Design Philosophy
From ccdevnet
Contents |
Player Freedom
All other points essentially boil down to this one. All the problems with the game, etc, in my opinion were due to the player being tied down by parts of the gameworld or flaws in the design. The power-up/"story" system implemented in the second two creatures games crippled the interface you expected to have from the previous two games. This killed the initial experience as a user, and turned many users off. Instead, a story mode should grant rewards that serve as new and entirely unexpected additions to your previous range of abilities, instead of taking a crippled version of the interface you loved from older games and restoring it. The world tied you down too. Instead of actually fulfilling its role as a background support system for creatures, or even a threat to them, the ecology alternated between being an insignificant, distracting gimmick that detracted from the focus of the game by breaking theme with the rest of the game, a broken collection of agents that did not interact in any meaningful way, and an outright hinderance to creature intelligence. Creatures' ability to learn is very limited in the previous games by the forgiving nature of the world. Aside from a few environmental hazards such as a radioactive volcano, an ocean that can be drowned in, and an occasional grendel, there is really nothing a norn can't do aside from eating something that smells good.
Better World Design
Although the ecology of the games and their neurology, biochemistry, and cellular automata were revolutionary, their world is still lackluster. It is entirely static, and therefore creatures easily reach a point of evolutionary perfection. This must be remedied not only by making better creatures immune to fast-ager and fast-breeder traits, but also through a world that is balanced and dynamic in terms of its ecology, meteorology, and available resources.
Ecological Design
Ecology is essential to supporting the creatures. It has unfortunately taken a back-seat in previous games to actual game play as a pretty add-on to the world. Ecology should be a global-scale affair for the most part, or at the very least a series of environments linked together through weather.
Resource Management
The world should have a limited set of resources that can be allocated between different species. These can be allocated in whatever amount is necessary, but ultimately resources must sum to the initial amount that existed to begin with in the world.
Each agent that is a member of an ecosystem (creatures included) needs to have certain costs in resources to be born, to live, and to grow. The ability to give up waste while living, and the resources within its body through decomposition are essential to the game.
Balance
Balancing the world is essential. Creatures 3 did not have a balanced or well tested ecosystem in many of its terrariums, and did not any way manage resources. As a result, there were a flood of grazers unmanaged by the solitary goshawk, Trout that went extinct due to a lack of food and overpredation by the kingfisher, and constantly dying critters that constantly died within the world and needed replacing through Deus Ex Machina vendors in the jungle, and generally broken ecology everywhere except in the ocean terrariums. Ecology must be balanced so the player doesn't have to balance it themselves, but can mess with it.
Siphoning points
These need to be implemented to add/remove resources from the world to balance it. A resource/resources are removed at one point in the world, the siphon point, and added back into the world at another point. For example, water should precipitate onto the ground, and percolate downward through the earth, after which it is added to the ocean again in a simplified model of a hydrological cycle. Total water, air, and other resource "amounts" should be checked in the world periodically, balancing them to equilibrium values to correct any agents that violate conservation of matter laws and thereby unbalance the global ecosystem.
To increase user freedom, the resource equilibrium values should be mutable by some means in-game. A user could push their world towards being wetter or dryer, higher or lower pressure, and hotter or colder. By means of an automated resource management system, the world will work more smoothly and avoid the issues of Creatures 3, such as grazers overrunning the norn terrarium.
Note: Modifying resource equilibrium values is a potential power-up
Acceptable, but let's have it *not* be a "twirling power-up-come-and-poke-me-instant-ability" type. How about you have to actually *DO* something to gain this function? (and potentially others we come up with.) First of all, this lets the player have direct control over the "powerup". A lot of the frustration comes out of the fact that your creature won't cooperate with activating the power ups in C3. Secondly it allows the opportunity to make the activation more complex and interesting. Maybe the broken machinery requires parts (finding them in the world) or repair (with certain tools or actions), and a power source before it will function. Embri 16:21, 7 November 2008 (UTC)
Fluctuation
No matter what scale it is on, the world cannot be static. Whether the world only goes as far as having simple as a day and night cycle, full seasons, or even a multi-year cycle (an extreme version of axial wobble, for example) established to affect weather and climate, it must exist. Firstly, this will aid in preventing there being an absolute point of evolutionary perfection for creatures to reach, and secondly it will be useful in removing a static state for the ecosystem in which resources are always being used. A damaged state for an ecosystem creates an opportunity renewal, and lying slightly fallow for a while in a winter or colder spell will allow resources to redistribute.
Note: Players should be able to turn the fluctuation on and off if they want to, just because.
Overall Stylistic Design
Agents should overall tie together in their appearance with the world. Although this is minor, it does detract from the game experience if an unimportant part of the world purposely draws attention to itself by not matching the overall feel of everything else.
An agent should convey information about its purpose, present state, and possible actions through every element of its being.
Visual Design
Anything can be implemented as long as it does not break the overall idea of the design philosophy, and the code behind it is entirely sound and consistent ecologically.
Lifandi should remain slightly whimsical and fun visually, but while reflecting a tad more of the processes of the real world in it.
However, each agent's appearance should reflect its purpose in the world. What does it do? Is it dangerous? Does it want/need to stay hidden?
Agents shouldn't move frequently unless they need to. If an agent needs to alert the user to its presence, it should move and make a sound. Follow common sense in a similar manner, and everything should be fine. However, if in doubt, get the opinions of other devs.
Sound Design
Don't annoy people with unnecessary sounds. If it gets annoying after 5 plays, then it probably doesn't work. If it wouldn't be needed to inform you that the agent has been activated, don't include it.
[21:38] kaelis|atwork: Albian Carrot Beetles are also awesome [21:39] Vamp: they look a bit freaky though :p [21:39] kaelis|atwork: >.> [21:39] Vamp: (and I mean the DS ones, the c2 ones look awesome) [21:40] scorp: god I hated the noise those things made
A sound has a purpose, and is meant to convey something. A vendor has been pushed/activated, food has been eaten, a Norn has been hit, etc. What did the Albian carrot beetle's sound accomplish? It conveyed that it was threatened somehow. However, this can be done in a better way then repeating the same sound over and over. Different alarm sounds, and varied responses would be a start.
Code
Conservation of Matter
If it's a critter or ecological element, it should at least attempt to meet the ideal of conservation of matter outlined in the ecology section.
If it isn't a critter, and is a machine such as a dispenser, then serious thought should be put into the food it creates. As general guidelines, if the food has low nutritional value, it should decay quickly and have a small effect on global resources. If it has a higher nutritional value and therefore higher resource value, it should decay more slowly by default. However, these are only guidelines, and thought should be put into each agent to make it behave in a sensible way as much as possible.
Note: Room should also be left in each agent for environmental factors to affect decay.
Leave No Stimulus Unaccounted For
The world needs to be harder on creatures. Appropriate stimuli need to be applied by an object back on a creature in response to a creature acting upon that object.
In short, everything needs an eat script. If a creature performs an action that is silly, such as attempting to eat a metal toy or gadget, that agents eat script should make it hurt when they try to bite the agent! If they attempt to bite a critter, it should react to them, and get injured. This should not be limited to just eating, however. Hitting, grabbing, and other actions should all have associated agent scripts that somehow give sensory feedback to the creature.
Although it would be an immensely painful task to implement by hand in every single agent, an inheritance mechanism could be implemented to fill in default scripts for agents that do not provide their own script for such events. This would save large amounts of time for simple agents that need to simply be in place in the world as fast as possible (such as simple toys).
Note: Please, do not make lemons give pain stimulus, as that's just stupid. Biting a lemon is sour, not painful.
Generalization
If at all possible, leave critters able to generalize to attack and eat critters other that the ones they were designed to eat. This allows ecology to develop with different creatures meeting each other as opposed to break.
Expandability
The world needs to be built from the beginning to expect the addition of new metarooms and therefore leave a framework for how to integrate them into the overall world ecology, hydrological cycle, and other generalized.
Ecological Integration
Essentially, metarooms need to be able to have their own internal resources contributable to those of the world at large. A possible guideline to use for metarooms would be "what comes in must come out" in one way or another, meaning that if matter enters it, equivalent matter must somehow exit it.
Questions are still unresolved as to what occurs when a user wishes to remove a meta room integrated in this way, but potentially this could be done through destroying all agents within it, adding the destroyed agent's resource totals to the room totals, removing those totals from the world, and then remove more resources from around the world as equally as possible to reach the pre-metaroom levels of resources.
Predesignated expansion slots
Areas where metarooms are open for addition should be provided to avoid silly and tiny doors such as the Terra Pluvialis "teleporter". Places left in the world ready for expansion to occur, along with good documentation allow the easier user
Also, reconfigurable slots for metarooms would be interesting to allow users more choice in where to plug their caves into.
Better Creatures
Creatures Are Niether Inherently Good Nor Evil
Although Grendels succeed at being very strong and a threat to norns, what are their motivations? Why are they violent? Why do they come into conflict with everything else-are violent, cheesy, badly thought out movie-villains. Red eyes, big jaw, deep voice, scripted only to hit. There is no more depth after that, and there is no user choice in how to deal with them. The Grendels are always a threat as they are always replaced unless somehow removed from the world by the user. In effect, they were accessories to the game world with no depth aside from fulfilling the need of a threat. There were no motivations for grendels to kill norns aside from hindering the user from raising norns, and none for Ettins to steal gadgets except to serve as a hindrance to the user's attempts to fight grendels.
Creatures should be more than just game accessories. They are major players in the world's balance and ecology. All creature races should be viable choices as a player's "favorite". They must all have sensible behavior patterns, sustainable reproduction (both genders present), and modifiable, reasonable (for their species) behavior. Creatures should come into conflict over territory and resources, not due to the fact the game engine is forcing them down one specific behavior path.
Creatures Should not Break the Laws of Nature
Genomes must be modified in such a way as to make it impossible for Immortal, Essex, and Fast Ager mutations to occur naturally. In order to emulate life, creatures must have the ability to die. Super breeders (Essex mutation) also defy reality by producing far more offspring than their energy intake should allow. No natural creature can go from infancy to full adulthood in an instant, especially without consuming any nutrition. Energy can be converted into mass, mass into energy, but neither should be allowed to be fabricated from nothing.
The reverse is also true; creatures should not be able to eat several times their own body weight in mere seconds. Gestation of eggs requires a reasonable amount of time, and places high demands on the parent creature for additional nutrition to sustain the new embryo.
Creatures Should Make Sense
Lifandi creatures need to escape this element of sudden genesis from nothing, and instead need to actually live and reproduce in the world. Creatures should fill their "accessory" roles (presently candidates include Fents and Hellswamp Creatures) by means other than Deus Ex Machina egg layers. Instead of simply popping into being to come threaten the player's goals, they must have their own ways of living. These ways of living should be balanced for moderate success, allowing the creatures survive hardship and threats without the care of the user. These creatures should also be unique both physically and behaviorally to bring them into conflict with other species in the world, creating logical points of conflict. Behavioral patterns that follow common sense allow users to develop their own strategies for solving their game's problems, instead of locking them into a conflict with a very limited scope of solutions.
Players can attempt to destroy a species, or they can choose to attempt to make peace with it. If players attempt to make peace, all creatures can suffer from each other's negative traits, but also reap the benefits of each other's companionship. If a player guides their creatures to destroy a species, then they will eliminate all conflict with the exterminated species, but will face the consequences from a potentially unbalanced ecosystem. The original "kill the Grendel while feeding the norns" game play that quickly became stale needs to be replaced. Player choices driving game play and world development forward are that replacement.
Creatures Aren't Scripts
Instincts and scripts are handy, but programming creatures with scripts and instincts exclusively to fill single accessory roles removes a large degree of player freedom. It leaves players unable to train creatures out of their vices. Grendels are essentially immutable mobile hit-scripts in previous games. Although they did present the player with a clear enemy and challenge to fight against, there are no solutions aside from removing Grendels from the world, or removing their violent tendencies, you are left with a very simple game to play.
Scripts and overly strong instincts need to be kept to a minimum level of complexity to allow a creature to learn as much as possible from its environment. Otherwise creatures have no real use for a brain and could navigate without one entirely.
Creatures Should be More Than Just Eating Machines
All creature types in Lifandi should be more than just resource consumers. With simulated digestive systems, they may be capable of distributing seeds (like many real world primates), serving to perpetuate the plants they subsist on. They should also be prevented from consuming more food than should be physically possible. While C3/DS creatures have hunger drives, there is nothing stopping them from eating constantly except for a limit of available food. Creatures are not black holes, all that mass must go somewhere and that takes time. This should also help mitigate the current tendency of creatures to decimate their food supplies to such an extent that deus ex machina vendors are required. The natural end result of digestion should also contribute to greater plant health and productivity. In essence, higher order creatures should work with the ecosystem instead of against it.
More powerful interface and better game play
Starting Abilities
Instead of having the hand limited to dragging norns around at first, it should have all the abilities it had in the previous games. These abilities are taken for granted in current games.
The splicer and other features left unrestricted in the first two games of the series should be left unrestricted for the same reasons. If a story mode requires power-ups to gain access to these devices, it should not be in a vastly incremental way. Instead, the power-ups should be a one-time affair of activating a certain aspect of the world. Additionally, they should be located somewhere near the aspect to be activated.
Power-ups
The basic hand functionality should be expanded upon by these, instead of simply filled out to match what was taken for granted in the previous games.
After a user grabs power-ups, the hand should be a more powerful force in the world than in the world after the game "story" mode is finished. The hand could be given new powers such as manipulating the weather, grabbing and holding limited quantities of air and water, and grabbing multiple objects. These would extend previous game play and allow for increased freedom of the user to pursue their own style of game play.
No timer-based challenges
Long term challenges that use a time component to mark the end are fine so long as they are not short in duration. What should be avoided are the "gimmicky minigame" type timer challenges, for example, "Get your creature to the waterfall in two minutes without picking it up/holding hands." This very poorly thought out "challenge" is more random luck than anything else, and likely to lead to frustration. It also accomplishes/teaches nothing.
A good challenge example would be "Breed at least four second generation creatures in one (game) year." This has a much more reasonable timeframe, the goal relates to the game, and it should be (reasonably) easy to attain. There are also several potential ways of improving the chances of success, through good husbandry.
