#as a way to display my gratitude i shall now hunt down a bunch of jeverus posts

[moonlightdancer26]

When a blog whose posts I used to literally obsess over randomly follows me:

[tumblunni]

A random game idea I had! It could be really cool to have like a survival RPG where you play as a wild animal trying to survive in the world. Seriously there are barely any games about the coolness of nature from the perspective of the nature, and the only one I found was just a platformer/walking simulator type thing with not much appeal to it. Still worth wasting my money on it just so the universe can see there's a market for this genre, tho! So yeah anyway, random thoughts for this game idea!! * I was thinking it could be a bit more fun if you're exploring an entirely new world of magical creatures instead of a super realistic documentary on any real animal. Plus that's just more flexible for me to do whatever I want with how things work for this species. * My first thought was maybe like a very unusual 'dragon' that's more insectile in design. Like a long Asian dragon crossed with a fluffy caterpillar. Lotsa legs, and a sweet lil face! There's even that one species of Japanese caterpillar that has the big head with horns and an EVEN MORE sweet lil face, that would work perfectly!! And I was thinking maybe it can charge up and shoot electrical blasts from those back horns? Its still very much a small underdog creature in this ecosystem tho, usually all it can do is issue weak zaps to scare predators away but not really fight back all that well. And your lil babies can't zap at all until their horns grow in, so you need to be very strategic to choose your battles carefully and keep your family safe. * also I was thinking maybe the babies could kinda be your lives system? It'd be hard to finish the game while keeping them all alive, and if you lose them all its a game over from despair. And also they follow you around and are cute and helpful and love u lots! And ypu can see them grow up if you keep them safe for the whole game, you can watch them leave the nest in the end and be so proud! I want them all to have their own lil personality, I want the player to get goddamn attached to their lil monster fam!! * alternatively maybe you start off with just one baby and then gain more as the game progresses? Cos I'm picturing this as you playing as a single animal, you're a solo mama lookin after the babs. Maybe your previous mate died tragically in the prologue? Or maybe you just don't have one and you're just a sweet lil dragon who adopts abandoned eggs you find along your journey. You could go on quests to find all the hidden unlockable children around the world map! And maybe they could be a big ol variety of patterns, and different special powers. Multi talented bebs! * another idea for adding variety to game is 'what about customization?' Let's defy all laws of logic and have the player be able to choose the course of evolution for these critters! Your skill tree could be growing extra legs or fangs or becoming an omnivore all of a sudden. Who cares if it makes no sense! Tho that would kinda lend itself better to a plotless game with intimate amounts of generations, so we could at least make the evolution semi realistic. Inheriting traits instead of just abruptly mutating a million things within the same generation. But I kinda wanted this to be a more emotional journey of a single family surviving a small lifetime together. Just a lil warm and soft snippet of life in this world. Just a lil family that you can keep safe. * a random idea I had for a helpful NPC was a big giant scary monster of another species that you end up forming an unlikely friendship with. Big scary is only scary cos they're protecting their sick child, you can find out about this and help find the rare herbs they need to get better. And now you have won a very large friend's undying gratitude! Maybe they could remove an obstacle in your path by fighting off a giant unwinnable boss fight for you, so you can get to the next area. Or maybe you can ride on their back so they can carry you further away from your nest than you can usually reach. I'm imagining the player character being like the size of one of their eyebrows, lol! Oh, and maybe they could even help dig stuff so you can do bigger renovations on your nest? I was thinking it'd slowly upgrade as you gather more skills and materials throughout the game, and you could have a super complex luxury lil meadow grove by the end. * oh and a random other optional side quest idea! One of the various biomes you explore could be a wintery area, and you could find a prime spot where you can store your supplies and have like rudimentary refrigeration. Storing up food supplies in prime cache locations around the world would be a big gameplay element if you're playing as a herbivore, and this would be a gamechanger cos now meat can be cached away too. And I was thinking the Large Friend could also be a useful way to make the game equally playable whether you picked herbivore or carnivore. Herbivore players can trade meat to the Large Friend and thus still gain some benefit from defeating enemies. Large Friend can probably bring you cool exotic fruits from high up in trees you can't reach. Yay! * oh and I've kinda been calling those characters The Bigman and Bigman Larva. Cos I thought it'd be funny if this is some large mammal and the protagonist doesn't really understand the difference. Their babies totally come from eggs too, right? When's the lil guy gonna spin his cocoon? * ...it'd be even funnier if they actually did spin cocoons. I mean, its a magical world! I can make anything I want! Mice hatch into bats in the spring~ * also I had a neat idea of how to maybe handle 'dialogue' in this game. Cos it'd be a bit lame to just translate all this animal talk into English, and it'd be hard to have an RPG if its completely 100% silent. I don't have enough confidence in my abilities to say I could pull off the awesome nonverbal storytelling of Journey! So the idea I had was that maybe it could be.. A nonverbal language? You see your protagonist's thoughts as lil dialogue bubbles of images. Lil semi-complex rune type icons that the player slowly learns as they play through the game. Starting just with very basic representations of the actual gameplay commands like 'run' and 'hunt' and 'small larva whom I love and protect', and then by the end you're able to hold entire simple conversations with friendly NPCs. * also I thought it could be hella neat if you could acrually name your babies using this system! Pick two or three runes to combine into a lil squeak you shall squeak towards this particular ball of fluff. "I love you [FIRE] [FRIGHTENED] and [BRISTLE BUSH] [ACORN] [TAIL]" * also I was thinking a cool way to organically teach this language to players would be to kinda compartmentalize it? Youd start off with a library of basic words and then everything would be introduced using those basic words. Like 'predator' is [RUN]-[EAT], displayed with those two symbols when you first encounter this problem. But then after its become more of a common part of your life it'd be smooshed down into a new rune symbol that combines those two, and that's added to your dictionary. And now you're able to say things about that predator, and use the word predator as a modifier to other stuff. Like 'coyote' might be introduced as 'fast predator' and then if you spend a lot of time scavenging in the coyote territory and fighting them, 'coyote' would become an actual word too. And it could be kinda oddly satisfying to name your newest child after a word you didn't have the last time, symbolising how you've mastered evading that particular predator. Hold your head high, [COYOTE] [FEET], my new and prosperous son! * Also, hmm, it could probably symbolise 'this shit is wrong and terrifying' when something breaks the naming conventions and reminds you of the components that first made that word. Like every other predator is just [adjective] [RUN]-[EAT] but then a griffon is [SKY]-[EAT] and a snake is [LUNGE]-[EAT]. Hell, to someone who's literally never seen a flying creature before, they might just be classified as like.. 'Jump' creatures. It'd be a giant shaking up of the whole world for our poor protagonist who only sees things as a collection of running or not running! And humans would be even more terrifying cos they're the only predator that isn't 'eat'. Why on earth does this thing kill us and just leave the body there?? Thats TERRIFYING! Protagonist might even have nightmares of their poor kid's soul being unable to rest cos their empty shell was never returned to nature after they died. They don't have the capacity to understand that humans hunt for sport or exterminate things they see as pests... And man, I can imagine that scraps of human materials could be super useful rare objects along your journey and like.. HOO BOY its a good thing protagonist will never know how exactly humans make those things. 'Wow this weird human thing called a clothes is useful nest lining material!' she says, as she sits on a dragon skin coat. 'Odd how it reminds me of my grandma!' * anyway lol I have a bunch of ideas but they're not very organized so I apologise for this rambley post