#beasteon

A hopper approaches you. Someone dressed the critter as a postman - it even has a cap with straps preventing the wearer from losing it. Is this a weird joke?... The animal opens its bag and handles you a newspaper, then busily leaves - probably towards the next addressee. You wonder why would anyone spend their time to train one of these unintelligent grazers instead of just asking a Beast. Maybe the newspaper contains the answer...

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Anonymous asked:

Can you show us a glimpse of the adult Lykos yet? And this looks amazing i cant wait! Also, can the beast have pets? Like a lykos have a one of those fluff balls as a pet? (Sorry, i forgot their name XD)

Adult Lykos hasn’t got its redraw yet. At this point, we don’t plan to change its posing or anatomy, just to clean up the original image a bit to match other Beast artworks.

Yes, petpets are planned, and your guess about the designation of Furriosas is completely correct! They are collectible pets for Beasts.

rawrzskythrone asked:

Hey! I've got a couple questions about the Beast mechanics. Once a Beast grows up, will you have to continually feed it? Does anything happen if you don't? Can Beasts get sick or injured and how will that condition impact them? Can a Beast choose to abandon you instead of you chasing it away? Sorry for the barrage!

Hi!

1) Each Beast needs to consume a certain number of food points each day. Food and diet management plays a big role, but at the basic level, it's pretty much automated until you want your Beasts to eat something specific. They will go and search for food themselves, be it their inventory, your warehouse, a café somewhere outside your manor, or even utilizing their skills (gathering, hunting, fishing, cooking) to obtain something edible. Without food, a Beast will gradually lose its weight, health and raise its stress level. 

2) We have an extensive diseases/injuries system in plans, but it will be pretty basic at the start. There are several statuses that raise Beast's stress level and apply disease-specific debuffs. Some examples are inability to craft with a limb fracture, increased fail chance for all actions while constantly scratching because of insect bites, reduced speed and agility for molting birds, reduced daily energy because of fever, reduced attractiveness because of rash. These statuses may fall off themselves with time or be removed through a treatment purchased from a NPC seller.

3) At a certain point, a Beast may decide to leave its keeper if its life becomes utterly unbearable. This may happen if it has a high stress level for too long, its needs are not met, it has health or personal life issues, etc. One specific need we'd like to specifically mention here is the need for freedom. It's possible to force a Beast to leave the manor by issuing too many orders and micro-managing each aspect of its life.

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We also have two very popular questions asked by a lot of our subscribers. 

Will there be deviants?

Yes, non-heritable visual mutations are planned, i.e. unusual pigmentation like erythrism or albinism, overgrown fangs, and double horn.

What is your development progress? When the game will be open to the public?

We're not giving any estimates right now, though we can assure that we're working on the game as much as possible. At this point, the team is slowed down by significant health issues and the need to earn money for living. We still have a lot to be done, but here are some things that we've been working on!

Training hoppers. We have 2D animation with Spine 2D in our scope now, potentially allowing to introduce things like mini-games, rich explore mode visuals and even animated Beasts themselves.

Repainting all terrain tiles to larger and less busy versions

Working on isometric fauna and flora

Inventing a way to create a 2D Beast "model" that may be used for 8-side isometric movement, doesn't require enormous space to store Beast images like sprite animation does, and supports easy recoloring. Currently we're remaking 3D-rendered isometric sprites into Spine animated 2D textures.

Peeking into Unity as a way to implement everything mini-game related and maybe exploration

Extending and developing the lore

Reworking Beast psychic model from the neural structure to a proprietary pattern. The neural-like structure turned out to be producing results that are hard for players to track and understand where they came from

Experimenting with Blender to create procedural striped patterns

A showcase of gatherable flora. 

Monsters of Europa are usually universally known under their ancient names, given in the Age of Primordial Wonder by the Demigods themselves. Over the Long Dark, the Administratum preserved these names – and later, in the Discovery Age, spread them among the populace with active participation of the Sentinels and the Warlock-Rovers. These names seem to originate from some kind of prehistoric language, lost and forgotten in all other aspects (not completely, say some, because species that appeared in later ages receive such names as well). However, most of Europa’s monsters also have local nicknames. Some may have dozens of them, depending on how widespread they are through the realms. Beastlord houses and major factions care little of these aliases as they tend to change not just with the change of region but also in the course of time. This creature is thus a particularly curious exception.

There is a lot of discussion around the origins of the name "Nightgaunt". The Sentinels lead one camp, claiming Nightgaunts to be a relatively young species that takes its origins in the late Age of the Long Dark. This seems to be a logical suggestion, as these creatures remained hidden from the Explorers for quite a long time (they were discovered only in the in later eons of the Discovery Age) and no mention, even tales of them from earlier ages were found. However, there’s an opposite theory enforced by a smaller group of scientists from lesser Beastlord houses, informally supported by some of the Warlocks. They claim the Nightgaunts to be ancient creatures, as old as the Primordial Wonder itself. This hypothesis has much fewer followers, for only indirect proofs of it have been produced to this day. On the other hand, this is what actually makes it so tempting.

The thing is, the origins of the Nightgaunts is only a sort of side-project in a larger history theory. The theory claims that, during the Age of Primordial Wonder, there was an island in the southern part of the Europa Ocean. Specifically, it was located in the area called Point Nemo, the oceanic pole of inaccessibility (the place in the ocean that is farthest from land). This island was the top of a volcanic mountain erected by the Demigods. Ancient data claims it to be more than 7 000 meters high above the ocean level and over 15 000 meters if measured from the ocean bed - which makes it the tallest mountain that ever stood on Europa. However, it didn’t last to this day. Presumably, it collapsed due to certain tectonic activities of the Great Machines in the early days of the Long Dark. As the theorists have it, the reason for such a natural disaster lies in the structure of the Point Nemo mountain. And that’s where the real mystery begins.

Europa has no widespread religion, but some local cults and churches of limited influence are present on it. Their quantity and number of adherents vary over time; the same goes true for the nature of the mystical knowledge on which they are based. There is, however, one common feature that can be traced through almost all of them. Different as they are, they all tell the legend of the Underworld, a place of unspeakable horrors and grim wonders. These myths do not place the Underworld, or Shezurh, on the ethereal plane or in another dimension, but say instead that it can found somewhere in Europa. According to religious texts, one can enter it through the labyrinth of caves in an ancient volcano.

Scientists studied this religious myth and came to the conclusion that Shezurh could actually have existed at Point Nemo. If so, the mountain could be hollow, with an immense, complex system of tunnels, halls, and galleries. It is not a rare occasion for the Demigods to build large underground facilities for various purposes, and the collapse of Point Nemo could have been the result of a malfunction within the machinery that was supposed to keep it intact.

The exact purpose of Shezurh is unknown, but legends depict it as a dark and dangerous place, inhabited by the creatures of alien or even demonic nature. Actually, Nightgaunts are believed to be of these creatures - the ones who hunt, kidnap their victims and drag them into the dungeons of Shezurh.

Obviously, for most of the scientists “Nightgaunt” looks like a nickname spread among religious cults. Their opponents point at an unusual universality of the name’s origin: it is known and used by a great many communities spread throughout Europa with no connection between one another.

Nightgaunts were considered being creatures of myth for eons – until, recently, their existence was scientifically confirmed. Not much about them was discovered since that day, though, for they are dangerous and secretive predators and are anything but easy to observe and study. They are only active during the night when they stay cautious at all times. They avoid any pursuer, often outflanking and attacking them. They are swift and soundless flyers unmatched at sudden swoops, and are able to overcome a target twice as large as them. For flying they use a membrane between the tail and forelimbs (also called disk) and a large sack on the back, which a Nightgaunt can fill with lighter-than-air organic gas. Nightgaunt can produce this gas to gain lifting and release it in a short burst, like a jet engine. During the daytime, they stay in deep caves and caverns or, often in abandoned underground complexes.

The Nightgaunt origin idea of the Pole Nemo theory is that there was actually the Shezurh mountain, erected by the Demigods during the Primordial Wonder. The Nightgaunts were the inhabitants of Shezurh – perhaps just one species among others, yet undiscovered. The mountain collapsed in the wake of the Long Dark - but not entirely. Only upper levels were destroyed, and Pole Nemo became submerged and concealed until the Age of Discovery. At some point, its isolation was breached, presumably by part of the mountain raising above the sea level for a certain period of time. And the Nightgaunts broke free. As they are perfectly able to fly great distances, part of them managed to reach the nearest land and spread on Europa’s archipelagos. A small group of enthusiasts even claim there were several such liberations. Genetic analysis of different territorial groups shows that younger ones are not originating from the older, but all have one genotype of origin - which may be taken as proof that different colonies form as offspring of the original one. And as such colony is yet undiscovered, some presume it to dwell within Shezurh.

There's a bunch of different screens, but taking into account your reference to BeastKeeper, you probably mean the Beast profile . UI for such unconventional things is always a challenge, especially when you need to squeeze in that much data. Also as we know now, a tutorial is of a great importance when learning game controls, and it was literally non-existant in terms of GUI in BeastKeeper. No wonder you found it confusing! We plan to make a tutorial that takes into account this aspect of the game as well, starting simple and moving to more complex things. It's a big chunk of work itself, but it surely needs to be done.

We're still looking for the best solutions and moving things around. All crucial info is placed at the top of the screen to be available without scrolling, and detailed data goes below that. The current WIP version looks like this:

Most of the interactions with a Beast are available without scrolling. There's a context menu which appears when clicking a Beast:

It provides a quick access to all areas where you may want to do something with a Beast (issue orders, wear items, change allowance size, make gifts, craft items, check recent actions, etc.)

Dialog overlay for events waiting for player's decision:

The data&details part isn’t that minimalistic, but there’s no other nice way to get it all in one place...

Inventory and item details: