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[Kreatures] UI character   1 | 2
Geat_Masta

Geat_Masta
United States  


  3/16/2017  1

I need help brainstorming ideas!

My basic idea is a character something like midna from twilight princess--why I chose midna as an example--, a character that isn't directly under the control of the player but helps the player out. You would interact with it somehow to get chemical history graphs, and so on.

The basic flow would be like this:

Having a creature activate the robot would have it come up and tell you what it can do and demonstrate it. Like a tutorial BUT the demonstration doesn't work.

This prompts the robot to bring up a window of the scripts that should do the things, and finding that they aren't right: parts are missing, misspellings, legacy commands, etc.

So you have to go all around town looking for little scraps of information that will tell you how to fix the robot's scripts. This functions as the adventure mode, UI tutorial, and modding tutorial.

Alternately, maybe something like a fairy, that refers to the scripts as 'spells.'

Ideas?

 
Uzag

Uzag


 visit Uzag's website: DeviantArt
  3/16/2017  1

What about a robot-fairy? XD
But to be serious, I'm more towards sci-fi and would personally favour a robot. Maybe it could be shee inspiered, independing on what it is.

I shall ponder about it a bit, but it sounds like a fun idea off the bat. I figure it's not a crucial thing and it should be worth the effort to create it, it may be something that should be added last, so to say.

Maybe "parts" could be rewarded through competing diffrent tasks too. The can also be hinted, like you suggested. Some hints could come from the "Helper" as well (which may be puzzles by using riddles or have the text gliched up, depending on what kind of being the helper is). A bit like the "archivements"-thing that a lot of modern games love so much...

(It could be things breeding/hatching a number of eggs, splice creatures, reach a certain generation, have a creature reach old lifestage, have a creature eat a bug, stuff...)

 
Brynn

Brynn



  3/16/2017

The capability of the fairy (maybe "Adelaide"? it has the word "aid" in it, idk) could also serve as a miniature achievement system. gamers love them achievements.

Perhaps one of the later tutorials the helper shows you is how to edit how it looks, so that players can actually make it Midna if they so choose. Unless the "tutorials" and "scripts" it teaches you is strictly in-game puedocode...
Regardless, I think out of the box, it should be a very simple thing. A small representation of a Kreature, or the Progenitor species, for example...it could also be something as basic as a floating orb/will-o-wisp.

(oh gosh, what if it was a disembodied hand. WHAT A TWEEST.)

 
Doringo
Lodestar

Doringo


 visit Doringo's website: Abacus & Ettinus
  3/16/2017

I think more of an AI instead of a fairy which executes programs and such, but functionally pretty much the same as what you mentioned.
 
Uzag

Uzag


 visit Uzag's website: DeviantArt
  3/16/2017  1

Ooh, how about a hologram thing? That way it would be a mix between tech and "anything you'd like". It would also support possible customizing, if being a built-in mechanic like Brynn suggested. It could look like a fairy but still make sense sci-fi wise, a small program gadget (possibly the shee) left behind.

(But I also support it being a hand. You won't know until you've finished all achivements. Then you'll learn you've just released an evil hand clone of yourself into the world XD)

 
C-Rex
Lollipop Lord

C-Rex


 visit C-Rex's website: The Norn Nebula
  3/16/2017  1

The hologram idea sounds good. Perhaps we could have a doozer? Those guys haven't been in any Creature games since C2.
 
Geat_Masta

Geat_Masta



  3/16/2017

I'd like it to be able to walk around the world as if it was a creature, but also teleport around, so it stays near the screen. Maybe be represented as a creature without a brain, and have a script based AI instead.

What do you mean hologram? like rendered transparent with scanlines?

 
Uzag

Uzag


 visit Uzag's website: DeviantArt
  3/16/2017

To me, a hologram could just be something the helper is referred as. It's a computer program that has a visual appearance but isn't physically there.

It wouldn't have to look like these classic "blue scan lines things" but appear as perfectly rendered as any real object. It could appear as a robot, fairy, wisp or doozer while you'd know that it's acually just something a computer, or AI, is presenting itself as to you.

 
Bifrost

Bifrost



  3/16/2017  1

Could we toss GAIA, Midna, Hover Doc and a fairy into a splicer? I love the name Adelaide.

She could be a bot with an optical illusion mechanism, that you can find additional skins for. And she might have a stationary computer hub where she updates her scripts. By discovering script discs all over the world, you can grant her new features, such as gene sampling, splicing, monitoring various stuff, egg collecting, and all the jazz we want to be able to do.

 
Geat_Masta

Geat_Masta



  3/16/2017  1

The midna thing was about the characterization, hence the video, I paraphrase:

"At the start of her character arc: Midna doesn't actually care about the people she's helping you save, she is only helping you out so you'll do things for her. This gives a very unique edge to the game, because link and Midna have no trust in each other, and outright despise that they need each other."

To me this made Midna a more identifiable character than most video game AI companions; who I can barely characterize at all.

I could have powerup agents where the creature activation script is hard coded in, hence it can't be activated through script, and when activated it changes a built in function from doing nothing to doing something.

 
Bifrost

Bifrost



  3/16/2017

Adelaide was the Daoine spacecraft's diagnostics tool and computer manifestation. Through a script error, she's responsible for the crash landing, and somehow, undisclosed to the player, also for the disappearance of the Daoine. Her main goal is to reunite with her masters, which she can't accomplish without a small herd of lagoraptors, for some tba reason.
 
Ghosthande
Prodigal Sock

Ghosthande


 visit Ghosthande's website: Breeders Beware
  3/17/2017

So it only has basic functionality but you can find "powerups" essentially to give it more features? I like that idea.

I had a robot that was going to serve a similar purpose, though I never got around to doing anything with the project. It was going to be for a claymation-looking game, hence the matte texture; swapping out the texture for a metal-looking one would be easy.

I really like the idea of a hologram, though. Maybe she(?) could even have a little hologram emitter that floats over her head, so you where the hologram is coming from.



 
Bifrost

Bifrost



  3/17/2017

Can we turn it slightly more in the direction of this:

meeting this:

?

 
Geat_Masta

Geat_Masta



  3/17/2017

I always liked the design of the robots in ratchet and clank.
 
Kule

Kule



  3/17/2017  1

Excuse the bad quality phone pic but maybe something like this? It's a concept from an old scrapped project where the player would find the central eye (core) and it would gradually upgrade with extra limbs and intelligence.


 
Bifrost

Bifrost



  3/20/2017  1

Perhaps the first time you meet Adelaide, it's her hologram projection. A part of the initial quest will be to find her physical body.
 
Jesseth
The Mossy Shee

Jesseth


 visit Jesseth's website: My tumblr
  3/20/2017  1

I always felt that the hoverdoc was a really underused/underappreciated design in DS! Maybe a souped up/adjusted version of them with a different attached menu? I feel like there could be some fun to summoning your helper by having an item you plop down and activate, a la the little closed hoverdoc. The way it occasionally taps its tail while in closed mode is cute as heck too.





The Mossy Shee & Co
 
Norn_master

Norn_master



  3/22/2017

I don't care for the C3/DS way. Dragging your Norn into a room to get a medical scan, and get better. I prefer kits. I do like this concept tho. He could be an all in one kit thing, but only if you gather all of his parts. You help him reassemble himself, and in return he can scan, heal, inject, monitor.

Keeping with the LOZ concept, perhaps after being assembled, he would make you an offer to do something affecting the environment in the world in exchange for something else in the environment that you have a lot of. Keeping the world in balence, and restoring nature to it's optimal state. Something that you should have the ability to grow. ( Example: I notice you are running low on lemon trees in the world. I will replicate some more in exchange for 4 mushrooms )



It’s a me! Dvader0086 from the’a Discord!
 
Geat_Masta

Geat_Masta



  3/22/2017

@Norn_master creatures and resource management seem like they go together, probably why it was tried in C3 with the biofuel, and in creatures online, but in reality they don't. The concept of resource management is basically incompatible with any game as moddable as creatures.
 
Kule

Kule



  3/22/2017  1

I'm also against the 1:1 interaction with norns and being able to easily manipulate them by hand. C1 was more like an advanced ant farm experiment where the emphasis was on observation and learning.
 
Ghosthande
Prodigal Sock

Ghosthande


 visit Ghosthande's website: Breeders Beware
  3/22/2017

I'm also against being able to easily manipulate Creatures by hand, but possibly for the opposite reason. You have to actually work with Norns in C1 and C2 and train them, the game encourages you to spend at least a little time on them. In C3, you can just drag them around or carry them wherever (and even if you don't they're basically wired to be forced to obey your commands). When you have absolute control like that, they wind up feeling more like dolls than the little simulated beings they were supposed to be.

I'm curious what functionality this UI character would have, and what functionality would be put into kits. Would there be some crossover or communication between the two?

Hoverdoc did come with two annoying downsides: the windows built into him were very small and felt cramped at times, and he occasionally would get lost (probably autokilled). Last thing you want in the middle of an epidemic is to have your only doctor vanish into thin air.



 
Jesseth
The Mossy Shee

Jesseth


 visit Jesseth's website: My tumblr
  3/22/2017  1

I actually LIKE being able to give norns advice and carry them if need be. I was horrified as a kiddo when I played C2 and hadn't gotten the ability to pick up my norns and resuscitate them.

Sure it takes some of the 'challenge' out of getting them to do autonomous things sometimes, but I tend to find that not having those abilities makes things tedious: especially in the context of breeding experiments, and when trying to do things like work out if a norn actually has the marbles to be conditioned to do things. -Especially- after a couple of splices have possibly done some weird things to their minds. I always have the 'collect all power-ups' mod installed because I don't want to go get everything all over again just to set up a breeding experiment or a wolfing run where I need to prepare starting conditions.


The Mossy Shee & Co
 
Geat_Masta

Geat_Masta



  3/22/2017

I don't know about the kits, other than a lot of that functionality has to be put elsewhere to avoid copyright. Adding a character was my solution. It obviously would replace the observation kit and favorite places, but I'm not sure what else.

I'm also considering having a socket class, this would allow you to make external programs that act as kits.

Id also like a way to forgo the owners kit in favor of name learning, but not all languages have words in the same order, so it would be hard to pick out the name.

 
Doringo
Lodestar

Doringo


 visit Doringo's website: Abacus & Ettinus
  3/23/2017

Ghosthande wrote:
he occasionally would get lost (probably autokilled). Last thing you want in the middle of an epidemic is to have your only doctor vanish into thin air.



If you drop the opened hoverdoc in certain places (such as in walls and stuff I guess) it will teleport to it's starting position in the Meso. Ctrl + H is very useful for locating a lost doctor, but also seems to reinject it if it is truly lost (which includes being in your hand, meaning you can use this to duplicate them quickly)

 
Ghosthande
Prodigal Sock

Ghosthande


 visit Ghosthande's website: Breeders Beware
  3/23/2017

I'm aware of how it's supposed to work, but Ctrl + H never reinjected the Hoverdoc for me. Half the time it didn't even locate it when it did still exist in the world.

Geat_Masta wrote:
not all languages have words in the same order, so it would be hard to pick out the name.



Would it really be too different from them understanding any other words that might appear in different orders? I wouldn't expect that part to be terribly hard, if you can get them understanding different word orders to begin with. But I guess it depends on how you plan on handling language in general.



 
Geat_Masta

Geat_Masta



  3/24/2017

Notice that in c3/ds the norns couldn't be taught words for adjectives, advervs, verbs except through caos, basically, the norn would look for these in the sentence you gave it, then decided whatever was left was a noun, so word order didn't matter.
 
Ghosthande
Prodigal Sock

Ghosthande


 visit Ghosthande's website: Breeders Beware
  3/27/2017

That's interesting. I assumed it would be easier to do it the other way around: start with word order and anticipate which particle goes where based on that. If I say "John push fruit" and you know ahead of time that the word order is SVO, then it goes without saying that John is the subject. But I guess that would make shorter sentences like "John hungry" and "push fruit" too ambiguous.


 
Geat_Masta

Geat_Masta



  3/27/2017

@ghosthande it's not only not easier, it's literally impossible!
 
Ghosthande
Prodigal Sock

Ghosthande


 visit Ghosthande's website: Breeders Beware
  3/28/2017

If you're trying to parse regular English, yes. If you're going for a more simplified grammatical structure as in Creatures, you don't have to worry about things like passivity, so I doubt you'd run into nearly as many problems.

But I digress; I've drawn the conversation off topic.

You mentioned the UI character handling favorite place functionality. I'd be curious to know more about how that could work.



 
Geat_Masta

Geat_Masta



  3/28/2017

The issue is that no one knows how Complex a grammar can be before its undecidable, and even if i knew that the grammar would work in English, it may fail completely in chinese. So it's best to ignore word order and syntax.

In not sure, i haven't really done much on it because my computer stopped working when i replaced the cpu/motherboard. It took me 3 days to find a decent repair shop, the guy said he'd get back to me later that day and tell me what component needs replaced, that was 4 days ago and i haven't heard back. T_T

I imagine the AI would use a similar speech algorithm as the creatures, but different key words. So you would ask it to go to the favorite place. Not sure how to define the places though.

 
Brynn

Brynn



  3/29/2017

Would talking to the AI/fairy/Adelaide be the only way you can activate its functionality? Even if you have a "recently spoken" dropdown menu, scrolling through that to pull out several functions from the UI character might be bothersome.

What if this character become part of the user interface chrome? Like, actually become a toolbar? That way it would never get lost somewhere in the world - it always floats on top of the game window. Could a kreature be able to interact with it still, even if the player can drag it around?

 
Geat_Masta

Geat_Masta



  3/29/2017

I imagine it would move relative to the camera, and be as unable to go outside a certain radius of the center of the screen.

Basically when it goes off screen it would wait until the screen has been relatively still for a certain period of time, then teleport to within the screen radius, and start wandering around. Like if a norn is sick that would get it attention.

Theres no point in comparing to the hoverdoc getting lost because that's in a different engine.

 
Bifrost

Bifrost



  3/29/2017

Communication with Adelaide could be through a command bar that she provides you with. And other functions and menues could switch between being a part of her (or her interface) or "sent out of the world" to the player's screen.
 
3kul

3kul



  4/18/2017  2

I had a go at trying to combine a few ideas being discussed to come up with something that might suit your project. I wasn't a big fan of Scrubby the fairy in the Creatures GBA game so I think that a sci-fi focus for your project is a bit better. Apologies in advance for what is a fairly lengthy post!

The assistant is an A.I. re-activated by player at the beginning of the game (you could make this intuitive by having a single glowing button on dark screen for a player to press when starting the game for the first time, or you could just have it as something that's already done). This A.I. was previously responsible for all facilities and life forms on this world under the service of the precursor race but was disconnected and deactivated an unspecified amount of time ago. The A.I. doesn't know why it was deactivated or what happened to the world/precursor race, and remains disconnected from worldwide systems.

In it's disconnected state, the A.I. finds itself severely limited in what it can and cannot do. It can now only move from it's point of origin by being attached to/following another life form, but quickly finds that this is not possible with the player (maybe because they are foreign/alien to this world, or you could go with some other reason). The A.I. quickly becomes suspicious of the player, but it's smart enough to conclude that it must cooperate with you to find out what is going on and ensure its own restoration.

With it's limited range of movement the A.I. can initially only help the player access a genetic facility or hatchery equivalent in the immediate vicinity. This is damaged (corrupted?) to the point that the only viable DNA samples are of early primitive yet intelligent lifeforms (if you want to make the number of kreatures limited to 6 or so like in the older Creatures games this would also tie in to the 'damaged facility' idea nicely). With a little experimentation the A.I. finds it can move about by being attached to/following the kreatures.

Based on what you mentioned appealed to you about Midna, I think it would be interesting for the A.I. to form a negative opinion of the kreatures. Given that the A.I. last served what I'm assuming would be an advanced race, it would probably consider the kreatures to be abominably stupid and inept by comparison (it would probably also feel that the player is lacking in this regard). If you do this well it could position the player to feel more sympathetic towards the kreatures to balance out how unreasonably harsh the A.I. is.

In a vulnerable state of being the A.I. would not want to travel with kreatures alone as the risk of being stranded would be much too high, so the player's active support would be required. While exceedingly knowledgeable the A.I. lacks the patience and empathy to raise kreatures alone, so it would try to get the player's support in this task (emotional blackmail, promise of great reward, etc.), but at the same time view the player with a great deal of suspicion as it has no idea who the player is, how they came to be here or how the player could be tied to whatever happened to the precursor race disappearing.

The A.I. ultimately seeks to have the player guide kreatures throughout the world so that it can follow them to find out what happened to the precursor race and restore its functionality. This could be a way to active more features (kind of like the kits in the older games), or a way to access new areas, or if you don't like either of those ideas then progressing the story itself could simply be the incentive (and players that dislike the A.I. or story could choose to ignore it).

In terms of character development (if you're interested in that sort of thing), I guess the most obvious thing would be for the A.I. to go through the various stages of grief as it becomes more and more apparent that the precursor race is gone for good: denial (insisting that this can only be a minor, isolated problem), anger (resentment at being abandoned by the precursor race), bargaining (seeking a way off the world - the player may highlight the hypocrisy in the A.I. attempting to abandon the kreatures, or could just make it clear that this is impossible), depression (the A.I. despairs that the world has reached a dead end, with no way to equal the greatness of the precursor race) and acceptance (the A.I. could simply resolve to focus on helping the kreatures develop into a new master race, or if you want something a bit more upbeat and meaningful, perhaps the player & A.I. discover that the A.I. was left to ensure the success of future civilisations). This could lead to the A.I. developing at least a small sense of appreciation for the potential that kreatures represent for the future.

That's enough from me for now I think - hope that there's an idea here that you can use! :)

 
Geat_Masta

Geat_Masta



  4/18/2017

@3Kul I love it, I wonder how much can be told without words.
 
3kul

3kul



  5/15/2017

Glad to hear that you approve (and sorry for the month-late response!) :D

I guess I'm kind of stating the obvious in saying this, but how much you are able to convey without words will depend upon the expressiveness of the character (facial expressions, body language, etc.), a lot of which will come down to whatever design you decide upon, as well as how you decide to tell your story.

If you do go with the kind of character that I was writing about above, then I think you'd want them to be able to react to the kreatures around them. Simple stuff like looking at the nearest kreature with a particular expression (disdain early on, changing as the story progresses), or rolling it's eyes when a nearby kreature spouts some nonsense that it knows isn't possible ("eem eat lift", for example).

That said I've got no idea how easy that all is to do!

 

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