One of the core concepts of BeastEon is that each beast has personality and free will. Most of the events in beast’s life will happen without player’s control. A beast will decide itself what to do, informing its lord about the result of its action through the activity log. This way we want to build a life like society of unique personalities that will resemble living beings when it comes to behavior. In the article on Tumblr  we explained the very basics of neural networks to show the mechanism that stands behind the making of decisions. Let’s move to the next level and see how these algorithms will be actually used in the game when talking about relationships between beasts.

What is the role of relationships except simulating the behavior of a live system?

• Relations affect how beasts spends their leisure time, like where they go out to eat or who they decide to visit
• Beasts occasionally initiate quests asking their lord to fulfill their wishes. Such quests may appear both from the inner desires of your beast and under the influence of their friends, enemies or sweethearts
• The effectiveness of an exploration party highly depends on the relations between its members. The same works for sports and art teams for contests
• Beasts may inspire each other to do something, for example, to draw, sing or dance
• Beasts may cause anger or envy making your beast spend its action points on harmful  or useless activity instead of something positive and productive
• Beasts remember the most important things that happened with them, and use these memories in future interactions

How do beasts start interacting with each other?

Every relationship starts with the first meeting. There are a few possibilities for your beast to meet some new faces:

• Beasts make new acquaintances themselves when they have leisure time. Your beast randomly chooses where to go and who to meet. The chances are higher that the decision will be to meet someone famous, someone who your beast has heard about from friends, or someone who lives in your friend’s manor.
• You as a lord can use your authority points and tell your beast to go and meet someone.
• Finally, beasts can meet each other in the outer world while exploring.

The relationship between two beasts is represented as a scale ranging from -100 to 100. The higher the value, the better are the relationships with 100 being the best buddies and -100 being that guy who pisses you off by his mere presence.

Usually, a relationship starts from 0 being neutral. Though your beast may have some type of preliminary attitude to its new acquaintance even before saying the first “Hello!” Such attitude is built based on all indirect interactions that two living beings may have - hearing what others tell about that individual, knowing its relationships with your friends and family, seeing the results of its work or just judging by the appearance without knowing the personality (yes, the wrong first impression happens even among beasts!).

From the moment when two beasts get acquainted, they start interacting with each other occasionally to satisfy their need for socializing. They share the news, discuss different things, argue, exchange impressions, spending leisure time together and so on. As a result, the relations start to change slowly. Sometimes your beast may decide to impress its friend and ask you to help through a wish. For example, your male unicorn finds out that this shy unicorn lady likes flowers, and he asks you to find a rare desert lily to make a unique gift. If everything goes fine, this gift will drastically improve the relationships of these two beasts.

There can be an opposite situation as well if your beast doesn’t like its acquaintance. Let’s imagine that beasts have different political preferences: one of them supports Administratum and the other is a fan of Warlocks. Accompanied by the lack of self-control and a certain environment, this situation may resolve as a nasty fight that will drop the value of relations even more. And if that fight affects other beasts, for example, by damaging their property or scaring them, they will get angry on the brawlers as well.

The relation value isn’t the same for both involved beasts. While one of them may see the other as a buddy, that “buddy” may show no interest in friendship.

Among all the regular relationships, there are two special ones - the Sweetheart and the Nemesis. The relations with these two beasts can rise higher than 100 and drop lower than -100 respectively. A romantic relationship is possible only with the Sweetheart, while active negative actions and wishes - only with the Nemesis. A beast can have only one Sweetheart and one Nemesis at the same time.

Romantic Relationships

Romantic relationships appear between two beasts who have maxed out relation value. Although first they must experience a turning point. A turning point is an exciting event, a confession or a date that helps a beast to analyze its feelings. When this happens, a neural network will make a decision basing on all the relevant information about the partner and situation:

• The lineage
• Physical development and health
• Interests, need either of the following:
  • beasts share the same interests
  • beasts don’t share the same interests but one of them is very eloquent and involves the other into its interests
  • beasts don’t share the same interests but one of them has “Open-minded” perk
• Fame and success
• If the partner is a nonconformist or following the trends
• The impact of the moment

The turning point may happen before the relation value reaches, though this is a rare event. However, a sudden love is possible. For example, a patient can fall in love into a doctor who healed him from a dangerous illness.

The relation value jumps to 150 if a beast decides that it has fallen in love. Such value is possible on for the Sweetheart. All other beasts can’t have the value higher than 100.

Except providing a plethora of exciting feelings, romantic relationship is the only way for two beasts to have a baby.

As a Beastlord, you may have high plans for some of your thoroughly bred beasts and don’t want them to fall in love into a beast with no background. In this case, you may assign a contract marriage. A contract marriage means that two children were promised each other as spouses. There’s still a chance that they fall in love with someone else, but it’s lower than usual. When they reach adult age, you will get a quest to prepare for their first date. Unlike spontaneous romance where partners may barely know what to do and how to impress each other and not to blunder, here you come prepared, and the chances that these two will fall in love are significantly higher. However, if that first date fails, a beast becomes free from any promises and can start searching for the true love on its own.

There can be only one Sweetheart at the same time. A beast needs to end the current romantic relationship first before starting a new one.

Sometimes it may happen that a beast falls in love with someone of different species or same gender. If these feelings are reciprocated, the couple will build the relationships as usual with one restriction - they can’t have children.

Negative relationships and the Feud

Every little thing that may lead to love or friendship may also result in a negative reaction. Different interests, preferences, character traits and past deeds may cause disagreements, quarrels and rumbles. Usually, a beast just tries to avoid those who it doesn’t like and gets into conflicts only because of an unfortunate combination of circumstances. However, there’s one special case - the Feud, when a beast may start purposefully searching for its Nemesis and spending action points to persecute it and do something harmful (provoke a fight, break or spoil the belongings, spread unpleasant rumors).

Being opposite to romantic relationships, the Feud appears when a beast detests someone fiercely. The relation value drops lower than -100 for the Nemesis. A regular enemy may turn into the Nemesis both through a turning point and without it just as a sum of all negative interactions between two beasts.

It’s possible that two enemies will revise their attitude to each other, either through reconciliation initiated by one of them or through indirect means helping them to understand that the other party isn’t such a bad guy. For example, it may happen that both beasts are artists, and they like the pictures of each other. Or they may have a common friend who improves their relations (“my friend’s friend is my friend as well”). Even neutral business interactions can help here: if one of the beasts is a doctor, and another got an injury and then was healed by that doctor, the patient will be grateful for help.

Relationships through time

The passed time doesn’t change the relationship value until it stays within -100...100 range. In the case of the Sweetheart and the Nemesis the value tends to return in the range of the scale, and active interaction between beasts is needed to maintain the extended value. So if a male doesn’t pay any attention to his beloved female for a certain amount of time, she may decide to search for someone else who will value her more than he did.

Neutral interactions

A lot of everyday interactions happen without involving the personal feelings. Trading, service rendering, business collaboration, and other similar activities almost don’t affect the relations between two pets. However, the relations may affect the neutral interactions. A beast won’t trade with its Nemesis while it may render a service for a good friend for free.

That’s all great, but how can I make my beast do something that I want?

You as a Beastlord have a certain authority level that you use to order your beast to do or not to do something. For example, your orders may look like these:

• Go mine some ore
• Avoid meeting Basil the Dragon
• Pay attention to classical music
• Go and reconcile with Fluffy the Puma

As long as the order is active, it will lock an authority point from your pool. You can increase your authority level in the following ways:

• Winning sports competitions
• Winning art competitions
• With the help of specific buildings, artifacts and quests
• Offering a private competition to another Beastlord and winning it
• Fulfill  your beast’s wishes to get limited authority points that work only with that certain beast

We tried to cover only the core concepts here, but the article is quite lengthy already. Feel free to write us if you have any questions or would like to hear more! We would love to hear your thoughts, ideas and suggestions!

Thank you for reading, and may your relationships always stay at their maximum value! :)

Aww the illustrations are too adorable, especially the first one. <3

I feel so sorry for the blue gryphon. That sad little face... :)

Wow, When my bests will do they quest and exploring? They'll have so much social life ;)

I'm joking, but, really, I can't imagine how it's gonna work and what kinf of role will beat lords play. It's look like all pets will be very independent.

I love these so much :D

Does it cost anything to make a contract marriage?

Jazsam8, sure it will as you need to impress the potential groom or bride. There's no developed mechanics for this yet, but most likely it will look like a quest where you need to collect resources and craft things for gifts or dowry, prepare some kind of ceremony for the first date, and make your beast ready to meet its potential spouse.

Thankyou :), also, who does the drawings? They're really good,I especially like the puma and unicorn!

Both illustrations for this article were created by Shwampy.

Important question! Will, for example, a female roc be able to have a sweetheart of the same gender?

QueenSairai, yes, and even of a different species :) Though this would happen more rare than "classical" model of relationships and will highly depend on the personality of a certain beast. Naturally babies are possible only in male-female couples, so such couples are considerably more common while the population level is maintained.

Ok! Thank you!

Wow! This is really cool, I will need to make an account when this game comes out!

Can a beast fall in love with another user's pet?

Yes, and this is a very probable scenario just because the variety of beasts outside the home manor is a lot bigger than inside it.

whould you beast be more likely to fall in love with a pet in your manor or a friends pet then strangers? And can you arrange marriages between your pets and a friends? also, is it possible for two pets to fall out of love?