Creatures Community Chat

Friday, August 6, 2010

The Island: A feverfew by any other name would taste just as delicious!

I'm up to a point with Tiggy now that I'm going to need to take some time to animate before I can do too much more. So instead I've decided to do a little more work on the world which will allow me to do some additional coding. I'm a sucker for punishment :D

For the next release of The Island expect to see the Feverfew plants with a full life cycle!
As with most things at the moment the life cycle is very fast, but that will be adjusted once we've got some Norns working 'properly'.

As you can see, the feverfew now start life as seeds.



After a period of time the seeds will sprout and out will pop a feverfew plant. But be warned! The seeds only have a 50/50 chance of growing at all. As you can see in this image, only 4 of the 5 seeds have grown.



When they die the plant will drop an additional two seeds, which will also have a 50/50 chance of growing. Theoretically this means that a garden left unattended should grow all by itself. In reality though, this isn't always the case, so the player will need to keep a watchful eye on their crops.



Currently I still have it set up so the player needs to water the plants to make them grow. This is mostly so I have some control over their cycles in the testing phase and this requirement will be removed later on. Instead I want to replace it with a function that allows you to water the seeds, which will then bump them up to a 75% chance to grow. This way an attended garden is more likely to succeed.

And so the player isn't left in a world without greenery, a dispenser will be added for each plant type. More on that another time.

Next job? Coconuts!

4 comments:

  1. Pirate-Rob: I can't get the game to work on my pc... Is there a way to make it into an EXE file?

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  2. Hey Bob,

    Are you trying to play it off the website or have you downloaded it to try?

    If you're playing off the website then I'm not sure...has worked for others. Do you have the Unity player?

    If you've downloaded it, thanks, I think you're the first.

    Honestly I wasn't certain the downloading would work at all, and by the sounds of it it doesn't. I'll do some tests on other computers and see if I can work out what's wrong.

    Unfortunately I'm using the free version of Unity3D which doesn't allow you to make EXEs (found that out the hard way).

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  3. In every creatures game underground areas play a big role. Are caves and burrows possible with this engine?

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  4. Hey Bart,

    Pretty much anything is possible with this engine and enough creative minds behind it.

    The difficult part is going to be figuring out the best way to navigate in such areas. Can the Hand magically pass through ground layers? Or would it be better to restrict it to following similar paths to the creatures?

    All difficult questions I've been playing with in the back of my mind. If I can actually get some basic Norns working I'll start really considering how to go about building such a world. I'm certainly open to suggestions though.

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