Experimental build: prey vocals, more complex brains, and game mode customization

A new experimental build is up!

Game Modes

There’s a new “Scenario Mode” menu where you can set up a game. This lets you pick a scene and a game mode. You can also configure the game mode now! There aren’t many options, though: just whether you’re the hunted or hunter, and how many objectives you need to complete as the hunted.

You’ll be able to pick between different characters once they’re actually added.

The UI is a little messed up here – navigating it with a controller doesn’t work right. I need to spend some more time on that.

Brains

Entities now have traits and motives. Traits are things like…

• Prey drive
• Sadism

…which will, in a future update, have more visible effects on the game! There’s just one effect right now – an entity with a high prey drive will be friendly towards predators, and will run towards them.

This only happens on first sight, though, so it’s pretty flaky right now. I’m going to actually flesh this out later.

Anyway, there’s just a single motive right now: pain. If you’ve ever played The Sims before, you know how these work – they go up and down over time, depending on what happens to the entity.

This does get some use with…

Prey vocals

They’re back! The exact vocals that get chosen now depend on:

• Whether or not you have them turned on at all
• How much health the prey has left
• How much pain the prey is in.

Fen’s stomach causes pretty severe pain by default, but you can mess with that via the Director.

Remember that vocals are disabled by default! Look in Settings -> Content -> Vore to turn it on.

Objectives

The Pursuit game mode now spawns a few circuit breakers around the map. When you flip all of them, you win.

Obviously, this is going to need to be fleshed out further, but the basic idea is there (:

Other stuff

• I’ve changed how hearing works. It’s much closer to vision now – each sound increases the listener’s awareness, and once the awareness is high enough, they notice the sounds. This has had the effect of making Fen’s hearing a lot weaker.
• Some missing digestion audio has been put back. Sounds now play when prey dies/digests/dissolves.

Known issues

• Director sliders have weird text-wrapping problems
  • I made some major changes to how those slider prefabs are set up
• The sadism/masochism traits do nothing
• The hint settings still don’t do anything

What’s next?

I am eventually going to be confident enough in my config system to let you save and load characters. I don’t want to repeat the stats.json fiasco again (although, to be fair, that bug was in the legacy version!).

I’m going to be working on adding more traits and motives. These will affect things like…

• How long Fen will stalk you for before closing in
• Whether Fen eats you or tosses you

The Pursuit game mode will be getting fleshed out into something close to what the legacy version has. There will be different objectives in different scenes. There also might be a returning scene (: