#probably just dumb doodles based on my gameplay of re games

[saphirdevil]

so cute

[tumblunni]

More minor thoughts and things for the Dragon Mom Game! Its not super developed yet, but I’m thinking more on what sort of gameplay it should have. And can i just say THANK YOU SO MUCH for the positive reponse on this idea!! I’ve never got 8 notes on one of my dumb idea posts before!! Usually at best I just get 2 likes by my close friends, lol

* I’m still having trouble settling on a design for the main character species, I’m even not sure anymore if I want it to be an insectile dragon or just a complete dragon or just a complete insect or a dragon or insect mixed with something entirely else AAAAA And even just amoung the different cool caterpillars i was inspired by, I can’t decide!! * So i definately think I’m gonna go with the idea of a magically evolving species with a big ol skill tree of player choices. Even if it makes no sense! But i mean, dragons can do anything! XD So maybe your various skills and stuff could also give you appearance traits of all different cute and cool insects! BUNNI NEVER HAS TO CHOOSE EVER AGAIN

(post is getting long so more under the cut)

* Relatedly, I’m wondering whether I should give the player a ‘respec’ option? Cos.. I mean.. it would be even more immersion breaking if you could de-evolve at will, I think. it at least could make some internal sense in-universe if we say that evolving is a natural part of this creature’s life cycle. And it would seem a bit overpowered if they could freely discard and re-evolve whenever they felt like it. You could just defeat any problem you encountered, and not even have to worry about making a skillset that functions well at everything necessary to survive. BUT on the other hand, permenant choices in a skill tree with a lot of options can be a big problem depending on how much the player gets to know about each option beforehand, yknow? It sucks when you play a game and you find out you have to start all over when you;’re six hours into it, cos you somehow screwed yourself over with one bad choice and had NO WARNING. I’ve been recently playing the (very fun!) remake of Sonny for steam, and in that game every boss is so wildly different that you often have to respec your entire build to find a way to beat them. Which works well with how its basically a giant boss rush game where grinding is optional and respeccing is available whenever you want for a small amount of ingame currency. The no-respecs achievement is possibly the most difficult one! So yeah, I’m kinda worried I’d accidentally create a game like that, even though this genre doesn’t work as well with that level of difficulty. But also infinate respecs don’t work for this genre either... So I’m thinking maybe respeccing WOULD be possible, but it would be in a very limited quantity and you’d have to go through some hidden sidequest to get it. Maybe there’s one special plant that causes these dragons to reset to their basic state? And maybe it could have a cost, like it makes them very sick so you sleep through like a week or something. Or your stats are lowered for a few days, or your overall lifespan is decreased? I’ll have to think more about balancing it well!

* I’ve been thinking more and the cache-based gameplay could really be really cool as the primary form of challenge in the early stages. Your biggest obstacle is knowing that food and materials can expire, and that your ability to carry things is limited, and that you only have a certain amount of time each day to go around and then find your way back to a safe shelter to sleep. At first you might be quite desperate, eating everything you find as soon as you find it, and only being able to venture out a little way away from your nest. But then you start building cache locations and temporary shelters around the world, allowing you to move further and even be able to slowly carry some rare distant item back all the way to your main nest. The epic three week quest to move a single log! Being dragonmom is suffering! XD But it could be really rewarding to see that early difficulty be flushed down the toilet as you develop your skills, opening up the world and presenting new challenges to replace it! * And there could even maybe be multiple ways to solve the problem! This could be the first opportunity to make the choice between being a herbivore or carnivore, carnivore would be adapting more towards the ‘eat it now, constantly be searching for new food’ play style. You’d be stuck living within that limitation forever, escaping it just through becoming way better at dealing with it. You get a food source that’s basically everywhere, and gives you more nutrition, you turn the terrifying enemy predators into nosh and get to feel the ultimate catharsis of dooooom~! And you can become powerful enough to carry more stuff, and to affect the environment more and create shortcuts, and you need to worry less about finding a perfect shelter cos you have less enemies and you’re more hardy against the weather.

* Thoughts about the basic animal language system! I’m wondering about what sort of symbols it could use? Like, maybe it could just be intuitive pics of items and lil stick figure dragons and stuff. Here’s a few examples of default rpgmaker MV icons:

(tho these were some of the only ones useful for a dragon game so I’ll have to make my own) Alternatively, they could be like actual runes or heiroglyphs or made up fantasy letters. I tried googling around for something similar from a game, and all I could find was this thing thats apparantly from Spyro Skylanders? The disadvantage of that system is that it’d be less instantly intuitive what symbol means what. But that might even work to its advantage, cos it encourages the player to get started memorizing all the symbols instead of being complacent that everything will always be obvious. I wanna ease them into the puzzles, but I still do want there to be puzzles, yknow? i just think it would be a very cool concept! Oh, and of course having it look like a real language makes it feel like a real language. Woo! But maybe it could put more emphasis on the unusual nature of the language if its more pictoral? I DUNNO!! I’m bad at choices!! I’ll just have to work hard to make some endearing lil dragon doodles of what everything looks like to them. Thats the best compromise!

* oh!! A cool and unusual idea for one of the evolution skill branches!! Maybe you could take deliberate penalty devolutions? Maybe picking one of them gives you extra skill points to spend on others, or maybe its like.. sacrificing the ability to learn a new skill in favour of some additional stat boosts instead. And maybe even certain penalty evolutions could lead off into a longer tree of penalties with an unexpected bonus at the end! i was thinking a good one of these could be the ability to lose your sight. It could lead to boosters to all your other senses, and even the ability to eventually gain some sort of complicated telepathy sense that’s even better than eyes! Gotta put up with a while of waiting though. oh, and cos you’’re like a buggy dragon thing, maybe eye evolution would be Lots! Evolved eye! evolved eye! evolved eye! evolved eye! next evolution: eye!! achievement unlocked: spider. Oh, and actually the placement and type of eyes could adjust depending on what other evolution route you’re on! Thats be a cute bit of aesthetic. or maybe you could just choose the eyes regardless of what bug you are, and make the google eyed moth of your dreams~! It could be more tricky to make a fully customizeable character model though, rather than just a bunch of regular bugs. I mean, this is gonna be a pixelart game, its not like Spore with its big ol animation engine for all kinds of crazy leg combinations.. RANDOM THOUGHT! a dragon with eyes all down the sides of its body would be mega scary. maybe that could be part of the herbivore side evolutions? Realistically, scary appearances are more common for non-scary animals that evolve them to frighten off predators. Lots of caterpillars are actually kinda body horror disturbing looking, I cant stop being scared by the one with the huge swollen head with an optical illusion to look like a snake. It even manages to scare the predators of the predators of its predators! O_O Also actually having eyes all over your body instead of just markings would probably be really useful for spotting all those enemies. Spooky baby is the biggest fraidy cat ever!

* If I go with the idea of you gathering more children as the game goes on, then it could be cool to have all sorts of different sidequests to find the different eggs. Like maybe you can’t adopt the egg of a snow dragon unless you relocate your nest to a colder area where it could grow up healthy. Tho it’d suck if the game was forever limited that way and you had to leave your kids alone in various areas around the world or else they Die. So maybe its just for while the kid is a newborn, or maybe its that you have to nurse the egg in a certain environment in order to hatch it. i’m gonna say for the sake of gameplay conveinience that these magical dragons can just go into stasis in their eggs and survive forever, only hatching when they get their daily dose of mom hugs. Cos it would kinda suck if you had to make the decision IMMEDIATELY when you find an egg, especially if the eggs required certain things in order to be hatched. It would be super tragic to find this baby struggling to live and then you have to watch the egg go cold and die just cos you didn’t progress your stats fast enough. Magic eternal eggs is the best solution! Actually, maybe that could even be a good plot for a super rare egg you could unlock! You could find an ancient dragon species that was thought long extinct, and then get to raise a cute lil fossil son. Could be funny if they’re like an ancient megafauna version of your species! ‘My son iz larj but i luv heem’ He could carry the rest of his siblings around :3 Oh and maybe one of then could actually be an older child that you adopted after you found it cold and shivering next to its dead mother. It could be after you defeat some big boss, and find out that you were too late to save this poor fellow dragomom :( So then maybe that kid would start off more distrusting and disobedient at first, but to make up for it they’re already a fairly high level with some skills already. And maybe your choice of name for them would be limited at first, and then you can rename them properly once you finally win them over. You only get to choose one symbol at first, the kid is automatically named like.. Other [name]. Otherleaf, my smol untrusting beb!

* A SUPER SAD POSSIBLE IDEA Maybe there’s a small chance of finding the ghost of your kids when they die? There could be some sort of super mysterious and spiritual part of the forest that you can explore later on in the game, and there’s a random event to find a little baby shade in the fog that seems to remember you. And you can bring them home and its just like they never died, except they look a little spooky and they can only appear when the sun goes down. So you might wanna evolve the nocturnal skill so you can be with them. oh, and maybe when you get them back their name would change? Adds or replaces part of the symbols. they become Empty-[name]. And they can never grow up :( But still, imagine this lil ghost puff all happily curled up in a big hug pile with all their siblings, after so long wandering lost and alone!