Modding Discussion Kobold Race

Kobolds: Boldly Going Where No Bold Has Gone Before
Goal: Extra challenge with a primitive race.
Implementation: Weaker race armor, primitive starting tools.
Current Step: Finalizing Starter Gear, Creating Emotes, Adding Colors, and More Names!

(Kobold created by the awesome Bucketlamp!)

Current Features!
-Kobolds with 4 different kinds of ears!
-Technically playable!
-Basic starter gear (3 items and counting!)
-Three colors!
-Three part names!
-Starting Codex Entries and Quests!

Coming In Later Versions!
-Wooden tools! That are awful!
-Terrible armor! Maybe leather!
-Terrible weapons! Maybe bone!
-More customization of your 'bold!

Hey folks!

I'm beginning planning of a race of fuzzy, unintelligent, hopefully weaker than average kobolds. I'm going with the Dwarf Fortress "cutebold" style both visually and for what I'm trying culturally. I'm only just learning things related to how this coding works, but plan to pour a good amount of time into it over the next couple of weeks. As I understand it, there's not much of a race-making tutorial or anything like that at the moment, but I thought I'd get the ball rolling on a couple of questions I was working through. If you are interested in this mod, let me know!

The plan, essentially, is to try to introduce a race which makes the game harder. I'm still learning much of the armor progression system, but am hoping that I can simply make the craftable armors/weapons for this race worse. I'm also playing with the idea of having them start with just a weak axe rather than a matter modifier and making them work up from this. I'd potentially make it so that digging is a challenge, especially initially, to encourage the low-tech hyjinx that I have in mind. Between this and primitive armor/weapons (possibly made with modded in monster skin/bone if I can figure out a way to do this elegantly), I think it could offer a very different Starbound experience.

It occurs to me that this may be a huge undertaking or may simply not be possible with the game at the point it is. Still, I wanted to check for feedback and get a thread going where I could post updates to my progress as I go. My first project is likely going to be getting the kobold design and animation worked out.

Thanks for reading!

 

If this becomes a thing, there needs to be a fisher-cutebold named Jlaldus with cave spider silk panties on his head.

 

I can guarantee 100% that once I have the actual kobold design made I'll get silk panties as a hat ASAP.

Other clothing things I'd like to do include starting gear of a loincloth, further items including scarves, vests, and other unimpressive items. I'm thinking that it will eventually become possible to actually get into the space-faring Starboundy world as well, in which case I may try to design some cobbled together looking items and see if I can't keep the whole primitive vibe.

 

This sounds very possible. Each species has their own recipe progression, so it's very easy to have different starting items and naturally-learned recipes. Crafted tools and weapons that are worse than the standard ones are of course, completely possible.

 

Excellent! I imagine that it would remain possible to learn other recipes as normal, but with less impressive or tougher to make defaults it should get things nice and koboldy.

 

Set down a little list of plans in the first post. Mostly just getting organized for now but I'll cheerfully accept any ideas or suggestions as well!

Kobolds: Boldly Going Where No Bold Has Gone Before
Goal: Extra challenge with a primitive race.
Implementation: Weaker race armor, primitive starting tools.
Current Step: Planning and Sprite Editing
Planned Features:
-Wooden tools! That are awful!
-Terrible armor! Maybe leather!
-Terrible weapons! Maybe bone!
-Kobolds with various ears, snouts, and hair!
-Headslot panties! (See cutebold comics)

 

Codex books must refer to what occured on 1048.

If you need, I can probably help spriting during my free time, would love to start helping out a mod group again.

I will also request npcs have really corny in-joke flavor text when talked to like: "All according to Gri flibrisfriblim"
If possible (would likely be hard to do) allow for NPC 'bolds near water sources to be abducted by cod/spongemen.

 

Quickly made a kobold head from a base, need to define the ears a bit more with a darker underline. the two versions are different based on the "nose" otherwise they're identical. Anyway, I have a plane to catch. When I touch down in 14 hours I'm totally going to pixel out a bold with a pair of panties on his head giving two thumbs way way up.

 

Holy crap, that looks awesome! That's quite a bit better than what I'd had together so far. After I posted this stuff, I got a little influx of RL last night and had to stop for a while. Have a good flight! If you don't mind me grabbing some of your design, I'm hoping that I can have a finished sprite sheet done Saturday evening on the late side.

I vaguely remember hearing that Hyotyl can breath longer underwater, but I can't recall if that's an armor based thing or not. Perhaps I could set up kobolds breathing shorter, though that's a bit weird to be carried as an armor effect.

My plan is to go really crazy with the flavor texts and quest rewriting. Plenty of poorly written sentences, incomprehensible babble, and little references. If it was in a cutebold comic, I'm likely going to try to reference it in some way. Also, I'm thinking down the line I'll add a quest to bring another kobold the moon.

In terms of story and opening quest descriptions, I'm thinking that I'll emphasize the fact that the kobold has no idea how he got there. The ship will likely be a different species' ship, but with evidence of a kobold party having taken place.

 

Abducted kobolds, or kobold architecture? http://1d4chan.org/wiki/File:Koboldhouse.gif

 

That is also extremely tempting... Perhaps once I get closer to that, I'll throw up a poll whether a terribly put together ship or an obviously accidentally stolen ship is more amusing.

 

Maybe the basic ship can be abducted, and the ship upgrades could add kobold architecture to it?

 

Brilliant. I'm loving the idea of the front half of the ship being obviously cobbled together poorly and likely dangerous.

 

Alright, I'm spending entirely too much time reading up on coding for Starbound, so I'm going to make one post here and then stop for a bit. Here is the current timeline I'm hoping for:

12/19-12/21: Take care of RL stuff, plan tier 0 and tier .5 armor (essentially pre-ore stuff)
12/22: Initial sprite sheet with male/female kobolds, at least 2 types of ear, 2 types of snout, and 2 types of a third thing (either hair on top or war paint. Not sure which yet)
12/23-12/24: Kobolds downloadable. This will not be a real release of what they will be, obviously, but more so that the sprites can be seen in action.
12/25-1/1: Starting items and very beginning quests created. This may not be quite as possible.

All of this could very well be moved back a bit, dependent upon how well each of them go! But hopefully I'll be able to get this all done in about this timeframe.

 

Sprite sheets? I can totally take on sprite sheets, but 22nd is a bit of a stretch, unless you mean just the standing pose. I wanted to actually make kobolds 2/3 the height of the standard of a standard character.
Also new consideration: Tribal markings for the second trait, since they don't have mouths/hair accessories ear style will be the hair, and tribal makings will be their secondary facial traits (will just be called markings, that way we can get away with cute bold blush)

 

As for race-specific farmables, you could easily go with DF farmables.

 

I was thinking for character creation:

Ears
Markings
fur color
Tops +colors
Bottoms +colors
(and of course pose)

 

I'd find it quite funny if the ship the Kobold has is super high tech, and if you inspect any part as a kobold they just go "Uhhmm... " or if it's the pilot's console "Push buttons.. maybe go home?" Would be hilarious if the whole kobold background story is that you're a kobold, some random species came to investigate the planet and you, some unsuspecting 'bold wandered onto the ship looking for treasures and somehow accidentally (Similar to how they get into the BEST secured dwarven forts) manage to unwittingly dodge traps in frenzied attempts to escape, disable onboard security (by sneezing on it or something, and smashed your cute little nose on the console- causing the ship to jump into deepspace.

 

I'm sorrpy, I totally failed o communicate well! I meant that I can make a sheet by then! Unfortunately, if we change height, it will mtake it not work with existing items, I believe. Markings sounds like a good plan on that as well.

I'm wondering whether plants should be given or not, after all, kobolds are carnivores!

The listing of piece choices sounds like a ggood way to s it up and that exlanation souends lijr a hilarious onPhonetypinv poorly... will respond beer later. What the hell phone?

 

There could be "plants" that are meaty, right?