Return to Nurturing. Sort of.

I was on a coding roll this week. This kind of stuff tends to happen after I get a new order of tea.



Okay, and I wanted an excuse to post this extremely pointless video. Anyway.

So I was coding along when out of the blue I get this weird urge to like...um... actually play the game I'm coding for. What a weird idea.

I'm pretty sure I haven't run a serious nurturing world since Mixed Nuts back in September '09, and lately I'm wondering if I need to rediscover the experiences that made me fall in love with this game so long ago.

With this idea in mind, I promptly went back to coding. How effective.

No, really, my ambitions had a purpose-- I wanted to start a nurturing world with instinctless creatures, and in order to do that, I had to make some lifts that didn't require call buttons, since without instincts, creatures don't have the call button/lift system programmed into their brains. So grabbing some random sprites from the hoverdoc, I hastily and sloppily coded these goofy little lift rings.

They're not much to look at and don't really make much sense in design, but they're practical and easy to work with. Shift-clicking one makes another ring appear with the same ID as the original, ctrl-clicking creates a ring with a new ID, shift-ctrl-clicking deletes the ring.

When a creature pushes/pulls the rings, which are classified as elevators, the rings look for the next highest/lowest ring with the same ID and teleport the creature there. It stims the creature in the same way lifts do, so for all intents and purposes, the rings are identical to lifts, just without all the call button complications.

At least, so I hope. Hopefully this nurturing world I'm planning will give them a thorough testing.

I set up the world (which I named Mixed Berries) for my instinctless creatures first by killing all the lifts and replacing them with the rings. I then killed all the vendors, since those too rely on the half-strength instinct trick, and replaced them with various plants instead.

Then I created my starter creatures. In the spirit of my old Mixed Nuts world, I decided to start with two norns, two ettins, and two grendels.

I opened the CFE breedfile for each species, disabled all instincts, and then chose the sprites for the creatures. It's important to mention the sprites do not reflect on the creatures' genome in this case-- all I did was change the appearance genes in the CFE genome to the sprite slots I wanted; they are more a skin than anything. Thus aquatic breeds are not actually aquatic, and so on.

So, meet the creatures of Mixed Berries:

I will try to document the time I spend with them in some attempt to learn more about instinctless creatures, and maybe just for a while set aside the logic and rationality required for coding and suspend my disbelief long enough to get in touch with my nurturing side.

That, or I'll get bored and forget the whole thing, as I am so prone to do. We'll see how it goes.