Idea: Voregon trail, let's discuss (now with Demo))

[DarkPinkie]

... Going to need a map to put them in a somewhat logical order of key landmarks and terrains... The map doesn't have to be available in game, but could really help in planning routes and landmarks.

Yeah. Taking a piece of paper and then just scribbling down an overworld map would indeed help quite a bit with planning potential paths. Heck the map itself can look shit, but just having something at least readable would help out.

Heck, I have some basic knowledge of cartography for my tabletop games. I could potentially do one.

[Thagrahn]

I have the initial graphics for a try for something similar to the ready in GameMaker, but right now it's more of a simple animation.

Need to figure out how to track supplies, food, health, and population. Set up a way for the game to know the distance to next landmark, and only have the distance to the landmark count down while traveling.

Hunting should be simple to implement, trade requires traking all the types of cargo.

[Bright]

Ideas for events that could occur:

There are monsters following your tracks, depending on your amount of horses, you can choose to outrun them.
If you don't have enough horses, you can try to fight them.
If you don't have enough weapons, well, the slowest people would have probably not lasted long anyway.

Items:
Warm clothing (A must for travel in frozen north climate)
Medicine (To use if someone gets sick for not using warm clothing, warning: Monsters smell weakness and sick people may attract hungry monsters.)

Events:
River Crossing (Do you appease the mermaids, fight them or try to outrun them?)
Doppelganger (Someone is pretending to be a human in an attempt to eat people in your caravan. Since you can't tell directly, you'll just have to hang someone and see if the eating stops.)

[Thagrahn]

Ideas for events that could occur:

There are monsters following your tracks, depending on your amount of horses, you can choose to outrun them.
If you don't have enough horses, you can try to fight them.
If you don't have enough weapons, well, the slowest people would have probably not lasted long anyway.

Items:
Warm clothing (A must for travel in frozen north climate)
Medicine (To use if someone gets sick for not using warm clothing, warning: Monsters smell weakness and sick people may attract hungry monsters.)

Events:
River Crossing (Do you appease the mermaids, fight them or try to outrun them?)
Doppelganger (Someone is pretending to be a human in an attempt to eat people in your caravan. Since you can't tell directly, you'll just have to hang someone and see if the eating stops.)

Sounds like fun, and will be interesting to see how those get implemented.

My game won't support those events due to being strictly travel at this point, as it is really just a start screen with an animation to watch right now. 2 rooms, 4 backgrounds, 5 objects total.
have third room to implement hunting/gathering, but not sure which direction I'm going to go with it.
Trade, supplies, food, locations, and random events are all up in the air.

Watching a fairy ride a cart pulled by a squirrel... and traveling from one burning building to the next.
All in poor design and detail.

((Likely need to figure out how to set up an array so the locations can have variation in the distances between locations, yet have those distances still be fixed on replays.))

[night22]

Tried the demo out, but the game immediately froze once I tried to get through the forest.

[DarkPinkie]

Tried the demo out, but the game immediately froze once I tried to get through the forest.

Don't worry you didn't miss all that much. The demo is a proof of concept more than anything else really.

[Bright]

Let's think of some characters that could potentially join Your caravan:

The ex-soldier:
Can give some bonus options when dealing With events that involve soldiers.
Will oppose becoming friends With monsters.

The nun:
Gives extra morale to Your caravan in times of dire.
Will oppose questionably moral actions.

The ''exotic'' dancer:
General morale bonus to Your caravan.
Some People might not leave her tent...

The thief:
When scavenging, find extra stuff.
May get you in trouble later.

[cloud1570]

what kind of vore should we expect? just the standard OV? in either case, i think adding domestic animals to your caravan would be an interesting way of having vore interactions either with your caravan members or random encounters!

[Thagrahn]

I saw a mention of horses for Bright's version.
If there are dogs too, could they assist or interfere with hunting?

The Cub:
An orphaned young monster that has become attached to one of the female caravan members.
Chance of one male caravan member going missing.

[Houyo]

Tagging thread. SOunds like a fun project, might do my own sorta thing with it sometime.

[Bright]

Tell you what:
If I get 10 more encounter ideas, I'll update this game.

[ShadowedFigure]

1. Repeating encounters with a bridge troll, inexplicably the same troll at each bridge. Perhaps refuses to accept other predators as 'payment', which could be used to discover hidden predators among your caravan.. though if you're wrong, they'll be lost.
2. Penalties for overkill: leaving a trail of slain buffalo/deer/whatever attracts scavengers with ever-increasing appetites.
3. Cultural connections: encounters with a dangerous tribe that can become your protectors within a region, if you're willing to accept and participate in their practices.
4. The Lorax (the Vorax): a region had its humans over-hunted and the predators nearly died out from starvation. A surviving predator tries to help you re-establish a human colony. This time, with mechanisms to keep the predators and humans in-balance.
5. Apex Predator: a predator-predator hunts your party while there are predators within it, if this predator-predator is not dealt with, it will kill the predators within your party, as well as a few non-predators incidentally.

I think some of these could be broken up into multiple encounter ideas, but even then I'm not quite at 10 yet.

[Rewired]

I'll see if i can brainstorm something up to pick up the slack...

Hmm...

1. Doctor/mad scientist who travels the world, peddling medicine, genetic mods (changes target attributes, such as pred or prey state, et cetera) and his own personal invention - a miniature personal cloning device. He can give you a prototype right away for free, or he can tag along for three days and a med-high sum of coin to make one for a random member of your group, or take triple the regular one's price and follow you for a whole week making a deluxe model. The differences are that the prototype:
>has a decent chance of messing with the user's attributes and traits, like changing pred/prey state or hair color or other such,
>has a somewhat smaller chance of misfiring from regular, nonlethal injuries leaving you with a slightly askew copy of the user,
>has a slight chance of not working at all.
>isn't reusable, but isn't limited to a specific user.

and the regular model:
>has a slight chance of messing with the user's attributes and traits
>has a minuscule chance of misfiring/firing early if you are able to save the user from death.
>isn't reusable and is also specific to a given character. Think biological keying.

and the deluxe model:
>doesn't mess with the user's attributes and traits
>has a minuscule chance of misfiring, again only if it's user is saved from death.
>is reusable, but again is also only for the char it was made for.

Buying enough from him or having him around for a full month leaves you with an apex model:
>all the benefits of deluxe
>can be misfired at will, as long as it's powered.
>reusable, not keyed.

2. Maybe some crossover stuff? Like Irongut from Mysta's Myst Adventure, or someone else.

3. Old ruins full of some mechanical/biological monstrosities who can possibly be recruited, but have a tendency to snack on your prey and pred alike. Metal slimes that propagate by converting organics and machines to more metal slimes, plant people, et cetera

4. A character someone from your crew claim is their wife/husband/lover. You can recruit the fella, and he's pretty good at a lot of things, but there's a chance he's developed into a fine pred and decides to snack on someone - rarely, to be fair, but it adds up and saps morale as he might not be particularly subtle about it.

5. For that matter, slime infestations that consume crew members but the slimes work decently in any task they're set to, and more slimes boosts the chances of success. Your preds could use straws to drink the slimes, your strong members could stuff them into barrels to refill water supplies, and, of course, if you do nothing about it, eventually the pool of slimes consumes the caravan leader after everyone else is consumed, leading to a game over as the now slime caravan leader leads the pool to consume another unsuspecting caravan. Maybe if you have the mad scientist above, or someone else like him, he can be asked to do something, at which point he uplifts all "mature" slimes to the level of regular pred caravan members. This stops the infestation.

[RossTheEmeraldFox]

Here, How about this.. What if there was a Prey character that was resistant to digestion, and increased morale the more predators you have in your group, But there is a 10% chance that he will be made to stay too long and get melted down.. Making the morale go down slightly for every pred if he does..


Nobody to fill that belly space...

[RossTheEmeraldFox]

Boom, Another one.. Random encounter, sometimes a Blue box (yes really) will come across your path and as you send someone out to move it, it dissapears and leaves behind some "Strange meat" and it has a 50% chance of sickening a player who eats it, or filling them up entirely.. And possibly a 10% chance of it coming to life when you pick it up, and maybe attacking the player.. And a 10% chance of it coming alive when you eat it and 50% possibly inguring the pred and 50% fully healing them (only when alive, but still applies full food if you are lucky in that too).. Basicly this meat is a HUGE gamble.. Best case scenario to get one character that is totally full and fully healed.

[RossTheEmeraldFox]

Another one.

It is a fire elemental, it doesn't say anything and you can let it aboard.. It doesn't need to eat or drink water or anything and it wards off predators (and SOME monsters like 50% for every monster encountered).. But It has a slight chance of burning your thing, killing everyone (Only on the first time you let it aboard, then it is fine) like.. Maybe a 5% chance.. And it has a 60% chance of warding off predator each on your caravan.. Preys are fine though.

[RossTheEmeraldFox]

Dammit.. How can I get MYSELF into this game but be subtle about it...


Okay, what If there was this lizard..

I'm kidding, I'm out of ideas.

[Thagrahn]

Remains of a prior caravan.
10% chance of supplies
40% chance of survivors
50% chance of predators

Motherly Monster
Having recently lost her newborn offspring, she is to sad to fight the caravan members, but with her intincts in mother more she will be likely to adopt some younger members of the caravan and protect them from predators. As a bonus, she can doulble the amount of good that can be gathered from a hunt.

[wetcardboardbox]

Encounter:

An apex pred joins your party to use you as bait to lure in lower tier preds. It's a double edged sword because you are protected from most preds, but can sometimes kill party members by accident or begin eating them if other preds are too scarce. And maybe if you're doing too well with that, a new apex can come challenge them and take the party as his lure, with different risk levels.

Also, I want to raise some concern about gender? I think I've read some people posting gender-specific entities/encounters, but there is virtually no drawback to keeping all gender and gender interactions in the game. So long as you can toggle spawnable genders/possibly who can do what, it can only serve to increase your audience and would only require more sprites and a bit more code.

[RossTheEmeraldFox]

Above about genders ^^^

I mostly said *It* nothing of my ideas really where gender specific XP

Maybe the prey one, But that could be a male sense typically people don't like male -Preds-