We aren’t getting rated by the ESRB, I thought that was pretty established at this point.
Oh, right. Still, pretty sure it was said that any “mating animations” would go into an “official 18+ mod” at best.
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I feel like we’re way too narrow in mating. Where does courtship end and mating begin? In the case of humans, to be blunt, foreplay and non-procreative sex is NSFW AND isn’t mating, but kissing your partner and cuddling is SFW (and fertilizing eggs is SFW and mating for good measure) and I’d like my species to have realistic socialization and not be like spore creatures who have a heart emoji, lay an egg, and then ignore each other 99% of the time. And humans are the easiest to sort because we are humans, we need a system robust enough to handle any sort of mating system that can be implemented within biology and game mechanics, and that somehow also requires 18+ stuff to be a mod. I think the best idea is to have a pre-designed configuration for a pretty sane mating behavior, with efficacy and time requirements and whatever, and make it so you can slot that into your behaviors, leave autoskip on, and forget about it. You can re-implement kissing because that’s interesting, but unless you want to edit mating behaviors, you can ignore them. If you add in nsfw pre-mating rituals (in humans that’s foreplay), you have to design them. No guarantee your species even has genitals. That’s on you for being weird, you’d never be penalized for sticking with the default settings and skipping it every time. i haven’t really heard any serious counter-proposals other than “overkill is fine” which, like, no, I’d like to be able to design a cool courtship ritual, and not get it cut off by the skip cutscene animation.
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I’d simply guess anything “18+” would go into that mod. So perhaps the mating stuff would get divided into sfw/nsfw parts, with the sfw parts becoming a part of the base game and nsfw parts becoming a part of the mod.
How do you make the split? Genuine question. For like, a pre slotted in mating behavior you threw in there to not think about it, obvious, but for everyone else… (if the pre slot in mating behavior’s “animation” is just a skip sequence, then yes, that makes sense, but then 18+ would just be electing to design your own, not a mod, and you can’t make a pre-slot in design for all behaviors, and you can always design all the before and after stuff all weird)
I can guess that since Thrive is currently in dire need of Youtuber reviews and will remain like so atleast up until aware development makes aware stage feel fun, anything which could impact the likelyhood of youtuber visits negatively (which’d mostly be 18+ stuff) would simply get delayed or “simplified” to non-18+ levels, atleast until Thrive has enough money inflow from non-youtube sources that it can afford to code those “18+” features in in some way, most likely as non-default options.
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Well, I think we shouldn’t be paying for or using volunteer time to design nsfw animations, that sounds like a waste of effort, i think that if we make a high quality procedural animation system able to animate based on edits to the behavior tab, we shouldn’t put extra effort into preventing people from doing gross stuff with it. You can draw a belgium in minecraft. You can draw a pair of belgium, I’ve seen plenty on servers with plenty of kids. It’s still a kids game. Thrive having mating be an explicit theme you can lean into as opposed to having “express yourself!” as the theme might not be taken as kindly, but it’s not gonna get an ESRP rating anyways.
Yes, you can indeed draw the outline of the country of belgium in minecraft. You can even draw two such borders if you want!
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The irony in my opinion is that before this discussion no one needed mating animations and such things, but after it was said in this discussion that they were not needed, many immediately began to say that they should be added.
Reverse psychology as it is.
Maybe it just brought an undiscussed topic to light…
This has been going since 2020. Clearly some people care. I am of the opinion the game doesn’t need mating animations, but I want to see cool courtship and maybe even truly unique mating styles if that goes well, and some people seem to think drawing a line is easy.
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When it’s not as easy as it seems. Don’t judge a book by it’s cover…
Let’s talk about genitals. Lets make democracy
Nature is full of genitals. There is a great variety.
Sometimes, you just have one hole. Sometimes, you have two holes, and use one of them as a sperm storage. Sometimes, you have no holes, and open a hole only when you need it, the male releases directly into the female body, which is called traumatic inse…tion. Sometimes, you have no females, in hermaphrodites, the males who get stabbed turn into females.
You can imagine even more scenerios. What if, you’re a millipede, and every leg is a new child? Every time you reproduce, you get longer, and the front parts die when they get too old. Their digestive tracks are connected, and sometimes, the zooid pieces can dissasociate into multiple pieces, like the eater of worlds in Terraria.
What if, everyone is born a female, but the first child you have is your pen*s? This is the alteration of generations. It happens in mushrooms. What if it happened in animals? This isn’t really a conversation starter. All the social interactions would be mostly the same.
Some people may want to recreate the variety they see in nature, in a game. Let’s discuss how much genitals Thrive should allow.
Let’s say that your species looks like this.
And it looks like this in the editor
Let’s say that you decided to add the organ that generates the reproduction cells
should it be
- a) You add the organ, and thats it. The only thing you can customise is which region in the body would expand during (if) pregnancy.
- b) You add the organ, and the tube connecting it to the outside. This allows you to make more choices, such as how many tubes there are, how long they are, whether they merge with other tubes of other organs, etc.
- c) You add a sphere at the outside. This is the “blob” option. It shows the exit point of the gametes to the outside. You can see the genitals now. But you can’t design the genitals. Its censored. You only want to see its location when playing.
- d) You can fully customise the structures at the end point of the tube. The tube can strech outward, lots of different possible designs
- e) You don’t add a reproduction organ. You select the reproduction type in the editor, and it doesn’t have any physical location in the body.
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voters
The answers should be placed on an axis, E-A-B-C-D, and the median answer should be chosen. It would highlight the desire of the players for the game, or for a mod.
Currently in the game we have the whole reproduction tab prototype in macroscopic editor. I guess if something has anything to do with reproduction, it would be shown in that tab.
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Option “d” looks pointless from a game design point of view, it has no gameplay sense, you can add mechanics to this system, but why? It CLEARLY looks like something that clearly does not justify the effort put into it. This mechanic would stupidly complicate the game without any gameplay value.
I think option “c” is the best because:
- It’s not difficult to develop.
- It’s simple enough for beginners.
- It’s flexible enough to implement many gameplay mechanics.
What are the gameplay mechanics associated with reproduction? I’ll explain everything now.
It will all start with the multicellular stage, and more specifically, with what type of reproduction, the choice will be, by default there will be asexual reproduction as at the microbe stage, but at this stage there will be another type of reproduction - sexual. Having chosen this type of reproduction, you first need to choose the type of cells that will act as gametes. After you exit the editor and your organism has grown to reproductive age, you will have a choice between asexual and sexual reproduction, asexual reproduction works as before, when choosing sexual reproduction, your organism throws several gametes into the water for which you switch, the task of the gametes is to find another gamete (not your organism) and merge with it, after which you go to the editor in which a discount is applied to everything. If the gamete for which you played died, you switch to another gamete thrown out by your organism. If all gametes died, you switch to an adult individual of your species, after which you will have to re-create gametes.
With the transition to macroscopics, everything will initially be arranged in a similar way, only the balancing mechanics for sexual reproduction will be the higher energy cost of sexual reproduction (Approximately the same thing happens in many primitive organisms such as sponges, coelenterates and algae). However, with the development of life, for more efficient production of gametes, sexual organs will appear, as well as division into small and moving gametes (male), as well as large and non-moving gametes (female) that will remain in the sexual organs until fertilization, this will make reproduction less energy-consuming, and will also give more energy to the embryo at the stratum. Once an actively swimming lifestyle has evolved, organisms may no longer rely on ocean currents, but instead simply release gametes near a partner.
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That could work. Achieves the same effects as d. But I’d guess some people would like to see more customization options, however that might not be the majority.
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I liked your post, mostly, so I want to clarify a few things I don’t fully agree on.
Why would the player still be able to use the old reproduction method? Seems a bit weird to me… though I guess it would make the game easier if your population is low to have the option of skipping finding another of your species.
Seems a bit weird choice to switch the gameplay like this… I’d much prefer an option where you just fire gametes kind of like toxins and they just need to make contact with other gametes of your species and then that triggers the editor entry.
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Since it also was discussed previously in this thread, how detailed should wounds be? Imagine if you’re playing as a vulture-like creature and come across corpses with deep wounds all the time.
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I think that at the multicellular stage there should be a mixture of sexual and asexual reproduction, and not obligate sexual because primitive organisms in reality rarely have obligate sexual reproduction, they often reproduce both sexually and asexually, this is due to the fact that they are simple enough for budding, and ocean currents cannot always provide stable sexual reproduction. In addition, this would provide a smoother transition from asexual to sexual reproduction.
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Correct. The more gradual the transistions are, the better…
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