Tame Pets, Collectable Pets, and Followers

Game Talk The Drawing Board
1

Greetings. This is my first time posting. I did a quick search but didn’t find a thread aimed at game design for pets so I’m starting this one, this is basically just what I would like to see from pets, I welcome any further ideas.

Pets

Pets need to be trained which takes four hours after they have been tamed which takes materials. Pets will try to defend you within the confines of the boundries designated by their current command. If desperately injured pet will switch to Wander mode. If further injured while in Wander mode the pet will Flee. An object can be used to extend the range you can deliver commands to your pet. Regardless of Commands Pets will avoid Enviornmental Hazards and Traps.

Neutral: Pet will randomly select behavior, change behavior according to vital needs, and occassionally return to you.

Heel: Pet will stay adjacent to you.

Follow: Pet will stay with a small distance of you but otherwise act neutral. A pet in this mode will Point at nearby creatures regardless of sight and Growl if an enemy or Trill if prey.

Wander: Pet will stay within a medium distance of you but otherwise act neutral. A pet in this mode will Point at nearby creatures regardless of sight and Growl if an enemy or Trill if prey.

Hunker: Pet will stay in target location.

Stay: Pet will stay within a small area of current location but otherwise act neutral.

Go: Pet will stay within a medium area of Target location but otherwise act neutral.

Home: Designates a target location as Home.

Away: Pet will stay within a medium area of Home location but otherwise act neutral.

Outside: Pet will stay within a large area of Home but otherwise act neutral.

Hunt: Pet will attempt to hunt, kill, and return with the meat of an animal after eating one meat off the animal.

Forage: Pet will return with some kind of found non meat item.

Kill: Pet will attack target creature.

Back: Pet will avoid contact with hostile creatures.

Equip: Allows the player to change the Pet’s inventory.

Get: Tells Pet to Flee.

Flee: Pet stops acting like your Pet until you retrain it but will remain friendly and may occassionally enter Wander mode.

Follower

Followers are like pets but with the following differences: Followers take only 1 hour to train. If a Follower Flees it does not remain friendly and very rarely has a chance to enter Wander mode after that. A Follower will flee the moment it is desperately injured. Followers lack any commands related to Home. Followers will Flee based on Loyalty versus Number of Enemies within ten squares.

Leaders

Eh… Somebody else do that.

Collectables (for lack of a better name.)

These creatures cannot be tamed but they can be captured. Such creatures typically have medicinal, nutritional, or other utility. This includes Cats, Geckos, Catfish, Jellyfish, Glowfish, Glowbugs, Glowworms, Purring Fungus, and Tiny Frogs, to name a few. Such creatures typically do not wander too far from whatever habitat they currently find themselves in but can take special attention to find unless want happens to have a vivarium.

EDIT: Possibly needs Trait “Pets” to justify?

2

can we train them to cook themselves as well so i dont starve to death in my evac shelter. mmmm dog jerky!

3

If this does make it into the game, owner should also take a massive morale hit should the pet die. And I mean massive.

4

The forage and hunt abilites need to have a very low chance of working. But can be improved through training e.g. Hunting. It may also have to do with the breed of dog.

e.g.
-Spaniels have a higher chance for bringing items back and hunting since they don’t damage the item/prey as much.
-German Shepards do more damage and can take more hits

You could also stroke your pet for a morale boost.
But as said before, you need to get a gigantic moral loss if your pet dies.

5

I foresee problems re: pets+vehicles. I’m not sure the current code handles anyone but the player as being “inside” a vehicle.

6

Source: I’m Legend.

7

I remember NPC’s working in vehicles, but that was when they gave you active crashes at start of game.

8

I would go a few steps further with morale loss and have you start losing morale after not even seeing your pet for awhile (three days? six, maybe?) then max out that morale loss when you find their corpse. This only begins to end after you bury them or about a month after not seeing them.

As for foraging/hunting chances. I think the difficulty for the pet being successful should be based on the enviornment rather than a set percent chance and the difficulty should effect time involved more than it does chance. However I do like the idea of different breeds giving different results.

9

It does handle NPCs, or at least it used to.
But I think this requires moving back to the .cpp files.

10

Improved pet stuff would definitely be something nice to add eventually, and would be applied to any sort of tamed monster, so if you somehow managed to tame a giant worm or something (probably through modding) then you could train it and it would learn based on it’s intelligence/your training skill.
Follower/leader stuff is part of the NPC planned bundle stuff
I could see adding some sort of collectible type creatures that you could catch and keep in an empty aquarium or something like that. (I’m not too sure about cats though, I’ve known some cats who can wander incredible distances if you let them :P).

11

… I Am Legend…