Ideas on how to give creeps their own sense of individuality?



  • I know this is silly, but the autonomy of everything was getting to me. Do you guys do anything to make the creeps seems alive and having their own personality and thoughts?

    Right now, I'm having them say random things such as greetings when they walk by each other, "I'm bored" when they do nothing for a while, and panic messages when being chased by invaders...

    I'm planning to add a journal feature so creeps can record their daily lives, such as how monotone and boring their day was and how bad the traffic was due to very bad road placements...

    What about you guys, any cool random things you make your creep do?



  • If you keep doing that, you should have logs like the old "Oregon Trail" games, where it's got random stuff you didnt see while playing... "we lost 5 chickens to the cold today." and "Little Jimmy got sick with the consumption today..." lol



  • I was already thinking of logging how much time each creep spends moving, working, idle, etc for efficiency purposes. Your post has inspired me to think of other uses for it!

    One crazy idea - you could implement a system where each creep has various stats for boredom, safety, loneliness, etc., and then make them work slower when unhappy and eventually refuse to work altogether or run away if things get too bad. Release it as an alternative screeps API for players to use as "hardcore mode"!



  • My creepers are normally pretty chatty, but it's an indication of what they're up to. When idle many of them will go "💤", and for collision resolver they'll yell "Beep beep!" at the other creep.

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    Mineral miners will also occasionally say "Boop!" when they activate the spinny thing, and I had my normal static miners sing a song while mining, but after a pretty unambiguous threat from 🐯 I decided to remove that feature.

    Oh, and remote miners and reservers will try to run away while screaming "Eeek!"/"Baddies!"/"Run!" when an enemy creep or invader gets close to them. They've gotten pretty good at kiting the invaders long enough for reinforcements to arrive. I really want to put in some logic to defenders to "*pat*" the miner once they healed 'em up for all their good work.

    👍


  • I had my normal static miners sing a song while mining, but after a pretty unambiguous threat from 🐯 I decided to remove that feature.

    Oh now I'm dying to know what they were singing!

    ☝


  • @systemparadox said in Ideas on how to give creeps their own sense of individuality?:

    I had my normal static miners sing a song while mining, but after a pretty unambiguous threat from 🐯 I decided to remove that feature.

    Oh now I'm dying to know what they were singing!

    Open at your own risk.

    Yes, some of my creeps are trolls.



  • 😄