BeastEon won't have mutagens as items at all. Unlike BeastKeeper, breeding isn't a central gameplay mechanics there.

The lore says: "A number of animals owned and their renown both determine a keeper's position and status."

Does it effectively make it (partially, if not entirely) a collector's game? Will there be any advantages or disadvantages due to not having enough animals, or having too many?

Will the animal's renown change on their own (animal's) accord, or will there be need to focus on a social networking aspect of the game as well?

An unrelated question:

Acquireable animals, except birds, seem to be purely land-based. Do you plan to introduce a purely water-based ones too?

The lore describes the world from the point of view of this world's commoner. From the gameplay point of view, this particular mechanic actually works vice versa. The higher is the keeper's level, the more beasts they can have.

BeastEon isn't a pet collecting game. Of course, a player can decide to set a purpose and collect certain beasts but there won't be any game prizes or bonuses for that. Having more beasts will allow a player to participate in more game activities (i.e. different craft professions, explore, competitions - few pets won't have enough time for all of that), but it would be harder to sustain the loyalty of a big variety of beasts just because there are a lot of them, and each one wants something. 

The beast's renown depends on its deeds and achievements (visiting places of interest and fulfilling special tasks in explore, crafting masterpieces, winning the competitions).

We have a few water-based species concepts which we plan to introduce along with water explore in case if the game becomes successful and gets enough funding for further development.

It was awesome to visit the blog this morning and see little dragons running around. With proper shadows, too! Really adds to the depth. :D 
I was in the process of doing some low-poly models in case you wanted them later, but never mind (it was fun and good practice anyway). Can understand why you stay with sprites - I've been trying to test my equestrian models and iso backgrounds in a browser with Three.js, and it's a pain to learn. Even without any random generation, or other libraries to mix with.

Anyway, since you can change the dragon's texture and render own sprites with shadows (I don't even know how to do that yet), guess there's no need for me to make alpha map sheets? Will tweak the other animations and just send the blender files. If there are any other boring, minor art-chores you'd like to offload onto someone and save time, feel free to ask. :)


Back on topic: time for another round of question spam, they've been gathering for a while. Apologies for so much curiosity.

1. From the blog earlier, the dynamically-generated fish look great! I never imagined this could be used for items as well as beasts. Very creative idea. I'm curious how they will be named and described. Could that be done by the beast (lord) who discovers the item? Of course, entries would need approval by the "Beastopian Oceanic Instutite" or something (a moderator) to prevent bad language and fix spelling errors.

Otherwise, I assume something automated. "The Howling Minty Bubbler was identified by the unicorn Chronos in the summer of year 140, in a grassland lake 67 miles from Beastopia. It's notable for its powerful smell and glossy scales. It's energetic and often bites the fisherbeast." That sounded a bit too Dwarf Fortressy.

2. How does fishing work? I have the idea of a roc flying over water tiles and picking them up, like other resources. Or is it an action that any beast can try, at any shoreline?

3. Will there be buildings or other interactive objects on the map? Places to repair/modify/trade an item, be blessed/cursed with status effects, etc.

4. The relationship article mentioned beasts finding places to eat. Does that mean restaurants... actively maintained by beasts, like shops? Is cooking a learnable skill?

5. If a beast has negative abilities (like cockatrice's Stench or poisonous body), does it cause any social issues, or is it conveniently invisible for gameplay reasons?

6. It was mentioned long ago: "player-created breeds" or something like that. I don't know any games that have this feature or how it works, so could you explain what it means here?

7. I assume that beasts use telepathy to communicate with humans and each other. Who tames wild beasts and teaches them the language? Is it a job other beasts can do (in a gameplay or lore sense)?

8. Something I noticed in BK, comparing to roleplay and other games: all actions are strictly one-beast-at-a-time (except squads), so there can be zero interaction, random surprises, or strategy about using multiple at once. Obviously this is something you're trying to change in BE, very much so. Apart from exploring parties, in what other ways can we direct a group of beasts together? Sports have been mentioned a lot, presumably that involves teams... what about crafting workshops, needing a team of different skills/species to assemble a large item?

Marans (#53943) wrote:

It was awesome to visit the blog this morning and see little dragons running around. With proper shadows, too! Really adds to the depth. :D I was in the process of doing some low-poly models in case you wanted them later, but never mind (it was fun and good practice anyway). Can understand why you stay with sprites - I've been trying to test my equestrian models and iso backgrounds in a browser with Three.js, and it's a pain to learn. Even without any random generation, or other libraries to mix with.

Low poly modeling and retopologizing are great and very demanded skills in game development! We would definitely hire you for that if we ended up using native 3d models, your work is exceptional. Alas, we don’t have enough resources to realize something with 3d content.

Three.js is fantastic, we tried it as well. Our main issue was integrating 3d models with a 2d engine. We tried to find a working solution for that and were ready even to switch our framework to something else, but it turned out that there are no solutions that support both 2d and 3d at the same time in the manner we need. And there's a good reason for that! So the only way out would be developing such bridge from scratch, and this would consume monstrous amounts of time and efforts without offering any large benefits in our case. Explore models are important, but not that important to dedicate them so much resources and sacrifice everything else.

Anyway, since you can change the dragon's texture and render own sprites with shadows (I don't even know how to do that yet), guess there's no need for me to make alpha map sheets? Will tweak the other animations and just send the blender files. If there are any other boring, minor art-chores you'd like to offload onto someone and save time, feel free to ask. :)

Thank you so much! Yes, for now we need only the models. We've managed to set up automated sprite generation using Texture Atlas add-on. Color genetics isn't developed yet. We're trying to solve the most difficult tasks first, so it was moved to the end of the task queue as a thing which is pretty clear and just requires a bunch of time. I’ll make sure to note you if we need any art help with that :)

Back on topic: time for another round of question spam, they've been gathering for a while. Apologies for so much curiosity.

We’re happy to answer, no need for apologies! Some of the questions make us think about things we missed, so they are kind of useful for us as developers as well :)

1. From the blog earlier, the dynamically-generated fish look great! I never imagined this could be used for items as well as beasts. Very creative idea. I'm curious how they will be named and described. Could that be done by the beast (lord) who discovers the item? Of course, entries would need approval by the "Beastopian Oceanic Instutite" or something (a moderator) to prevent bad language and fix spelling errors.

You guessed just right! There will be an automatically generated description with the time and eon of discovery, the name of the beast and the username of the lord who discovered the item, and a list of effects that the new item has. The discoverer also will have a possibility to offer a name and a custom description which will be added to the item after moderation.

2. How does fishing work? I have the idea of a roc flying over water tiles and picking them up, like other resources. Or is it an action that any beast can try, at any shoreline?

Professions aren’t species-specific, but certain species may have advantages in certain professions. So the fishing will work from the shoreline. In the case of the manual control in the explore mode, there will be a simple minigame. It’s also possible to tell a beast to go and gather a certain type of resource itself, so the gathering will happen in the background.

3. Will there be buildings or other interactive objects on the map? Places to repair/modify/trade an item, be blessed/cursed with status effects, etc.

Yes! We also want to add building / object related challenges similar to those with monsters. A simple example of such challenge: a beast pack with no flyers finds a mountain called Sky Fang. This mountain is marked and has a description telling it is extremely high. A pack can interact with the mountain and engage a challenge similar to the one we described with a Mogera, but using skills related to alpinism instead of battle skills. If the pack succeeds in this challenge, the beasts will get an achievement “Conqueror of Mount Sky Fang”. It will also raise the renown of these beasts, and a new topic will appear in Beastopia for other beasts to discuss this heroic deed. Such topics are a way to sustain a connection between beasts in the city and beasts in explore, and beasts who spend all their time in explore won’t be forgotten by city members.

4. The relationship article mentioned beasts finding places to eat. Does that mean restaurants... actively maintained by beasts, like shops? Is cooking a learnable skill?

Yes, “shops” is just a dev term, we simply didn’t invent a good word for that yet :) They include all types of facilities including cafes and restaurants. And yes, cooking is one of the available professions.

5. If a beast has negative abilities (like cockatrice's Stench or poisonous body), does it cause any social issues, or is it conveniently invisible for gameplay reasons?

Such negative abilities will cause social issues. A lot of social interactions of a stinky cockatrice will be affected by his Stench. This beast can tell something interesting, share delicious food, help with a wound or do any other good thing, but each its action will be darkened by the foul odor decreasing the overall good impression. However, the indirect social interactions won’t take Stench into account, so this cockatrice may still be very popular. Indirect social interactions happen when other beasts discuss the subject, like in the example with Mount Sky Fang or when a crafter creates a masterpiece admired by others.

Besides that, Stench itself is a trait, and each beast has a personal attitude to it depending on its previous life experience. For example, a certain beast has a negative experience with a stinker who offended it. This beast may establish an association between aggression and Stench, and thus it will think all beasts with Stench to be bad by default. Or on the contrary, a beast may buy extremely delicious dishes from a stinky cook and establish an association between tasty food and Stench.

6. It was mentioned long ago: "player-created breeds" or something like that. I don't know any games that have this feature or how it works, so could you explain what it means here?

There will be no user created breeds, and here’s why. Initially we wanted BeastEon to be centered around individual beasts, their personality, and their training. Any encouragement for breeding and manipulating many generations to get a certain beast (or even a whole breed of beasts) will bring it down back to “breed by cooldown, discard all fails, generate thousands of unwanted trash beasts”. Breeding games are cool too, but there’s already a bunch of superb breeding games out there, so we don’t want to make this aspect of gameplay such important. We’re reworking the breeding system right now after some pen and paper playtesting. We want to provide a way to get that desired beast without the mass breeding. There will be a mechanic allowing to alter the genome of a baby. Besides that, the genetics doesn’t determine all of the beast’s qualities. It’s merely a potential which can be actualized in phenotype in a number of ways. We also want to avoid strictly good or bad genes except a few that provide species-specific abilities which probably will have their price as well.

7. I assume that beasts use telepathy to communicate with humans and each other. Who tames wild beasts and teaches them the language? Is it a job other beasts can do (in a gameplay or lore sense)?

Yes, beasts and lords communicate directly with their minds. This ability is innate and doesn’t need to be learned for basic communication. Actually this is not a supernatural ability or magic. We have this moment described in the lore, but we won’t be uncovering this piece right now because it’s supposed to be learned by players in the game itself :) Wild beasts are tamed by other beasts. There are a few ways how this can happen, but usually a pack uses persuasion and explains how great it is to live on a manor.

8. Something I noticed in BK, comparing to roleplay and other games: all actions are strictly one-beast-at-a-time (except squads), so there can be zero interaction, random surprises, or strategy about using multiple at once. Obviously this is something you're trying to change in BE, very much so. Apart from exploring parties, in what other ways can we direct a group of beasts together? Sports have been mentioned a lot, presumably that involves teams... what about crafting workshops, needing a team of different skills/species to assemble a large item?

You guessed both things correct again :)
Teams of beasts participate in competitions. A lord plays the role of a coach assembling a team and giving the advice for each match.
Workshops run by a group of crafters with different professions are planned as well. This will be a way to craft items with additional properties (except masterpieces created by lonely geniuses). We can take a classic fantasy MMO example here: assembling a complex armor piece requires not only a blacksmith but also a tailor to sew and embroider a tabard, and a jeweler to inlay the gems and add an engraving.

That all sounds fantastic, thanks for the answers!

Player-created breeds - OK, not sure where I read that term, probably mis-remembered something. I agree, the mass breeding can get kind of exhausting here, and there's something hollow about finally getting a random bunch of desired traits after heaps of "misses", all according to known probabilities. Apart from some strategy in choosing parents, mostly it's about patience to... well, keep spamming.

So in BE, all babies are basically equal in potential - just that it's allocated across different areas? That system sounds much more fun to work with.

Oh, and... "establish an association between aggression and Stench, and thus it will think all beasts with Stench to be bad by default. Or on the contrary, a beast may buy extremely delicious dishes from a stinky cook and establish an association between tasty food and Stench."

Pavlovian conditioning? In such detail? Once again, it's terrifying to imagine how complex your code must be and how many variable scenarios you have to think of. x)

I've read about neural networks imitating Shakespeare and other writing styles, but that seems extremely simple and robotic, compared to generating "learning" creatures with changing relationships, personalities and other real-time social interactions in a large community. This must be on a whole new level.

So after BeastEon is created, tested, etc, is it possible for BeastKeeper to sort of "come back", and have a new event?

Marans (#53943) wrote:

So in BE, all babies are basically equal in potential - just that it's allocated across different areas? That system sounds much more fun to work with.

Not ideally equal as the system is quite complex an it's impossible to balance it that way, but we'll be trying to approach that as close as possible. Well, at least close to the real world where everyone can find a field where his talents will show themselves, or at least substitute those talents with diligent work and at the end get the same results. The genes will determine only predispositions to certain things. While the amount of work to reach a certain result may be different for different beasts, in a perfect world any beast may become a master in a certain field.

Marans (#53943) wrote:

Pavlovian conditioning? In such detail? Once again, it's terrifying to imagine how complex your code must be and how many variable scenarios you have to think of. x)

Yes, and also Sechenov and Bekhtereva, the same school :) We took USSR school of neurophysiology as a basis because it treats the mind as a machine, and this approach can be easily transfered to the code.

DragonDreamers (#49105) wrote:

So after BeastEon is created, tested, etc, is it possible for BeastKeeper to sort of "come back", and have a new event?

No. BeastEon is actually the second version of BeastKeeper, it's supposed to become a better realization of the same world. Just like BeastKeeper, it's a browser game which will require constant updates and new content. Focusing on the new content for BK means taking away new content from BE.

First, a comment on the breeding article. It's always fascinating to hear about the design decisions being made behind the scenes, and the new system of FP sounds amazing! It actually seems like breeding will be rare and a fun challenge now.

When you mentioned altering a baby's genome, I had thought about Order of the Griffin, an old game based on breeding beautiful plumage. It allowed to change the temperature of an egg during different stages of incubation, and a female could choose a certain gemstone to keep in the nest, which all affected the chick's colour when it hatched. This kind of idea couldn't work for mammal species though...

To be honest, the old idea about sending unwanted beasts to "live in the manor" and randomly produce babies never appealed to me much. Sounded like annoying background noise, for a beastlord who wanted to focus on a few active beasts, and a great way to spam things up. So I'm glad you've scrapped that.

Anyway, on topic, a few more questions. :)

- What is the sense of time in BE? For example in a 24-hour day, between the updates, every beast needs to eat at least once, do at least one task, etc. Perhaps the day is even split into morning, afternoon, night schedules?

Also, what happens while a beastlord is offline (possibly for days, weeks, permanently)?

- If there is a day-night cycle, would it include the explore map? I just have the vision of overlaid coloured/dark filters changing the look, and Fog of War / Line of Sight / whatever it's called, affecting vision. A party with Night Vision ability (perhaps a puma skill), or carrying a torch, would see further.

- Actually, do any senses like Acute Eyesight still affect exploring, or is the view equal for everyone? In the way that crows and other birds tend to like shiny things, I thought of a gryphon "noticing" sparkles on certain tiles, and he would have an extra chance to pick up a gem or coin buried there. Or perhaps any beast with an interest or knowledge of gems/coins would notice it.

- Beastopia article mentions festivals and parades. I assume that's like the Exhibitions here? But they were before I joined, so the mechanics are a mystery. Some details of how festivals/parades might work would be nice.

- The article also mentions guard-beasts, in mechanised armour. I just love the idea of a dragon/gryphon wearing that kind of crazy Warlock-like gear, and am curious to see them, and what abilities the armour has. Perhaps you have some concept art of it? :)

Is there no way to send a pet to another player or to a nursing home instead of throwing it out on the street when you don't want it? This would really upset me... I've rescued cats that no one else wanted to feed, and homelessness is terrible.

The breeding revamp sounds very intriguing, but I'm also a little nervous about how it will actually play out. If breeding can only be accomplished by having high enough fame, new or less active players will struggle to breed a single new beast, if any at all. The early stages of the game would just involve tons of grinding to finally get more than two beasts, and that would be frustrating. 

It's common in pet sites for some players to get bored after a while, and decide to clean all the pets off their account so they can start fresh. Like resetting a game. But BeastEon would penalize them for doing so. If selling beasts or getting rid of them in any way is portrayed as a negative thing, then players will be stuck with the same beasts they had at the very beginning with no opportunity to get rid of them without being guilted by the game.

One would also expect that after playing the game for a while, a player would eventually breed beasts that were genetically superior to their starters, and that it would be more advantageous to build fame and train skills on these new beasts than stick with the starters. This would make the starters obsolete, but again, the game would penalize the player for trying to get rid of them. 

I understand your concerns about pets being treated resonsibly, but taking care of real-life pets isn't a game with any ulterior goal beyond simply giving the pet a happy life. (Unless you train them for competitions or something.) In a game, I'd want to have choices and possibilites, and limiting me to a small handful of beasts where new ones were very difficult to obtain and old ones could not be gotten rid of seems very inflexible. 

Thank you for the feedback and questions! :) 

Marans, we got your answers ready!

arete, Sumatra_Echo, we got your questions and will address them asap! Hold on a bit please. We need to sort out everything, discuss a few lore moments and polish the mechanics before I will be able to provide a cohesive answer. Looks like the problem is that you perceive BeastEon similar to other pet games in the market, and think of its gameplay as that of a collectible game. Probably this is our fault because a lot of gameplay aspects aren’t covered anywhere yet. Ideally, I need to prepare a series of posts, but I will try to get back to you sooner and answer as clear as I can without involving a few pages of description of mechanics.

-----------------------

Marans (#53943) wrote:

What is the sense of time in BE? For example in a 24-hour day, between the updates, every beast needs to eat at least once, do at least one task, etc. Perhaps the day is even split into morning, afternoon, night schedules?

It’s 24 hours with no times of a day or day/night cycle.

A beast has a pool of energy which is spent for different actions. There are two types of actions: instant and prolonged. Instant actions don't take time but can take energy, prolonged actions can take both time and energy. For example, shooing away a small pest from a Beast’s house and studying a book both take 1 energy but the first one doesn’t require any time while the second one lasts a few hours.

Some actions don’t require energy, and some even restore it (like eating food).

Each Beast has personal needs. The current value of its needs defines what it wants to do right now. So when, what and how much it will eat depends on its need for food which in turn depends on Beast's personal traits, likes/dislikes, and current state but not on the time of day. There are 7 types of needs: food, socialization, comfort (or entertainment), love, self-actualization, freedom, new impressions.

Marans (#53943) wrote:

Also, what happens while a beastlord is offline (possibly for days, weeks, permanently)?

Beasts continue to live their lives autonomously for a certain period of time (probably a week or two; this requires live testing and depends on how much server load such idle manors would create). They perform actions which don’t require a player’s decision and respond to other Beasts’ offers and inquiries. The loyalty doesn’t decrease at this time. When this time expires, the Beasts are “frozen". They stop doing anything and don’t respond the inquiries coming from other Beasts and Beastlords.

-Actually, do any senses like Acute Eyesight still affect exploring, or is the view equal for everyone? In the way that crows and other birds tend to like shiny things, I thought of a gryphon "noticing" sparkles on certain tiles, and he would have an extra chance to pick up a gem or coin buried there. Or perhaps any beast with an interest or knowledge of gems/coins would notice it.

 Abilities that improve exploring experience are planned, though we’ll need to gather some live data first to make them balanced. For example, if a certain species provides a substantial increase of gathering a very demanded material this may make this species too unbalanced (and we’ll get a boom for sharp-eyed Gryphons no matter which other qualities they possess).The thing is that right now we can’t tell which types of materials will be demanded and which won’t because this is decided by players. We can set only the relative rarity of a material in each eon, but we don’t know how much it will be wanted by players.

Marans (#53943) wrote:

Beastopia article mentions festivals and parades. I assume that's like the Exhibitions here? But they were before I joined, so the mechanics are a mystery. Some details of how festivals/parades might work would be nice.

Festivals in BE will be different from exhibitions in BK.

There are two types of such events:

1. Spontaneous events, something like crafts fairs. They are generated automatically, happen in background and don’t require any player's attention. Beasts gather together to showcase their achievements in a certain field. Let’s take a hypothetical pottery fair for example. The purpose of such fair is to exchange information between Beasts, and bragging about craft achievements. For example, a certain Beast knows how to craft clay pots so it came to a fair to show its work. There it sees a marble pot made by another crafter, and now it can try to craft a similar thing too without the painful path of discovering a new approach itself. Or it doesn’t know how to craft pots at all but gets on a pot fair, sees a beautiful ornate pot and decided to try pottery itself. Showcasing good work makes a Beast more popular. This is a way for crafters to get fame.
2. Organized festivals. Right now we have developed the mechanic for sports festivals, namely for the sporting hunt. Here a player participates directly: your task is to arrange a team, assign roles and serve as a couch by giving your Beasts advice how to behave in the current circumstances. There will be similar festivals for other culture sections (for example, music) but the mechanic isn’t developed for them yet. We want to test such mass events in a single sphere first.

Marans (#53943) wrote:

The article also mentions guard-beasts, in mechanised armour. I just love the idea of a dragon/gryphon wearing that kind of crazy Warlock-like gear, and am curious to see them, and what abilities the armour has. Perhaps you have some concept art of it? :)

The mechanized armor exists only in the lore right now, but we definitely will introduce it as a craftable armor set. It’s a very attractive concept, we can’t just miss the opportunity and not visualize it :)

All sounds good, thanks for the answers again!

I get the impression that BE is more like "The Sims" than an animal breeding sim-game. You try to focus on well-managing a single household and family, and seeking success using the lifetimes/interests of a few people, rather than breeding or swapping them for new people. You can still do those things occasionally, but it would be weird and inefficient to keep doing it all the time.

These sentient Sims just happen to be beast-shaped instead of human. Is that roughly correct?

Marans, yes, you got the idea! "Seeking success using the lifetimes/interests" pretty nails it. The main difference with The Sims is that you can intrude in the life of a sim at any moment and make it do anything, while in our case you don't play your Beast directly but rather interact with it like with a creature which has some type of free will. You may give it something, show something new, give advice and sometimes orders, and get something in return depending on the personality of a certain Beast. In this aspect it's probably closer to games like Rimworld and Dwarf Fortress.

Having read the last two posts on this thread, I think I understand better now. It's true that I was thinking of BeastEon as more of a collectible game, and The Sims makes a much better analogy. (I've never actually played, but I have a rough idea of how it works.) I'm liking this concept of having fewer beasts a lot better than the previous version, as managing the individual needs and personalities of dozens of beasts at once seems like more than I would have been able to handle.

Will still look forward to a more in-depth answer when you have it, but my concerns have been put to rest. Thanks for answering!