Children? Could it happen?

Game Talk The Drawing Board
41

Nah, I meant the devs’ usage of the term “Feral” is what I really dislike. I feel it’s is not right - and I think any of the alternatives would probably slot in much better.

And technically, yes they should be. But in terms of “adjusting” the lore to justify the non-existence of children, one could just make up some “blob magic” excuse as to how humans became sterile or whatever - “blob magic” works as a crutch for pretty much everything you don’t feel like justifying. “Shocker Zombies? Blob Magic. Hyper-growing muscles on necrotic tissue? Blob Magic. Telekinetic powers or the ability to resurrect? Blob Magic! Gained Wings? redbull Blob Magic!”

Plus if the world is supposed to slowly become a place where death is inevitable and eventually there’s no more lifeforms (which is the reason why the Exodii are “travellers” iirc?) then why would there be any sort of reproduction anyway? Everyone is infected and are unable to escape, and their cognitive abilities will eventually deteriorate to the point where they themselves become crazy and eventually die. (Furthermore considering that if the Zombies aren’t hostile to non-zombies who are infected, are we supposed to believe that other NPCs and even the player are, somehow, miraculously unaffected by the blob, despite the fact they eat and drink contaminated stuff just as much as the others did before “the event™” happened? So why is the @ and the NPCs “different” in that regard? Are they “immune” to “blob magic” for some reason?)

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42

Everyone here seems confused as to how going feral works. People only went feral in the months leading up to the cataclysm. It means that someone slowly went beserk and turned into a living zombie. This simply doesn´t happen after the cataclysm. Some people that didn´t go feral might still have their behavior altered and animals might be a bit more aggressive but nothing is turning into living zombies anymore or having their brains turn into much. So the next generation of humans might be on average a bit more aggressive (absent any mutations) but will have their higher brainfunctions and intellect intact.

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43

My understanding of the lore is that the blob will eventually take over completely, i.e. all life is under its “control” (not completely dissimilar to how the mycus “absorbs” creatures), so all life not under the blob’s “control” becomes impossible because the blob’s “immune system” will simply kill what doesn’t belong.

As @spicyshadow said, the blob psychosis was a pre Cataclysm effect that has ceased, but the after effects of it remain in those alive at the time. This also means any new life (children, kitten, etc.) formed after the blob psychosis ended is unaffected by it. However, all life is affected by the blob, which is manifested in enhanced healing (which might potentially result in increased risk taking if the consequences of injuries are lessened), and, of course, being “resurrected”.

An analogy might be Covid-19, where some people got sick and recovered, some died, and some recovered but suffer from “long Covid” (the proportions of the outcomes aren’t equal, of course). A difference from Covid is that everyone got the blob psychosis to some extent, although some people didn’t have any symptoms at all, although most did, to varying extent.

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44

Ok, so…children. Let’s talk about that. Yes, adding children to the game would liven it up. Yes, it seems like a good idea. Yes, the lore seems to get in the way of that happening. BUT kids would be good to have in game even with the lore conflictions. remember, all this is happening because we wanted interdimensional travel. Having kids would be somewhat simple to code. Just increase nutrient and calorie requirements for the mother and add a couple other things that happen to pregnant women. with the blob and the virus and whatever went wrong with Melchior according to whatever I read on the experiment logs in labs… Basically with the end of the world you’d think more people would be “holding hands” whenever they get a chance because they think they might not get the chance to do it again. Either way adding the ability to “Hold Hands” with someone is just a good idea in general and adding pregnancy is only the next step.

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45

I dunno, that seams like an overly complicated thing to have ingame for a niche feature.

46

To me it would seem like a great challenge feature. Start the game as a women who got pragnant just before the cataclysm. You only have a few months to set yourself up in a safe enough situation that you can raise a baby.

Or you could start the game as a child. Would be a completely different playthough where you are incredibly weak for a few years and can´t really fight most things untill you grow up and start to play normally.

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47

We need more long-term goals to make playing more than one season more appealing. Being a child that’s too weak to fight and craft for years would be interesting. But I have a feeling the game can’t support that kind of gameplay yet. The pregnant start however would work really well.

48

A child PC game play would be weird when it comes to companions. Why would a kid order adults around?

49

Odds are, it would be the reverse. They would want the PC to become their follower. But again that’s not something the NPCs in this game can handle now, If ever.

50

Yes, that is what I was hinting at. I guess you could sort of do it with existing (debug?) mechanics by “recruiting” an adult and then transfer the leadership role to that companion, with the goal of shifting it back once the “real” PC grows up.

That would also result in the challenge of having to play with average characters for a very long time, as any outstanding point you’d invested in the kid would be kept out of play.

Still, it would be tricky to implement as a real mode (enforcing leadership on recruitment, with specific recruitment dialog for kids, etc.).

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51

I don’t see reason not to add NPC children. Both human and alien, like Harvey Alibastor from Lisa.
Raising survivor children would take too much time, though. People take 18 years to grow up, while players usually run out of content within a in-game year.

52

Raising children would be great content for faction gameplay or to have a reason for the player to keep playing for longer. I also disagree that it takes 18 years for people to grow up enough to be usefull or even playeble ingame

You can already play as a 16 year old in game. Survivors would also treat children especially from the age of 12 similar to adults in many ways. This wasn’t uncommon in the past or even today in some societies to have 12 year olds work and do many of the things that adults do. This is probably the same after the cataclysm.

I would implement children simply the same as adults are currently but probably with some sort of tiny and small mutation and additional state malices that slowly resolve as they grow up. Only really young children I would implement as either a item (babies) or some sort of monster (think totlers to 5 year olds).

53

Why would a kid order adults around?

Child leaders of a faction are a well known trope in sf and post apocalyptic fiction. It’s usually a weird religious thing, but for whatever reason it shows up now and then.

54

I have a question for those of you here who’re actually INTERESTED in the idea of children in C:DDA.

Let’s say, hypothetically, I’ve been feverishly and obsessively working on a mod for the past three weeks, and it’s in a very very alpha but currently loadable and partially-functional state. A very rough-but-proof-of-concept state whereby the player character… and presumably, but as-of-yet-unproven… NPCs can find themselves with child.

(That part was a pain. I had to cannibalize and read up on SO MUCH about JSON… but it was a fun project and I’m still glad I did it. I delved into items. I delved into effects and effect-on-conditions. I delved into NPCs. I delved into mutations. I experimented with multiple ways of achieving the same basic effect. It’s been a real trip, and I’m still on it.)

Now I’m at the point where like… I have to decide what shape the focus of this project is going to take: the Child.

It’s one thing to simulate a pregnancy. That’s stat penalties and EoC cycles and adding and removing traits while fine-tuning the duration timers on things until it feels balanced. I kind’ve feel like I’m at least starting to get the beginnings of a feel for that stuff. But I’m now at the point where like… I can test a conception, survive through three trimesters of gestation, and have a kid.

I have tested surviving 280+ days in game after a colorful ‘encounter’ with my fellow fire station dwelling NPC and spawned a horrible little zombie child test creature. Which promptly ate our cat. There’s some bugs to iron out.

But now that I’ve tested the cycles and processes and actually figured out how to make them work, I need to figure out how to handle the kid. What do those who actually want this feature think the mechanics of bringing a child into the apocalypse should look like?

Should the player spawn a tiny little shrieking, immobile milk-absorbing monster infant that eventually grows up into a monster child and then… somewhere around the minimum chargen age, find a way to make them ‘become’ an NPC? This seems like the better of my two ideas so far, though I have no idea how I could actually make it happen. I have yet to come across any easy way to make your child spawn into an NPC. Maybe a spell? Is there a spell effect that can ‘despawn’ something? I’ve seen the things that spawn monsters and kill the thing they spawn from, and things that keep it alive… but nothing that despawns the monster that spawned the next thing.

Do I just create like a… I don’t know… noisy little infant item and pull a sourdough starter aging trick on it? Care for this bag of flour by periodically feeding it until it reaches maturity and lets you place an NPC? I wouldn’t know how to make it like… vulnerable to zombies… which kind’ve eliminates the need to protect the kiddo. Though that being said, so would putting your baby in a cat carrier, and I suspect some folks would just do that too. Still, I might be able to figure out a way to require the player to protect their inanimate offspring object until it’s old enough to spawn as an NPC with terrible stats and a few inherited traits from their parents (eyes/Hair/Skin should be easy enough. Mutations are also on the table).

So, I have answered the question in the title of this thread to my own personal satisfaction:

Could it happen?
Yes. Yes it could.

So if the possibility isn’t purely hypothetical, my question becomes: What do the folks who want it to happen want in terms of actual gameplay mechanics and functionality from such a thing?

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55

Me personally, and this goes for everything. Just a new flavour of challange to tackle.

It’s one of the things I love most about CDDA is the diffrent ways to approch the game.

From wildreness survival innawoods, stardew Farmer, classic RPG, colony management, etc. You effectively make your own goals and fun however you want, but what really pushes the envelope for each of them is the challange that comes with each style.

As for babies? The challanges for that would be astronomical. Can’t leave it alone as it needs constant care, but taking it with you poses a real danger; as it can draw every threat to you when it cries, cuts into you calorie intake, and most of all, the fragility. As It can easily fall into harms way or get sick. So you’d be playing CDDA with the challange amped up since you’ll have to dedicate yourself to looking after your protege, else, game over man, game over.

The mechanics of course will sadly require some custom works, but maybe this can be broken down into seperate challanges to empathise on the diffrent life states. One for a baby and one for a child, which, compared to the former would be the easier option. Since a child can have some autonomy in contrast.

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56

The way that you could implement children the quickest and have gameplay value is by implementing older children as NPC’s. These NPC’s would have various debuffs to states and a custom hidden “growing up” effect that modifies the standard adult NPC template to that of a child.

This would allow us to implement older children and teenagers into the game. These are the ones that a survivor is most likely to encounter as they have the highest chance to survive the cataclysm and be encounted having some function in various factions. It would also allow the player to play as one of them as a new challenge mode.

I don’t know what the minimum age for child NPC’s should be. But it should probably be a age where a child would be somewhat able to phisically defend themselves (meaning being able to stab a adult to death with a knife or shoot a small handgun without the gun flying in their face) and have learned somewhat how to read, write and do basic arithmatic. So maybe around 8-10 years.

I’m not really sure how you should implement children even younger than that. Babies are indeed best represented by some special item. Todlers however should probably be a monster given that they can walk and aren’t completely defenseless from threats (they hide somewhere that zombies can´t get to and stay very quite). I believe the devs have made it possible to talk to monsters or at least plan to do so in the future so I would wait until then to implement younger children.

57

I agree NPC children could be implemented as some kind of stages:

  • Baby: Very limited mobility (but still enough to require you to keep track of them)
  • Toddler: Really horrible stage, as they’d go where they shouldn’t, make noise when they shouldn’t, etc.
  • Child: Capable of simple chores. Requires lots of “school” (which would include gun safety and other survival aspects). Still dangerously impulsive.
  • Older child: More capable version of Child, with some degree of sense, but still demanding lots of training. Potential for being used to get into places too narrow for grownups (to e.g. open a locked door from the inside), but how do you make sure there isn’t something lurking there?
  • Young teenager: Still more capable, with fewer restrictions.
  • Teenager won’t exists, as that would be adult, possibly with still growing reduced stats.

To make the younger stages possible you’d have to be able to offload those children to companions for some lengths of time. Babies would have to be fed regularly at the minimum, so a female parent would have to do only quick sorties, offload all off base activities to companions for quite some time, or take the risk of using more or less appropriate “baby formulae” with their attendant risks. I don’t think you’d be able to find wet nurses unless you have their children at the base as well.

The main problem with raising children is the game world and game duration: Few games would last 15 years (or 16, if you include pregnancy). The game world may well have gone completely uninhabitable in that time, and you’d be rather out of new content very long before the “kid production process” is complete.

58

Assume CDDA somehow decided to implement the children. Well kids would be useful for routine tasks. Child labor was the main reason people procreated so much before the Industrial age. A farmer with ten kids and a pregnant wife can do much more than a farmer with a wife. Its not all back breaking labor - cleaning, cooking, caring for animals, fixing clothes, spinning yarn - lots of small tasks requiring manual dexterity, all of that children can do on par if not better than adults. And its not like post-Cataclysm people will suddenly stop having sex, yet retain the same access to the birth control as they normally do.

I’d expect children to be a kind of investment on the part of PC that you’d start midgame. By age like 3 you can set your child to perform small simple tasks, e.g. be on lookout for zombies or such. By age 6 a child can be set to gather wild herbs, collect small items that you’d normally pass by but that can be useful - e.g. spent ammo you see while walking around to be reused for makeshift rounds, maybe craft some stuff or whatnot. By age 10 a child would be a fully functioning character, albeit with low stats. It is only now that we have 20 year old manchildren who can’t fry an egg for themselves living with parents forever, in ye olde times such people would be cast out from family and die somewhere. I bet a cataclysm would see return to such norms as well, only with a much higher child mortality, not mere 30% or so it used to be but a full 90% even among the most successful communities. Raising children would be a high risk-low reward task for purely RP reasons, after all children can do small tasks but the main commodity in deficit post-Cataclysm is security, not resources, and children arent very capable providers of security.

So how much effort will it take to implement this? You’d first need to implement NPCs properly which is still not finished afaik, you’d need to finish that NPC camp mechanics or something of the sort to allow setting NPC to do labor, only then you’d be able to start implementing children and everything required for them like the extended NPC needs mechanics, stats scaling with age and nutrition, aging of characters etc. And what do you get? A mechanic to see which it takes years of in-game time and an intentional choice to bear this heavy resource burden for debatable gain (why bother raising a child when you can just recruit an adult NPC?). This is very very much effort for not very much gain since I doubt all that many players would bother with it. Only real benefit I see is the lore consistency. I’m pretty sure you’d find a billion better places to spend all that effort.

Since the main benefit in implementing children seems to be the plugging of the gaping hole in the lore surrounding them, I think it’d be much easier to just invent an in-lore reason why humans can’t have or keep children, I dunno, like relatively small bodies combined with high metabolism results in accumulation of blob turning them all to zombies or something. Toddlers biting off their mothers breasts, zombie fetuses chewing their mothers from inside out, children ripping their parents throats in the middle of the night. You could make some events or quests out of it. E.g. help Free Merchants to raise their children once they start zombifying by making blob filtering devices for liquids, blob-free food, purifier vials for the threshold-close children and such. Provide birth control to women who dont want to one day wake up to a zombie fetus burrowing from their stomach. Help the Old Guard or some other faction that cares for long-term survival of humanity by any means necessary to build a safe blob-free incubator/human farm for mothers and children.

59

Here is someone trying to implement children and both of you say say that he shouldn´t bother. Some points why children are fine lore wise and why children would be a great feature for players:

  1. Humans can reproduce just fine in cataclysm. If normal animals can do it than humans can. The blob treats every mammal the same.

  2. There would be more then enough time for a child to grow up before the world becomes ¨uninhabitable¨. And even than it isn´t clear what uninhabitable means. Its meaning could range from the atmosphere becomes unbreatable to the zombies and bioshpere become so mutated and filled with nether horrors that survival is very difficult outside of a large group of people with the means to dominate their local enviroment.

  3. Your arguments that you shouldn´t implement them becease children aren´t worth it for players time or resource wise seem too completely ignore the gameplay value to players I previously mentioned. Obviously you would get or have children for the roleplay value not out of any real resouce gain. This is also ignoring the gameplay value that playing as a child would bring to players as a challenge mode. Not to mention that you could add actual children to factions and around the world adding to the player experience.

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60

No, what makes you think that?