that moves, always, unless at specific times of the year if it's the same species and the opposite gender.
- solitary; usually lives alone, recently territorial.
- small groups; each animal belongs to a group, for each species randomly roll for min and max group size between 2 and 20, groups will try to keep inside the bounds by splitting and merging groups
- large groups; this kind of creature just tries to flock together in as large numbers as possible.
* Colour: random RGB for species, probably a few possible values for each species for variety, trying to keep those values appropriately similar. remember that most creatures will be naturally colored as camouflage, but some dangerous ones have bright colors.
* Body type: This one is large part of this suggestion, i have awesome ideas for multi-tile creatures!
- tiny; just a small dot, doesn't count as a tile, should probably have a simplified AI and can't interact with most things.
- small bipedal/quadruped: a single tile, the difference between the two is just cosmetic.
- largish: two tiles
- huge snake: a series of tiles that follow a head, musical game body type.
- long neck; two leg tiles, one forward and one back (each can be either quad or biped, giving the creature 4-8 legs), a neck tile can move to any space adjustant to the front tile, and a head tile that can move to any space adjustant to the neck tile.
- large; 2x2x2 block tiles
- colossal; 3x3x2, 4 tiles that act like legs, a neck and head tile like the long-neck type.
(I have a bunch of more stuff about the more technical side of these and how to actually program it, but you probably can figure that out yourself easily so i wont type it out)
Hmm, I had some more ideas related to this I think, but I have forgotten what those were, and I think they required more info on the technical aspects of Cloudscream anyways.
Oh, and remember, even if you don't implement all of this at once you should try to make your code modular enough to leave the option open.
Author
Topic: Cloud Scream > Development on Pause (Read 86902 times)