- Sep 12, 2020
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Say I have a male wolfman and a female catgirl. Right now, the mechanics are very limited for what the possible offspring are. You will either get a male wolfman xor a female catgirl when they breed; the traits they have are basically somewhat randomly distributed from parents to child; you can't breed them together as far as I know and get a wolfgirl or a catboy. The sex and the species are bound genetic traits in the current mechanics and the inheritance of formal traits like "Loving X/4" is basically random.Porn games, come for the porn, stay for the lessons on genetic inheritance.
It was very interesting, but how do you implement any of that into gameplay? and into fun gameplay?
Also, I didn't understand Derp Farming and how it's more efficient. I make my monsters inbreed all the time anyway, but it was for the kink factor
I remember BS had some mechanic were severe inbreeding produced Gremlins, which I always thought was interesting and could be expanded. Free Cities has genetic damage, I think, to measure inbreeding. If breeder energy was replaced for individual energy for monsters, inbreeding could cause traits that reduce their amount of energy, a penalty on fertility, or an "ugly" trait that reduces Exp gain.
The issue is that the team has to be careful with any acknowledgement of incest because that's an easy way to get kicked out of Patreon.
This is where the Derp Farming comes in. If you want a monster with all traits at maximum then you need at least one monster with each trait at level 1. You breed the original monsters together pairwise till you have an offspring that has the combination of the parent's traits. Say our wolfman has Fertile and Lightning and our catgirl has Cute and Smart. Our target is to breed an offspring that has Fertile, Lightning, Cute, and Smart. Once we have that offspring then we breed them with one of the parents till we get Fertile 2, Lightning 2, Cute 1, Smart 1 XOR Fertile 1, Lightning 1, Cute 2, Smart 2. We keep breeding the resulting offspring with respective parents or siblings based on sex pairs until we finally have a massively inbred (wolfman XOR catgirl) that has {Fertile 4, Lightning 4, Cute 4, Smart 4}.
Trying to do this where you are not breeding any offspring with any parent or sibling or member of their family (non-derp-farming) drastically increases the number of steps required to accomplish the same outcome. Absent of obsticles or complicating mechanics you should in Breeding Farm Unity version 0.15 always Derp Farm a minimum number of original ancestors bought/acquired.
The significance of this is that besides cosmetic appearances all the monsters are effectively homogeneous and from the point of functionally trying to max-min the stats of a given monster we should be indifferent to what monsters we start with and end with. That means to me less interesting game mechanics and a lot of tedious grind.
The Breeding Season team put quite a bit of thought into how to make different breeding patterns and strategies interesting. You can Derp farm, but they designed in mechanics that makes it so that is not the only and incontestably best possible strategy. They also put some thought into how to keep the monsters mechanically distinct from each other so that you'd want to collect many different monster types and create multiple monster families. I don't necessarily think from a game mechanic design perspective that inbreeding should be only penalized as that also limits the strategic diversity of the game.
I generally think that some recessive traits should be desirable traits and some dominant traits should be undesirable traits. Infertility is sometimes very useful to have.
Also, Breeders of Nephylem has some interesting patterns of inheritance to look at. There are traits which help with derp farming and traits that interfere with derp farming.
One practical immediate suggestion that I am urging is to decouple species from sex selection. For human + monster breeding patterns it makes some sense for the offspring to always be a monster of the non-human parent, but it doesn't necessarily make sense for the offspring to always be the same sex as the monster parent.
In Portals of Phereon, there's a lot of traits for monster breeding. Fertile comes in three different varieties; one is Virile that improves the breeding stats of males while decreasing the breeding stats of females whereas Fertile is the trait that improves the breeding stats of females while decreasing the breeding stats of males and Breeder which improves all breeding stats. POP chose to make Fertile and Virile mutually exclusive, so characters can't have both simultaneously; this creates a dynamic in the patterns of inheritance for those traits that is strategically interesting. It would be possible to make similar traits that are always passed on in certain patterns of inheritance. Imagine there is a "Fertile" trait that is sex-linked to the matrilineal pattern of inheritance, so if the mother has the "fertile" trait then all her children get it, or suppose it is specifically sex-linked to matrilineal and X-chromosome inhertance, so only her daughters get it. Suppose there's a trait like that for male characters?
One pattern of inheritance I didn't talk about is hybrid patterns of inheritance. So there's reproduction between horses and donkeys for example. Or homo sapiens and neanderthal. When you take a male horse and a female donkey and get them to produce an offspring you get a hinny. When you take a female horse and a male donkey you get a mule. They're genetically distinctly different; if you take a hinny or a mule and you have them reproduce with a horse or a donkey or with each other then you get different outcomes. Generally, hinnies and mules are sterile, but they can sometimes reproduce.
"Mules and hinnies have 63 chromosomes, a mixture of the horse's 64 and the donkey's 62." In the rare case where a mule can and does reproduce it is generally a mare, and she usually ends up giving birth to what appears to be a horse or a donkey. Similar can go on with hinnies. There's this thing called Haldane's Rule which states that if an offspring of a hybrid parentage is fertile they will likely be a female; it is related to differences in chromosome length in the gametes of interbreeding species; sperm carrying lower chromosome count than the ova tend to produce viable offspring more often than the other way around. This is relevant when you want to model cross-species reproduction.
This is a place where Portals of Phereon excels with its hybridization system of species. Basically the species of a character is treated as an independent inheritance trait. Succubus + Succubus = Succubus, but Succubus + Centaur = Cowgirl. A Cowgirl + a Cowgirl can result in a Cowgirl, a Centaur, or a Succubus. There's something of a missed opportunity in an absence of species-linked traits or species AND sex linked traits. You might have a trait that is dormant in certain configurations but becomes active in special conditions like a catgirl with succubus ancestry but not in a wolfman with succubus ancestry.
The breeding in Breeding Farm as it currently is, is lackluster, I think. Breeding Season had to come up with a bunch of new mechanics just to have something that had some kind of game play. It has been many years since and there are now half a dozen relatively well developed spiritual successors that have made creatively different choices than the Breeding Season development team did or innovated on the proof of concept mechanics laid out by the BS team.
I was one of the early playtesters that stress tested Breeding Season (achieving 0 debt within relatively short time periods that were thought and explicitly designed to be unachievable by the devs at the time), and I was play testing and providing devs reports up to the day it all fell apart. Breeding Farm in its current state exists such that it is possible to radically rebuild the breeding mechanics without having to fight too significant sunk costs. Laying out the barebones for these kinds of changes won't be possible for much longer if the breeding system continues to get developed and the number of monsters starts to climb.
The question to me then is less "how do you implement any of that into fun gameplay?" and more "is the current implementation fun gameplay?" Cause it has promise, but if iterated strictly from what is currently presented it will be tedious, boring, and ultimately unrewarding IMHO.
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