The ADD Developer

Initially, I just wanted to create a interesting scenario in a world in which the male norns were trained from birth to be grendel-killers, and stationed next to the grendel egg layer to protect the women and children from incoming dangers.

But the grendels really weren't enough of a threat to keep it interesting, so I went about creating a genetic breed of carnivorous grendels that gained protein and starch from hitting other creatures, and fat from getting creature eggs. I also made their anger and boredom decrease from watching creatures retreat from them and a few other tweaks here and there to keep their drives in check.

But in the process of development I got tired of hatching "feeder" norns to test the breed with, so I stopped to write a quick agent that would automatically lay a norn egg of a random genome every few minutes. Then I accidentally left the world alone for a while and apparently the norns had managed to beat the grendels to death and were taking over the meso.

So it hit me; maybe to make this scenario I'm developing a bit more interesting, I could create an agent that would lay these carnivorous grendel eggs periodically, regardless of the current grendel population. It would be like a sort of survival game... keep the grendel population down or it'll eventually overrun everything.

Of course, then my mind ran wild. Why not just create an new metaroom for this scenario instead of trying to make pre-existing rooms meet my needs? I could create quite distinct "grendel territory" for the grendel eggs to hatch from, and a den that all norn eggs are teleported to where they have to pass a mini-version of the IQ test to get to food. Maybe even add in a training area with tools to teach the young to fight grendels.

Part of the scenario is to keep the males and females separate most of the time... with the males at the front lines doing the fighting and the females staying safe. Instead of using forcefields to keep this restriction I could put some of the knowledge of mind control I mentioned in my past posts to create an invisible agent at the boundries of grendel territory that encouages males to stay and fight but instills females with great fear and encourages them to stay away.

But another part of the scenario is that during the autumn season, the creatures are allowed to mix and mate to ensure the survival of the species. So perhaps when autumn rolls around, the grendel egg layer will temporarily deactivate-- as will the invisible "barrier" so the creatures can relax and return home to their loved ones for a while.

But the fantasy breaks down about here, because I am reminded that my skills are not up to par for any of that. While I might be able to write a few simple scripts, coding complex agents is beyond me and designing metarooms and sprites for agents is even further. Le sigh.

I'm always having these ideas for "scenario" metarooms though... metarooms that are far from just new scenery to raise your norns in... metarooms that are essentially their own minigame within Creatures. At least I can blog about them. Maybe someday I'll inspire someone more capable than I.