Animal Kingdom is the working name of the game I'm working on. At its core, it's about creating a society of wild animals. It's heavily inspired by Warrior Cats (in fact, that's what the game was originally going to be about, but I decided to broaden my horizons beyond cats in predefined clan structures), The Sims, and a bit of Stardew Valley. At first I wanted it to be 2D isometric, but due to too many hoops I would have to jump through, I decided to do 3D instead (maybe with voxels). The project has evolved so much and I have so much planned. The other day I created a new Godot project for it, because the old one had so much bloat from random add-ons I had installed (I have a problem) and features that were unused or only partly implemented.

In the new project I haven't implemented Kingdoms yet (that's what I'm calling the social structure that the player will build, purely for the pun), because I'm focusing on making the the Animals functional first. There's not much point in adding the Kingdoms yet because it would be a distraction and are not really useful without certain features of the animals.

When I do add the Kingdoms though, their main role will be to sort of control the animals. Since the animals will be controlled by their AI and not directly by the player, the Kingdom will set rules for the animals to follow. A Kingdom will have a set of ranks which an animal can be assigned to, each of which has a set of responsibilities (things they are expected to do, for example hunting), and permissions (things they are allowed to do, for example go in a certain area, or attack other animals). This system will very interesting create I think, and it will be difficult to strike a balance between user friendliness and flexibility. There are actually a lot of things that I want to add, I have a whole list.

For now though, I'm going to work on getting the animals to do things. Cheers! PS. Right now I don't actually have a source to get the art/ models from, so if anybody wants to help, let me know. I did have a pixel artist that I was talking to, he helped me decide against the Warriors thing, but he hasn't actually made any art for it and I've decided to go 3D.

I talked to pixel artist guy and we decided to go for voxels. Specifically, they'll be at a 8:1 ratio (minecraft is 1:1), for a balance between detail and simplicity. He said he'll be getting a laptop in about a month, so he can actually make textures (I think his last one broke and he was using his phone to chat). I'll have to figure out what method to use for pathfinding. Ideally I'd like to use raycasts, as it feels very natural and cool to watch, but I'm not sure how that would work in 3D, and would be a lot slower. Alternatively I could use A*, as there is a video by Miziziziz and a Reddit post expanding it to be dynamic. We'll see.

This sounds fun. I think it could be really popular, people love cats.

Sounds like a type of game I've never played before. Sounds interesting! Careful of scope creep it sounds like it's your number 1 foe. How far did you get on the first project? Get any animals up and moving around? That would be a nice example project on its own.

So there was this massively successful game called Creatures from 1996. It was sort of like a Sims game, where there were these Gizmo animals controlled by AI (advanced for 1996) and you could interact with them in a sort of sandbox.

There was even a huge controversy, because some people would torture their creatures and there was a whole sadist community of these Creature torturers, and then people were talking about if AI had rights or the ethics of harming virtual beings. Pretty interesting discourse.

Ah, the 90s graphical goodness. Always so eager to burn your eyes :)

Best of luck for your project! It's really interesting you decided to go with 3d Voxel instead of isometric 2D since you find it easier to work with, for me it would be the other way around for sure.