Game Development: Animal Domestication

[Peter]

or you could quit being a whiny baby and develop your character maybe i dunno

There are a great deal other games that begin to be fun less than six months after you start playing; for instance, Half Life 2 gives you a gun and a target after about five minutes; Oblivion lets you kill things after about ten.

While it's nice for games to break the curve, does H&H need to strive to make new players take a week of grinding before they can KILL A RAT?

[sabinati]

i dunno, i started having fun on day one, that's why i'm still here, 5 months and millions of LP later. i'm not saying the early game is perfect, by any means, but it's a slight hump to overcome. i didn't kill any bears in the first map, in fact i never even saw one. but there seems to be a lot of people who think that is the first thing they should be able to do, and other ridiculous notions of having high level content available immediately to new players. think about other rpgs you've played, you have to develop your character before you can do high level stuff. it's obvious that you're exaggerating for effect here.

all that being said, i think cows should be a bit less daunting, from taming to feeding. i hope that sheep aren't going to be just as bad, or it's going to be impossible for new players to make claims and other things that require dreams. who knows, maybe sheep will be much easier, and they will take my suggestion and make sheep milkable.

[Dwarfu]

Given that a calf needs to feed from a cow until it is grown, does this require direct access from the calf to cow (like mating) or general vicinity (like trough feeding)?

If you can't separate the calf from the cows, then if it grows into a bull, they will mate. This makes it nigh impossible to selectively breed if they can't be separated.

I mean, if you get a horrible calf (-2 all stats), you dang sure don't want it to grow into a bull and molest your delicious milk cows. Maybe have a day or so 'young adult' stage where they don't mate so you have at least some time to corral the new bull away from the cows.

[sabinati]

you should be able to determine the gender of a calf

[Dwarfu]

My question is whether or not the calf needs access to the cow. Even if you know it is a bull, you can't separate it because it needs to have milk. Therefore, if it grows up while you are offline or prancing about the land looking for mushrooms, then the newly grown bull can mate with the cows.

If the calf doesn't need access to the cow (and can feed like a trough radius), then everything is fine.

[sabinati]

by "you should be able to determine the gender of a calf ", i mean "i don't think you can currently determine the gender of a calf but you should be able to"

what i'm saying is that if you could determine the gender of a calf, and if it was a bull, and it had shitty stats, you could just kill it before it grew up

[Dwarfu]

i mean "i don't think you can currently determine the gender of a calf but you should be able to"
what i'm saying is that if you could determine the gender of a calf, and if it was a bull, and it had shitty stats, you could just kill it before it grew up

Ok, I see what you meant. I haven't had a calf yet, I wasn't sure if you saw its stats or not until it was grown. When [dev] said that the calf gives reduced results when slaughtered, it made me think that the calf doesn't achieve the full potential of its stats until it is grown (like a tree). But I guess you see the full stats and it is just a penalty against those if you slaughter it early.

I guess I could just wait for a calf to pop out, but was trying to prepare the pens ahead of time.

[sgtpepper]

Well I've been thinking about how much they eat and the pay off from it. We haven't been given any details on their eating habits, but we can assume they probably eat the same time the milking period resets, so every 100 real time minutes. That's 14.4 times a day. I'm guessing bulls and cows eat 2 fodder every time and pregnant\lactating cows eat 5-8. So for one milk cow you're looking at 70-120 fodder per real time day. To keep 1 bull and 2 milk cows it's gonna cost you about 160-260 fodder per day, and most players would manage to catch 2 milking periods a day if they play 2 hours a day.
So you'll be farming 50-80 squares of wheat in exchange for 4 liters of milk, enough for 1 unit of butter.

Edit: Selling 2 buckets of milk for a chest of silver or gold nuggets.

[sabinati]

i mean "i don't think you can currently determine the gender of a calf but you should be able to"
what i'm saying is that if you could determine the gender of a calf, and if it was a bull, and it had shitty stats, you could just kill it before it grew up

Ok, I see what you meant. I haven't had a calf yet, I wasn't sure if you saw its stats or not until it was grown. When [dev] said that the calf gives reduced results when slaughtered, it made me think that the calf doesn't achieve the full potential of its stats until it is grown (like a tree). But I guess you see the full stats and it is just a penalty against those if you slaughter it early.

I guess I could just wait for a calf to pop out, but was trying to prepare the pens ahead of time.

i think they said something like half the meat/intestine if you slaughter it early. and i don't think anyone has calves yet, not for a few more days, so we'll find out then if they can get milk in a radius or not, i guess.

[Shades]

or you could quit being a whiny baby and develop your character maybe i dunno

There are a great deal other games that begin to be fun less than six months after you start playing; for instance, Half Life 2 gives you a gun and a target after about five minutes; Oblivion lets you kill things after about ten.

While it's nice for games to break the curve, does H&H need to strive to make new players take a week of grinding before they can KILL A RAT?

Although it's not perfect it's not hear that bad, I signed up just over a week ago and other than the food panic at the start (I didn't realise the bar had multiple colours) it's been kinda fun. I'm happily killing level III critters and farming now and although I lack much in the way of equipment it's been enjoyable. No way I can get a cow though