We’ve been spending time gathering the concepts for our initial creature set. We’ve tried to get a broad selection of creatures from purely combat-based to more interesting and sandbox creatures. We’ve put together this image to show the (rough) scale of the creatures relative to each other.
Many of these concepts will need working up or adjusting to fit their purpose, but it should give you an idea of what we’re aiming to deliver for 1.0. Also we are looking to add lots of variation within each type, as Claudio showed with his variation exploration.
Very nice
Hope i don’t meet the big one when i am out and picking berries… He look angry.
And if you kill the thing with a raw of cubes, and hit a pair of sixths, or a full house, you get a nice reward…
I like that there are plans for larger monsters. You need a few of those I think, other than the titan idea. There often aren’t enough “run away quickly!” monsters that roam around in games (that aren’t specifically boss type encounters which aren’t the same thing).
The other thing I enjoy is being perpetually somewhere in the middle of the food chain (universally speaking if you have multiple worlds with varying degrees of difficulty). I don’t think at any point I should be strong enough that I can roam around without concern everywhere, that’s kind of dry.
@olliepurkiss: does this mean that this are the only creatures you plan to deliver for 1.0 (despite the fact that you show us 100 or more concept arts the past months) ? Or are this only a few examples so that we’re able to get a feeling for dimensions (i hope for this case, because i also miss a few of the communities favorites)?
They have mentioned before that they thinking having a few creatures with a large amount of variations will be easier to make.
So they are probably going to start of making one of each creature type then create a lot of ways those creatures can be different from each other both in behavior skills and look and then they will start create new creature sets.
You’re absolutely right. We are planning a huge amount of variation within each type, with lots of different behaviours, looks and attributes. This set of creature families is what we’re aiming for, but within each family there’ll be lots of interest and variety.
Really cool, looks like some of my favorites that I saw before got in. Can’t wait to see some more detailed sketches/models for them. Until then, I’ll add the picture to the devlog collection.
Umm,thank you! No body voted for #8 for the territorial creature. I don’t know if I’m mistaken or something,but common cognitive skills would say “If nobody out of 46 votes wants this creature,then maybe we shouldn’t pick this creature.” I mean,there is obviously information I don’t yet have,right ?
Now I know that while we have a say so in what goes in the game,the developers most likely get a good 85-90% on any and all decisions in the game. Which is fine,I mean it’s your game. But even so,I don’t think that just picking one that you like best and not looking at the votes at all is right.
I’m not saying that’s exactly what happened,or that they did this on purpose. It might have only been for this one topic because they didn’t have anything picked yet. But after thinking about it,I realized that no,they wouldn’t have done that because nobody voted for it.
So, @olliepurkiss please help me to understand what’s going on.
The process we’ve been through has involved designers, artists, animators and coders, and taken a very long time. We’ve thought about all aspects of the creatures, and tried to come up with interesting and awesome creatures that are also practical to make. In the case of the creature you’re referring to Claudio explored lots of concepts that were hidden traps, and we decided that from a gameplay perspective a hidden trap wasn’t so good, and we’ve also got the block parasite which is like a hidden trap anyway. So we went for a creature that you knew what it was, but provided an interesting challenge. That ruled out most of the concepts, and we settled on what we thought was the best fit.
It’s been said numerous times, but I’ll say it again: we read and listen to everything you say, and we really appreciate the input - it’s a real help to have you guys contributing. A lot of the stuff that ends up in the game has either come from you guys, or been discussed with you.
We’re sad about that too - we love some of the concepts on that sheet. The problem is that we’re concerned about good we can make a large quadruped look moving over rough voxel terrain, and we don’t want to spend ages doing that to the detriment of the other creatures.
We’re not completely ruling it out though, we’re planning on doing some tests as we implement the other creatures and see how it looks. If it looks good we can include one of those. Personally though, I don’t think it will happen unfortunately.
I believe the most difficult part in a larger creature woud be to set the levels for their feet. Terrain is uneven and a larger creature can’t stand with one foot on the ground and the other halfway in the air. The second (or the other) foot would need to be placed according to the block height below it.
Prince of Persia, Sands of Time did an approach to this concern in accordance to stairways. It is an old game now, but it was a new illusion for me at that time. When you were walking upwards a stairway the legs and the whole body stance changed. But not in relation to each step of the stairs, rather as a detection whether you were standing on it or not. As sort of a collision detection. Walk on stair --> stance changes. But not each foot and leg for each single step of the stair.
… and as a very final addition you forgot to mention again: This is the concept of creatures for 1.0 … not 1.1, not 1.4 and not 2.x or higher.
I think especially with some other aspects which are coming later (like farming) introducing new creature types would give room to “reanimate” old concepts
