A hearth and a home

For some reason it looks like itch.io is having some trouble loading the art. If you're not seeing it, I've put the images up on imgur as well for now.

Last time I said I wanted to work on enclosure and breeding systems, and that's what I've been doing. In fact, this past week has included a lot of deeper thinking on the systems I want to implement within the game. I spent some time really honing my must-have features: breeding, training, art generated by the computer based on genetics, among others. Some features can wait until the must-have features are done: a research group for "quests" and genetics explanations, compost, and employees.

Of course these are not exhaustive lists!

The old enclosure system

When I was first building the enclosure system almost a year ago (various life events interfered with my ability to gamedev for almost a year), I just wanted to get as much down as possible to allow me to play with the genetics. So the system was very simple and because I was new to Godot, it also relied on me telling Godot exactly where each boke would go to live, almost like horse stalls; one horse to each stall. This was so far back that I didn't even have a solid idea of how I wanted the bokes to look, so I just had a solid brown box. I figured, I could always change it later!

But this system has some issues, some of which involve not being easily scalable past six bokes with the way I've currently written the code.

Another thing that has been percolating in my brain is this idea that I don't want the player to ever be constrained from breeding just because they have 19 bokes in an enclosure with only 20 slots. If this was the case, the player would have to either get a new enclosure or upgrade their current one. Or baby bokes, called bokelets, don't apply to the cap, but I would still have to rewrite my code due to how I'm adding new bokes to the system. If bokelets don't count toward the cap, there might also have to be some kind of "pet home" system by which you can only keep a small subset of your litters. It's an artificial constraint which frustrates me.

So... what is the solution?

The new enclosure system

The most important component, at least to me, of the new enclosure system is that there is no programmed cap on the number of bokes you have in an enclosure. Just like in real life, you can have six great danes in a one bedroom apartment if you want. Will any of you be happy? Probably not, but if you want to you *can*. Especially temporarily.

So as I introduce variables like stress to the equation, there will be an ideal range of numbers of bokes for each enclosure. Since bokes are social, that ideal number is very unlikely to be less than two. But having twenty bokes in a small space is likely to raise their stress significantly, leading to health issues or infighting.

Coding-wise, I will be adding bokes to enclosures programmatically (the code decides how bokes are arranged). This offers some flexibility (including, possibly, manual rearrangement by the player), as well as the possible implementation of a few visual elements I'm really excited about. Redoing the visuals in this way also allows me to introduce the breeding system to my code immediately. I can test that system easily without having to worry about space constraints, to make sure that the genes are passing down correctly, and to see what feels most interesting in terms of weaning ages. And a few other things I'll discuss when I talk more about breeding.

More long-term, this new code means that the player will have more flexibility in choosing their housing arrangements. And it will allow for searching through your bokes to see who you have.

So that is the plan as we finish up the month of January: code the enclosure and breeding systems, as well as an announcement system to make keeping track of births, weaning, and deaths easier. I hope that next time I'll have that cool stuff to show off!

On art

As a quick aside, I am planning for there to be a lot of art in this game, but at the moment I'm really focusing on these systems that are the pillars of the game. As time permits, I'm hoping to take one of these months and make a dedicated effort to bettering my digital art.\