Saturday, December 10, 2016

Development Wishlist

While I don't have much enthusiasm for Creatures anymore, as people have probably guessed from my last post, there are still some things I'd like to do for this game. Sadly, they're all hindered by either my aforementioned lack of enthusiasm, the fact that I can't do them at all due to lack of skills/still active and willing people able to provide said skills, or both. But I figured I might as well make a list of them. Maybe it'll inspire me to actually do them, learn how to get the skills I need to do them, or get someone who'd be willing to help me do them.


  • Artemia Sea Update: This room's gotten a bunch of updates already, yet I'm still not entirely happy with it. I guess as the product I've been most pleased with I'd like to make it the best it can be.
    • Mapping update: Some of the upper crags have narrows that are too tight for creatures. And that tunnel separating the left and middle areas of the room is a pain to navigate for both creatures and critters. Sadly, this requires editing graphics, which I can't do.
    • Doors: I've been playing around with the Past Seas doors in Artemia Sea, and I've found that doors are great for getting creatures to spend some time in the upper areas of the room rather than sitting near the bottoms. So I figure it'd be nice to have the room have some doors of its own. Alas, I can't make sprites, and I just don't want to reuse the Past Seas doors. 
    • Coding update: I'd like to fix some of the critters so that they're less likely to fly above the water's surface or just made more efficient in general. Maybe make it so they make detritus for detritus-eating creatures.
  • Chione Update: This room could really use some native ecology, if not some native toys and a few flavor touches. Again making entirely new sprites is out of my expertise, and mea's both not been very active and has been having computer troubles as of late.
    • Sadly, this does mean Chione's not getting an update this year; there's no more changes I can think of that the infrastructure would need, and I can't make sprites for entirely new stuff. 
  • Past Seas update: This room could really use a coding overhaul, since I've learned a lot in the time since I've first made it.
  • Aquatilis Caverna V5: For a while I've had the thought of giving this room a coding overhaul (among other things, the critters and plants could stand to be fully interactive). The full idea I had was to give both AC1 and AC2 an overhaul, and then make it so that you could inject either room's ecology into the AC Pod. 
    • Plus, it'd be nice to give AC some doors as well, since it's even more expansive than Artemia Sea, and not only would doors give swimming creatures more reason to fully explore the rooms, it'd help non-swimmers get around them too. Alas, this would need new sprites that I can't provide.
    • It'd also be nice to make up for the lack of certain food items (there's almost no "food" in either area; in fact, I don't think there's any "food" at all in either room. The supply of "fruit" is also severely limited), or maybe just adding some new stuff to freshen them up. Again, my lack of spriting ability gets in the way here.
  • While I'm thinking of metarooms, a brand new freshwater-themed metaroom would be nice. This is even more of a pipe dream than updating already existing metarooms, though; I can't sprite, and furthermore I don't know if I have in me to code a completely new metaroom and associated ecology from scratch. 
  • Flesheater Grendels: I called this project my magnum opus back when I first talked about it, and it'd be nice to actually finish them and release them before my time in the CC is up. However, I'd probably have to remake them from scratch since their current genome is horribly outdated. I've also learned that the stimulus for hitting creatures also applies to hitting everything (e.g. a creature who gets food from hitting creatures will also get it from hitting a gadget). 
  • Learning to make copy-paste metarooms: Copy-paste metarooms are things like Past Seas and the Grendel Hideout. Out of all types of metarooms, this is the kind I'd probably be most adept at making. Alas, there's no good tutorials for making this kind of room (the old tutorial from CCSF 2006 just says 'this is easy' without explaining anything).