Design Generic Creature Interactions

[aRoverUnderTheSea]

Establish what creature interactions will be broadly required.

• Requesting -- Creature has a need and displays a message
• ???

[ambiguousname]

Like interactions that don't require design to script would probably be useful for you, like say:

• A measure for how much a creature trusts or likes a player
  • Could be a finite state machine, a behavior tree, or just a simple number.
  • Then that influences the range of actions you have with them (like say, they might let you capture them or feed them if they already trust you)
• Things that influence that measure (i.e., feeding them different kinds of food)
  • A dugong might like seagrass or dislike hamburgers, for example.
• Mini-games
  • You could clean and take trash off a hurt animal to gain their trust.
• Behaviors
  • An animal could wander around and have a schedule and set reactions. Requiring you to study the animal to learn when it will say, poke its head in a hole, so you can capture it. Think Bugsnax or Skyrim.
  • Animals could even react to other animals, if there are multiple on the same screen.
• Senses
  • Animals could have particular senses as to what they detect. For instance, animals with a sense of smell could detect food in your inventory.
  • Animals with a sense of sight could move to or from where you are depending on how they feel about you.
  • Etc.

Of course, we could move some of this functionality into scripting as well if you'd like to have direct control over these things as well.