HTML How to "prevent" incest in my game?

[PinkArdillaDev]

I'm making a game where you can have children and a harem, and people age and get old (like Crusader Kings).
The game is set in medieval times with other races besides human.

Question: What could I do to prevent the illegal incest?
What if instead of raising a baby, the gods take your baby and give you a "seed" that will sprout and create a human, not related to you, child?
Is this enough to circumvent this or will I have to hard-code restrictions with close relatives?

Also, what if the seed sprouts a full grown 18yo adult human (so I don't have children in the game at all), do I technically need to wait 18 years until the seed sprouts?
What if it sprouts 1 year after? Or 100 years after?

 

[PinkArdillaDev]

I just realized people might even attempt to go for sisters, mothers... I didn't even consider this since I'm not into incest

 

[DawnCry]

First of all I find it weird that you wanna invest time into something like this, even more when games like crusaders kings actually have incest haha.

Now, if you truly want to prevent any incest in the game the easy way would be to NOT have family members in the game, but if you truly want to have family members the easiest way would be to create a tag to said character type then those characters that have said tag lock for them all romantic interactions.

But still you would have to define many aspects like up to which point are you considered family, how many generations apart from origin would you lose that tag, because if not there is a possibility that all the population ends up becoming family at some point.

 

[whowhawhy]

create a tag to said character type then those characters that have said tag lock for them all romantic interactions.

and an option to ask the local seer for an equivalent of a dna test or the priest to look into birth records to find out you're not related, enabling the interactions.

 

[PinkArdillaDev]

First of all I find it weird that you wanna invest time into something like this, even more when games like crusaders kings actually have incest haha.

Now, if you truly want to prevent any incest in the game the easy way would be to NOT have family members in the game, but if you truly want to have family members the easiest way would be to create a tag to said character type then those characters that have said tag lock for them all romantic interactions.

But still you would have to define many aspects like up to which point are you considered family, how many generations apart from origin would you lose that tag, because if not there is a possibility that all the population ends up becoming family at some point.

I'd allow incest but I need this to be Patreon friendly if possible. I don't have anything against it but also it's not the focus of the game, which is to inseminate random women peasants, ladies, fighters, mages, etc.
The usual trick is to have "step-" but that's tricky to do here.

 

[woody554]

I'd allow incest but I need this to be Patreon friendly if possible. I don't have anything against it but also it's not the focus of the game, which is to inseminate random women peasants, ladies, fighters, mages, etc.
The usual trick is to have "step-" but that's tricky to do here.

so is the point that your game generates new NPCs and you need an automated way to figure out 'incest or not'? and what you're asking is how to program your NPCs in a way that stores their close relatives somehow and runs a check on it before sex events?

the ways you suggested (steps/gods/sprouts whatever) are all incest to patreon IF they grew up in the same family. they don't care if they're unrelated they care about the optics of being raised in the same family.

 

[PinkArdillaDev]

No, @woody55 what I meant to say is that you can have daughters in the game, and if you play as your son then you'll have sisters and so on, and currently there's no system that checks for incest.

I guess I'll straight out disable incest completely, safest thing to do.

 

[Kamishirov]

How about if all women of noble birth were forced to enter a nunnery and you can only breed with random nuns, you could code it so that the likelihood of exotic nuns from foreign lands would be chosen... or women who are captured as slaves from foreign sieges/raids, or peasant women who have no lineage and are under your lecherous service, or girls cast low that you happen to come across in countryside villages or on filthy urban streets, girls who have to pay you with their lewd bodies due to their various unfortunate circumstances such as being in a family that can't feed and barely clothe them.



You could also have a "pot luck" incest system for extra spicy danger, maybe the Gods will force you to suffer from a lucky dip into your sister or cousin who just so happens to be the "indulgence" assigned to your bedchamber inside the nunnery.

 

[PinkArdillaDev]

How about if all women of noble birth were forced to enter a nunnery and you can only breed with random nuns, you could code it so that the likelihood of exotic nuns from foreign lands would be chosen... or women who are captured as slaves from foreign sieges/raids, or peasant women who have no lineage and are under your lecherous service, or girls cast low that you happen to come across in countryside villages or on filthy urban streets, girls who have to pay you with their lewd bodies due to their various unfortunate circumstances such as being in a family that can't feed and barely clothe them.

A lot of this will be implemented as you'd play as an army leader and traveller.

You could also have a "pot luck" incest system for extra spicy danger, maybe the Gods will force you to suffer from a lucky dip into your sister or cousin who just so happens to be the "indulgence" assigned to your bedchamber inside the nunnery.

No. That's literally the point of this post, how to avoid straight up incest for Patreon while allowing certain freedom to keep that niche happy.

 

[Catapo]

Ok, not sure if I understand correctly what you want to achieve. Also I never played Crusader Kings so I am sorry if I misunderstand some aspects.

If you want to prevent sexual content with underage NPCs the obvious solution is to store their age and any sexual interaction with said npcs to be blocked, and maybe provide a way for players to skip years ahead without ruining the gameplay, or as you said some kind of method to accelerate growth: gods or magic or whatever.

The problem of preventing incest on the other hand is very interesting and made me think for a bit. So here is a quick untested thought on how I would approach the problem:
For each NPC I would store the following:
1. A generation number - a simple number that might be useful for some stuff, each NPC would have their generation = max(mom generation, dad generation) + 1
2. A gender - male or female - 0 or 1 or however
3. A "genetic encoding" of sorts, a simple representation of who the parents are.
For example let's use a 2 character hexadecimal representation for the first generation of NPCs this allows you to have 255 females and 255 males, a total maximum of 510 NPCs in your first generation since you can reuse them.
Each child would have their genetic encoding as a concatenation of the parents encoding or some other way of storing the parents encoding.
The child of 1A and 2C will have the encoding 1A2C for example, also note that padding with 0s might be needed in some relations to help with even splitting: The child of 1A and 2B3D could be 001A2B3D
4. An additional separate number to differentiate multiple children of the same parents while still keeping the same encoding: 1A2C (1) and 1A2C (2) for example

When you compare 2 NPCs you compare their encodings and you have the following situations:
- Same encoding and same child number = same person - should be impossible but I added it anyway.
- Same encoding, different child number = brother or sister
- one npc full encoding matches half of the other npc = mother / father or uncle / aunt, you could differentiate exactly if needed by using the child number from parents in the encoding somehow
- one npc full encoding matches a quarter of the other = grandparents
- half of npc encoding matches half of other npc = cousins.

And so on by this point I hope you get the ideea.

The immediate drawback to this is as generations grow the encoding would get way too large and at some point you would have to cleverly reset them and recompute them for all the living npcs.

This is just a quick ideea I came up with while thinking on the problem, obviously with more time and tought put into it better ideas could come but I hope at least I gave you a good starting point.

Apologies if this is not what you wanted

 

[Qahlz]

One of the easiest way to prevent incest seems to be what Breeders of the Nephelym has implemented:
Each character has its parents stored in their character sheet.
If you attempt to mate two characters it checks if one of the characters is the parent of the other, or if they share one or more parents.
If either of these is true, mating is disabled. Not sure if that game also prevents incest with grandchildren, but that could also be prevented by checking if a parent's parents are one of the mating partners. I don't think you'll have to worry about cousins.

If you make it easily patchable, so that "someone" could enable incest content, you might be able to appeal to a wider audience.

 

[Count Morado]

I'd allow incest but I need this to be Patreon friendly if possible. I don't have anything against it but also it's not the focus of the game, which is to inseminate random women peasants, ladies, fighters, mages, etc.
The usual trick is to have "step-" but that's tricky to do here.

Incest is not allowed on Patreon for sexually gratifying purposes. You should reach out to Patreon about your game and your concern, have a conversation with the people who will make the decision. Save all conversations for documentation.