For me it would be fine about poop and pee being a part of gameplay, but appearing censored, as I’m not with the idea of showing ALIEN POOP when Im playing and have dinner later. Just my opinion.
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I’ll share some perspective on all of these.
At what point would these happen?
As the game starts from the microbe stage, the player is going to see stuff like gametes being combined and primitive digestive tracks, way before playing as a big creature. At what point would you start censoring? Or would it make sense to not draw a hard line like “sorry your creature is too much like a proper animal, we can no longer show it pooping.”
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It would only be a thing in the Aware stage, I think. Besides, nature is already cruel and gruesome. The only reason why we (the Occidentals) don’t witness so much violence is because of human justice. As for how to censor dynamic reproduction/gore scenes, it’s just about changing the camera’s angle.
I’m not sure about the other stuff but I don’t see a specific reason not to include gore. There is no way thrive’s graphics will be good enough for it to look genuinely disgusting and we already know where creature’s blood vessels and internal organs are from the editor. At this point it’s just a matter of actually rendering them during gameplay and applying some effects to make it look like a wound.
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I never meant to say there wouldn’t be gore I was just saying it shouldn’t be intense. I’m sure what Sentiant said about the gore graphics would fit nicely into a more T oriented rating (if we had ratings). I don’t think we would ever have to bother censoring the violence.
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I think mating should be handled in the same way it is handled in Ancestors, your POV is forced to look into the sky and times speeds up.
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But what is excessive gore, sex, private parts, and defecation?
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Excessive gore is different by each person while sex, private parts and defecation is all known. I’d say have an option to disable each but have gore on as a default.
But how would that be programmed? It should be dynamic yes, but how? It would all depend on the species’ biological composition (e.g. vital fluids or components, reproduction organs) and societal composition (e.g. language).
Then, the camera would detect those factors and change its behavior depending on them, but how much work would that need?
Gore would be realistic and quite honestly required to make the game an immersive experience.
Sex scenes on the other hand… eh…
I don’t really want to watch my giant floating jelly brain creatures mating, but maybe that just me.
Maybe the camera can just fade to black during those scenes, with suggestive vocalizations but nothing visual.
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What is this definition of sex, private parts and defecation?
I think gore is a must. We need it. If it winds up being disgusting, make a setting, set the default to low gore. As for sex scenes… I don’t think they’ll hurt, I mean, there are these cool slugs who, for some reason, stab one another during they’re mating. I want to see my crazy mating rituals that I overhauled to be wildly efficient, so we should be fine if the default setting is that, when you evolve internal fertilization, you can no longer see reproductive ritual. I’d just turn that off. Another thing I’d like to see is my sequenceal hermaphrodite’s combat ready genitalia, and their symbionts consume their feces, so I’m sure those don’t need to be censored. Human genitalia are only going to evolve if you make it happen, as they are that specific. That’s just my two cents.
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I think that reproduction methods might even affect your species’ health. Let’s take the Tasmanian Devil as an example. Before mating, they usually bite each other’s mouth. Unfortunately, a lot of them get cancer that way because they transmit their cancerous cells into each other’s mouth. Their tumor is always located in their mouth if that explains it better.
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Now that’s weird. But it’s exactly what I mean by saying that you may have really useful or interestung mating rituals that actually do something, or might even require the player’s input. If you happen to design that kind of ritual you don’t want to miss it. So all we need is a setting that affects that!
As long as there is a skip button, I’m fine.
It could always do something similar to what “Ancestors, the humankind Odyssey” did and just zoom out into the sky or something
I’m having a strange sense of deja vu…
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Same… Great minds think alike!
The only time I’d want to skip a mating scene would be if it was a super long one. I just can’t be bothered to watch an animal that takes as long as a human doing its thing. Other than that, since there are so many methods to reproduction, it would be kind of disappointing to never actually see how my creature does it. Like someone else said, what if it’s one of those insects that stabs the other to mate? Or something even crazier?
So in my opinion it should be that if an animal takes a certain amount of time to do its thing then yeah skip it because nobody wants to sit for several minutes watching an animal do the do. But for short scenes there’s really no reason to skip it other than squeamishness.
As for the censorship of genitalia, that’s a definite no. I mean think about it. Some genitalia are used for purposes other than breeding, like the ovipositors of many hymenopterans. They are used to sting. If genitalia were censored, you wouldn’t be able to build genitals for anything OTHER than breeding. Not only that but I believe building something that’s actually capable of reproducing is important and inevitably the structure of the genitals is part of that.
I would say most censorship should be left to mods or kept as an optional thing. I am definitely on the side of skipping long sex scenes, but that’s it. And the skip should be a button rather than forced.
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the problem i see with that is that would make thrive an M rated game, and could lose a huge chunk of possible players