CCSF Blog Carnival 2: Play styles

Even the aquatic worlds are decorated.

Today's prompt is about playing styles and habits/quirks. My play style has been shaped by my first real creatures game, Docking Station. So I usually play hands-off, full of wolfling runs, full of decorated worlds, and full of genetic and caos projects. I have a lot of worlds, and most of them are for testing things or wolfling runs. Coming up with ideas for wolfling runs and setting up the worlds is about as active as I get with most creatures. I love playing like that, and seeing if the populations can survive, thrive, and mutate is fascinating to me. Also Decorating worlds is sometimes a pleasant way to burn an hour or two. The focus on wolfling runs means I'm free to tinker with caos or genetics without worrying about my creatures.

Most of my play time this year has been spent messing with caos and developing a few agents I've always wanted or whatever random idea pops into my head. Caos, to me, has become the ultimate jigsaw puzzle. Like any good jigsaw puzzle, I have a picture on the box, a bunch of pieces, and it's up to me to figure it all out. And, unlike a real puzzle, it's almost impossible to loose these pieces. I also mess around with genetics, though I haven't done that as much this year. There's only so much I can take of the genetics kit before I get bored.

When I get tired of testing things, I start a nurture world. I have the occasional DS nurture world, and my C1 and C2 games are dominated by nurture worlds. I gave up on wolfling runs in C1/C2 after I always ended up wiggling food in my favorite norn's face to try and get it to eat. Even though I enjoy most of my time with C1 and C2, I don't play them that often. The norns in C1 are equally as frustrating as they are lovable, so it often gathers dust for months between play sessions. I used to play C2 more, but my game somehow corrupted itself early this year. I lost all of my worlds and any creatures I didn't export. I haven't really touched it since then (though I have been slowly reinstalling it.) So most of my recent nurture worlds have been in DS, which hasn't gone well. As much as I love the game, the norns in it aren't as charming or lovable as the older ones.

Stingers in a Stinger Norn world, how original.

As for habits or weird quirks, I have a few of them. I have a few names I use when I can't think of a good name for a world. Mobula Ray is the name I've been using the longest, so much so that I named my blog after it! I've probably used it for dozens of worlds now. I also use the Remora Ray for a filler name. Mobula and manta rays often have remoras attached to them, and the original Remora Ray was meant as an extension to the Mobula Ray world at the time. So it was named the Remora Ray. And my oldest habit is adding stingers, bugs, and critters to every world. The habit started forming back from the many, many tests I did when making the original Stinger norns. For whatever reason, I just haven't stopped adding stingers and bugs to my other worlds. To be fair, the stingers act as a hazard to regular creatures, and the bugs I usually use act as play things to my CFF creatures. So perhaps it was a good habit to get into.

My most recent habit formed from me trying to figure out caos. I got in the habit of creating buttons that run chunks of caos code. Most of them only get used once or were one off tests. A few of them have become permanent parts of my game though. The one I use the most is a button that checks creatures hunger levels every few minutes and exports them if they are extremely hungry and not a baby. (An earlier version killed them and targeted babies... that run didn't end well.) I use it in my wolfling runs to help weed out creatures who won't feed themselves. I can't say if it's made much of a difference to my gene pool, but it does help the generations go by a bit quicker. It was originally inspired by the wolfling monitor. I wanted a simpler version, so I made it. And that's pretty much been my play style this year, full of caos, genetics, wolfling runs, and the occasional nurture world.