So remember that crazy metaroom idea I had? The one I don't have the skills to actually bring into existence? Well, apparently that didn't stop me from at least trying to sketch up a layout for it. And then that layout turned into adding a little color... and texture... and then... well.. yeah..
So the little upper-right "pit" I figure will be the grendel hatchery and the area above it the "battle zone" so to speak... the right cave entrance will have that funny little barrier I was talking about earlier, that will attempt to keep the women and children in the cave and the adult males out to fight. In the fall that barrier will switch off and instead all norns will be encouraged outside to the tree, where delicious fertility fruit will grow.
Pregnant norns and norns holding eggs will be encouraged to make their way to the tiny cave all the way to the left to lay/drop them. The cave and the tunnel below it will be barren for the most part-- so the babies have to undergo a sort of mini-IQ test before they can enter the normal population.
The bottom right tunnel will be a training, resource, and recovery area for male norns. Fake grendels to teach them to beat on and a variety of medicines to heal their injuries.
Which leave the two middle caves as general living areas for the population. I suppose there will be some sort of sea-critter for the pond and some other little edible plants and animals.
The room is no work of art... but it's suitable enough for my purposes. Buuut... again, I lack the CAOS skill to actually bring this to life. For the most part, this is still a dream. That's not going to stop me from continuing to develop it until I hit a wall of confusion though, so maybe twelve years and a ton of trial and error later, I'll actually finish it.
So I'm going to add onto my little daydream here. It would be interesting, just to sort of add to the "game" element this room is meant to create, to have a plant, or series of plants, that generally bear poor fruit with little nutrition. To get them to bear proper fruit, you have to get a norn to hit a certain critter (killing it) and place the critter's corpse near the plants to act as fertilizer. The plants will then bear proper fruit for a period of time.
As a secondary plant idea, somewhat inspired by Animal Crossing, perhaps a plant would only seed itself if close to another plant, and the offspring plant would have a chance of mutating into a different color.. and different colored plants would bear fruit with different properties. Would sort of give the hand something else to do other than tend to norns... trying to breed rare plants and the like. And just to add a level of difficulty to the whole thing, while the hand could uproot the plants to arrange them according to how they want them to breed, there would be a chance of the plants dying after transplanting.
...Or if I wanted to be really cruel, sometimes tiny weeds would sprout around the plants that would stop breeding as long as they were present. And one would have to be careful to pull the weeds without uprooting the plants.
Gah. Leave it to me to try to turn something like Creatures into a gardening sim, haha. I guess I am just always fascinated by the possibilites of CAOS and trying to think outside the box in that sense.
Now if only I was knowledgable enough to fulfill these ideas. I know enough about CAOS to know that these things are possible, and I could probably figure out how to excute them in a very basic sense, but I tend to just get stuck on all the little details. Scripting complex objects really is not for the faint of heart.
Anyway, back to the actual metaroom. I still want to tweak the background a little and add some details to make each of the caves room at least a little unique. Then the real fun starts.
http://i176.photobucket.com/albums/w184/Amaikokonut/creatures/I-guess-the-BG.jpg
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