August Development Update
Welcome to another development update! The Nestables team has grown this month as are currently finalising arrangements to bring on a new part-time developer to speedup development progress. Their focus will mainly be on polishing different gameplay aspects and assisting with other smaller tasks.
Development Progress
Biome Changes and New Resources
Since the pre-alpha, we have been working towards making it so that each biome in the game has at least one unique resource. This month, we have continued progress on this task by introducing brand new wood qualities.
You will be able to move the wood chopping station into different biomes to get different types of wood. The different wood types will be used for crafting items ingame at the workshop — not for the building editor at this stage. Not all different biomes will have a specific wood type. Those biomes will have other useful resources in them. Here are the wood types so far:
Next month, we will have some very cool biome improvements to show everyone as we unveil another large part of gameplay for Nestables.
Breeding Prerequisites
We have touched in previous posts on a number of requirements for Nestable breeding. Being a blockchain game, we have always decided it would be better to have too few Nestables rather than too many. The requirements can always be relaxed but it isn’t really possible to reduce the number of Nestables that will be in circulation.
With development work over the past few months focussing on breeding, trait inheritance and the link with the AI system, we have been refining the prerequisites for breeding. At this stage, these include the Nestable:
- Being an adult.
- Having more than 90 happiness.
- Not having bred in the last two weeks.
- Not having bred more than two times.
- Having at least 100 mutual affection. (May increase every subsequent child, requiring 200 for the second and 400 for the third child.)
- Not be in a parent, sibling, half — sibling or child relationship with potential partner.
We will continue to refine this list and the requirements over time depending on the balancing.
Nestable Affection
In order for two Nestables to breed, they need to accumulate sufficient mutual “affection ”. Affection is not necessarily reciprocated, meaning one Nestable can have more affection for another.
Affection can be generated “naturally” whenever two Nestables interact, the amount depends on the individual happiness of the Nestables and the type of interaction that is occuring. The Nestable’s social and cleanliness rating will also play a key role in determining the level of affection. The alternative and much faster way to generate affection will be through gifting tea as we discussed a few months ago in the June development update.
To put things more simply, when two or more Nestables interact, all of them “send” and “receive” affection points. How many points each Nestable sends depends on the interaction occurring and its Social and Cleanliness stats in equal proportion. How many points a Nestable receives depends on its overall happiness (equal proportion of all stats).
In future updates, we will be talking more about the other benefits that generating affection between Nestables can have.
Juvenile Nestable Behavior
One other gameplay area that has been worked on over the past month, has been developing how baby Nestables grow up — essentially the juvenile phase.
The juvenile phase will be split into two parts: Toddler and Adolescent.
Toddlers can interact with unproductive interactable objects only if supervised by an adult. Toddlers can’t interact in any way with productive interaction objects such as wood chopping, farming etc. Only special toddler toys will allow the toddler to stay alone.
This focus in this phase is to keep the toddler happy, fed and clean. This will give the baby Nestable the best chance that one of it’s traits might gain a level. Toddler Nestables will also degenerate their stats much faster than adult or adolescent Nestables. They will be high maintenance!
The juvenile will not be able to do anything productive (exploration, mining, woodchopping, cooking, farming) and will only be able to interact with an object if an adult Nestable is already using it. This will reduce the efficiency of the task being done by the adult.
Adolescents will be able to play with both toddler and adult toys. They can interact with a productive interaction object if there is an occupied adult slot in the same object.
This kind of interaction will reduce the productivity of the task, but will count as research of the related task for the adolescent.
