Hi Jeremy.
If there is one thing that bothers me, it is that mice sometimes seems more
profitable to keep than either rabbits or squerals. I don't know if this was
what you intended, but it almost always seems a bad idea to get rabbits or
squerals. Mice seems to always be the thing that works. In my opinion the
game would be beter balanced if some situations demanded different pray.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Jeremy Kaldobsky" <[email protected]>
To: "Gamers Discussion list" <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, May 29, 2011 5:08 PM
Subject: Re: [Audyssey] Lunimals current thoughts.
Chris,
Without access to the inner workings of the code, it definitely does
seem like starvation is the only regulator. In the original design,
before I released the first beta, there were 2 major factors that limited
species besides food. Oxygen consumption forced your dome population to
stay at a level matching the vegetation, so if you made more trees you
would be able to support more living animals. Since predators are larger,
they required more oxygen and would begin dying out sooner than smaller
animals should the population reach the O2 limit. This became a nightmare
to balance, so I completely removed it to make the game more entertaining.
It is a case of bending reality to improve game play.
The second regulator is animal age. The game simulated the fact that
animals would become slower and weaker with age, plus they should hit a
species-specific maximum age and die no matter how much food was around.
Once again, while it mimicked real life really well, it was just too
complicated to balance in the game. I was already sad about removing all
my oxygen related code, so instead of simply tearing out all of the aging
code, I heavily modified it to relax its impact up on the game. The way
it stands now, animals do age and become weaker, but there is no true
maximum that would force them to die regardless of food. Weaker animals
are simulated by having them burn through calories faster than their
younger counterparts, meaning they can't survive as long while they wait
for their next meal. When food begins to get scarce, the old animals are
the very first to die out. This code change was another alteration on how
things really work, but
it made the game more entertaining.
I suppose the point to explaining these changes is just to let you know
how the regulations had been removed or changed before the game released.
I really wanted to have Lunimals simulate real life as close as possible,
but as you can see, I desperately tried but ended up having to twist
things to improve game play. Oh well, that's just how games work I
suppose. It may set your mind at ease to know, there were! sweet spots in
the original design, lol. Of course I only had 4 species at the time, but
they could reach a perfect balance where their numbers remained fairly
steady without any regulation needed by the user.
I loved your description of mission 9, a cast iron female dog. ROFL! I'm
anxious to hear your thoughts on the final mission, once you reach it.
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