[Unofficial!] Genetic Manipulation or Starter Pets?

There is a lot of controversy surrounding what Stretch Goal 3 is, and many people are against the idea of starter pets. First, let's get the facts straight. (Stretch Goal 3 is not necessarily $1,000,000.)
Starter Pets
You have a choice of several starter pets specific to your race when you start the game. These pets will follow you around, but are non-combat and cannot damage enemies. This does not mean that they don't have special effects however, some may light up caves or have passive buffs or helpful abilities.

Pets are already in the game however. A system is already in place where, with a specific item, you can capture most of the monsters you find on your journeys. The monsters you capture will aid you in combat. Starter Pets will give you a vanity pet to begin the game with in addition to the ability to capture pets. Even if Starter Pets aren't in the game, normal pets will be and you can still capture them!
Genetic Manipulation
A lot of people have been asking for this feature, and it could be implemented in a number of ways. One of the popular ideas out there is splicing.

Splicing would be combining two creatures, and their offspring will share randomly chosen body parts from their parents. For example, take these two fine monsters:

You would need to capture both monsters and bring them to a Gene Splicer. For a small pixel fee, it would combine both monsters and out comes a third creature, which shares similar parts from the parent creatures.

As you can see, the offspring took after the color scheme and tail of the first creature, but retained all the body, legs and head of the second creature. Splicing these same two creatures again might yield different results, as which parts are used is randomly decided.
This is just one of the possibilities of Genetic Manipulation, and in no way is it official.
You decide!
Read each idea fully before voting, you may not have fully understood the suggestion as many people did in the Starter Pets thread, where they thought that the suggestion was to add taming pets in general. (Which are already in the game.) I am aware this thread is very biased, I just really dislike the idea of Starter Pets.

Starter pets won.

 

awesome!!!!

 

That's an awesome ideas !!!!



Devs can also locks some combination from spawning naturally...
They can only exist with genetic maipulation !!!

But why not just reproduction ??? :O

 

I still want the ability to splice your own genes with other things... to become a grotesque mutant or hybrid... no? only me?

 

I think we dont have to decide between starters and genetic manipulation.

Genetic manipulation is so big that it would probably be the 1 million goal while starters would only be around 800K. So I think we need a goal that takes a smaller amount of money as the third goal.(For example starters)

 

Starter pet, of course. Genetic manipulation, although cool, is not as cool as a pet.

 

But we already have pets :'((

 

The problem with this is that genetic manipulation would require more coding for mechanics, which as the devs have stated they want to avoid right now to avoid risk of delaying Beta or release.

 

genetic manipulation ftw

 

I posted this in the sticky but I'll repost it here too. Here's my suggestion:

1) Pet "Storage". I imagine we can only go out with one pet at a time. I hope you can add a space where we can leave other pets to sleep.
2) Behavior. It would be great if pets can behave according to our actions. Examples:
- If you have a dog and give him meat, he will be happy.
- If you forget to feed your pet he will quickly be sick, move slower, make sad faces, etc.
- If you 'accidentely' harm it by a miss fire or bad sword swing, etc, he will lose happiness quickly and will not follow so closely.
- When pets are happy they follow you very closely, they purr, bark, make all sorts of cute alien noises; they wave their tales, make little jumps and even back-flips just to show you how joyful they are, etc
- The more time they spend with you, the happier they get.
- If they are unhappy they may randomly bite and hurt you lightly as well as constantly make angry noises.
3) Interaction with other objects and entities
- Pets can pick up distant valuable items for you if they are happy such as money or precious gems. They will go to the object and come back to you. The object will then be automatically added to your inventory.
- They do not engage in combat. But some may give some power ups, etc. For example: the dog's bark may reduce the enemy defense by 10% because it got scared.
- Pets may have special abilities that support you like to able to spot nearby enemies, or buried treasures, pick up apples and food from trees, etc.



Anyway, regarding the origin of pets, I believe we could have 3 forms: original, genetic combining, and taming.

Regarding original (starting pets) I just think they should not come free, but maybe after some quest or by buying it from an NPC.

 

LAWL PLATYPUS I'M DOWN

 

I think gene manipulation would be hella fun. I think once u put the creature into the machine it keeps the dna and u can use multiple creatures to splice a creature ur own way. Would be nice to create a creature which looks really scary of fearsome and some cute ones out of several creatures.

 

Voted "other," because I figure, why not both? Genetic manipulation sounds like a wonderful feature, but I'm assuming it comes with the understanding that modified creatures would be able to be used as combat pets, yes? If so, then it seems to me the "pet" programming architecture would already have to be in place. If so, why not simply have a docile, capture-able monster of the player's choice spawn with them in their starting area (or equivalent)? Then those who wish (like myself, strongly) to have a simple dog can be happy, and those who wish (also like myself) for some sort of splicing system to be implemented can also be happy.

 

The gentic manipulation idea is really cool but Molly on the sticked topic said

and the manipulation (at least to me) seems to be code-heavy

 

"AWESOME IDEA, AWESOME IDEA, YES YES YES!" is all I hear without a second thought on this forum recently.
Imagine if you could create your own weapons, then that would take away the exploration element of looking for well, new weapons. The same thing with monsters, if you could gene splice monsters, that could take away an element of looking for those very rare randomly generated monsters that you want to populate your planet with. As cool as gene splicing could be, I find that it could also break some of the exploration portions of this game. I would rather feel like a boss for finding a brand new monsters. When you gene splice a monster, you didn't create a "new monster", you created one that already exists on some planet somewhere in the galaxy.
If I am going to make a dungeon with traps and beasties of all sorts, I want to feel like I made that myself, that I searched all across the galaxy to look for the perfect monster for my dungeon.

I would rather have something like improvements on stealth or randomly generated mechs or something.

 

It's basically CnP the monsters DNA and putting body parts where u think it would be cool then adding personality features and how the creature acts. If it was just like the random breeding look from above that could use the random generation system they used for monster creation but be a bit more specific on the traits from each monster used. Would still require some coding, but it would be worth it i think.

 

I'm no coder, but I think it would be as easy as identifying which parts a monster has and then generating a monster with the basic generator using only parts from the two monsters. (And removing x amount of pixels from the player.)

 

i had a dream and the 1.000.000$ stretch goal was an instant beta release.
but because thats won't happen, i would say a catrace...or at least cat pets...anything cat.
Meow

 

Starter Pets.

 

Genetic manipulation sounds a little boring to me, feels a little too pokemon-ish.