| Toady: | The vampires have a significant number of obstacles of course because they have their own little tropey trope tropes that kind of need to be looked at for them, but for the intelligent undead and mostly the construct guys - like the Frankenstein's monster type thingy - those aren't so bad, I've got most of the stuff I need for them. The only thing I need for the Frankenstein's monster is that it's not an animated corpse, right? Because I hadn't really thought about this, I think, when I was talking to Rainseeker so I don't remember what I said there but it's going to really need a soul creation effect. It's like a new critter living in an old body in a way. I think there were these knock on effects like it might have some memories from its old body or something, but it's kind of a genuinely new creature learning how to deal with the world in a way. So we'll have this kind of ... it's not going to be all sciencey with lightning most likely, although there's no reason not to do that really except for the silliness of it - which is fine because we have werecapybaras after all - but it's just going to be some kind of soul creation secret thingy, I don't know if it's going to be related to what the necromancers already do, because it's probably going to be the necromancers doing it, at least at first, obviously we can diversify. Then you can have these kind of glued together bodies with weapons grafted on their arms and then they can be ... I don't know why they respond to the world in such a negative way, but maybe it's just because at first the necromancer is just telling them to be bad, from when they a little baby Frankenstein's monster critter, and they were just like 'You've got to hurt people and be bad', and they were like 'Okay, I'll go and be bad'. It would be cool for them to have some autonomy later and not necessarily be evil, but at first they're probably just going to be for spamming your fortress with weirdass constructed monster axe-wielding half sutured together things. |
| Capntastic: | Yeah, that's the kind of feel I get with the current night creatures and bogeymen, it's like you put them in and you've got to have a way for players to immediately get jumped by them and beat up to death, you know. |
| Toady: | Yeah, it's really the only way we can relate to our world right now. But, yeah , we always hope for ... the whole release five 'make your world come alive' thing will hopefully start with ... When was the personality rewrite? Someone's got to remind me of all this stuff. Personality rewrite right now is number eight, and that'll be good. Release five with release eight, assuming those things remain in their current position because release eight's personality rewrite could be moved up to release five, which is ... release five is when the world comes alive, right? That's what we've been selling it as anyway. You have the populations, there can be birth and replacement for successions, people eating and using up their food after world generation ... Right now all that stuff happens in world generation and we basically want to throw forward as many non armyish things from world generation that we can, and in order to do that we probably will need the personality framework so I might move that up. That's also when we can start considering having autonomous constructed vehicle people that can thing. I said autonomous vehicle just because I think that was in one of those 'How It's Made' episodes that was ... |
| Capntastic: | 'Machines did it!' |
| Toady: | Yeah, it was like 'Here, watch the autonomous vehicle ride down this hallway and do seven hundred different tasks' it was pretty cool. But anyway ... Where will we go ... So the vampires are going to have framework issues ... |
| Capntastic: | They're going to have to be really cool. They're just going to be, you know, throwing wine goblets at you and ... |
| Toady: | That's right. Diamond skin and vampire babies, that's what we've got to have. |
| Capntastic: | ... backdashing, and other Castlevania reference ... |
| Toady: | That's right, we're going to transform into vermin, and if we can do it we can transform into gas, that's cool, that's always cool to transform into gas. |
| Capntastic: | Can you turn into a ghost and go through walls? |
| Toady: | There would be absolutely no problem with that ... |
| Capntastic: | Can you mod in a rock that when you touch it you turn into a ghost, or a plant that you eat it and turn into a ghost? |
| Toady: | What do we have? Because I was thinking what syndromes actually work. I don't think ingested syndromes work ... I don't recall, I don't think they do, which would mean that you might need to have a thing where it makes gas. People have been good at making gasses ... what would that be ... Because you have all those adventure mode ... people can mod in an adventure mode reaction where you do it just like butchering a corpse or sharpening a knife, but it turns it into a material that turns into a gas, and then when you breathe the gas the effect happens. I think people were doing that, I think that works, and then you do all kinds of things like, you take your magic twig that you've found somewhere - however you get that in - and then you do the special breaking-the-twig modded in reaction, that turns the twig into an item with a high boiling point that shoots out a gas that makes it so you can breathe underwater. Then you have a water breathing under ... twig .. thing. |
| Capntastic: | That's how magic works. |
| Toady: | That's how it works right now, yeah. So there's a certain degeneracy to that, but obviously I think there'll be an increasing desire to do thing like ingestion systems which are really just like one line of code. They should be ... I think I already have the whatchamacallit, the trigger class for injection ... or maybe not? What syndromes styles do I ... 'injected' might be what I was thinking of, I'm trying to think of my syndrome words. Yeah there's injected syndromes, contact syndromes, inhaled syndromes and the contact syndromes don't work for just like touching a rock I think, so we just need to add ingested syndromes and then we can forgo all this nonsense. So that'll be good, eventually, sometime, who knows when. And making vampires get messed up by the sun, that's always good. The thing that's tricky with vampires is the contagion process; the turning of another vampire. Because ideally you'd want them to be able to come and visit a dwarf three times or whatever, it's like when your dwarf is sleeping a vampire will come and visit them, or you could be hunted by one in adventure mode, whenever you sleep then you could be being stalked by a vampire, but there needs to be countermeasures or that's no longer fun, with a lower case 'f'.
So that's the last giant project, like werewolves have taken a while, I think we've been a week on werewolves now or something, and the others have all taken about that much time, and so if we spend a week on vampires then we should have a significant batch of new stuff associated to them, and then we can kind of knock off some of the others and it'll be good, it'll be good. Then we get back to markets and then we'll be done, and it won't have taken all year. Of course there's going to be time ... we have to definitely do sponsored animals, because ... We were thinking, if we're not through with the sponsored animals by December, which is the year anniversary of the sponsored animals, then we'll have done kind of a disservice to the world, like you can't have a pledge drive and then take more than a year to do all the stuff. That means we'll have to accelerate that process which will mean we'll be doing a little bit less of other things, but not that much less. There's a hundred and twenty something animals left, but they can't all have the bee treatment, where we spent like a month on the bee. We spent an extreme amount of time on the bee, but the bee won, so that's why the bee got the treatment. Hopefully there won't be ... I mean, you can't add things like, there's some critters on there like leeches and mosquitoes, you can't add leeches and mosquitoes without adding more stuff, but certain ones might get no new tags. But we'll try our best to make it cool for all of the little critters. |
| Ollieh: | (musical interlude) |