Pseudolonewolf on DeviantArthttps://www.deviantart.com/pseudolonewolf/art/Some-Yden-People-481108578Pseudolonewolf

Deviation Actions

Pseudolonewolf's avatar

Some Yden People!

Published:
2.6K Views

Description

A while back, I made this thing:
Random Person Breeder!! by Pseudolonewolf

It was a simple, fairly crude tool that generated random people using coded equations that you could 'breed' together, making them produce offspring with slight genetic variation. I drew no art for it, at least not in the normal way; instead, I just input a bunch of numbers and coordinates (using my knowledge of proportions and such... though stylised of course!!), which were altered based on random, inheritable 'gene' values.

I felt embarrassed about the ugly goblin-like creatures that it produced... BUT I also thought the idea had some potential, since I liked playing around with it.

Several weeks have passed, and I've been working on a game based around this concept. It's called Yden, and I've been writing about it in detail on my site here.

Basically, you are a god or goddess who raises a 'garden' full of human people, who age and grow and have to be fed and rested and such. They can form relationships with other people, and when they love eachother enough, they can have children. They can have jobs, which they can use to contribute items, clothing, potions, entertainment, food foraging, etc.

You can design some yourself using an editor with a ton of different sliders to change the proportions of certain features such as eyes, jaw width, hair colour, height, weight, etc, etc, but then you breed them together to produce children with appearances determined by the appearances of their two parents.

I for one have been finding it really addictive to play! I end up developing emotional connections to every person who's born into my pretend little world, and I find it interesting watching as they begin to love one another, and then seeing how their children turn out.

This image shows some of the people from my current playthrough; all (except Canyon) were bred rather than designed by me, and it's been really fascinating seeing these different people emerge over time. As such they feel like 'my characters', but in a sense where I 'found' rather than 'made' them... or something?!

The game lets you export a 'card' image sort of thing of a person if you want to, and this image is basically just a row of those put together... hence the weird repetition of the game's title at the top and stuff.

The game's almost finished now, and when it is I'll probably release a free version online, and I'll start trying to develop a mobile version too. It might be rather interesting!!

---

Some minor notes:

- The ages don't correspond to human ages; in Yden, a child becomes an adolescent (starts puberty) at age 5, and becomes a full adult at age 10. Most people naturally die in their 30s, though they start becoming elderly at age 40 and reach peak oldness at age 50.

- People have tattoos on their arms to show their family connections. The top ring on their bicep is the colour of their mother's top ring, and the bottom one is the colour of their father's bottom ring. When someone has a child with someone else, they add a ring (the man's father ring or the woman's mother ring) to one of their forearms, allowing you to see how many offspring they have at a glance. Any one person can have ten children at most.

- People also inherit surnames in a similar way. Surnames have the format MotherName-FatherName, with the MotherName being inherited from the mother and the FatherName from the father. When you magically create a person from scratch rather than breeding them (which you can only do rarely, and must do at least thrice to start your population off), they simply have a single name, which is appended to the surname of any children they have. So a man called Canyon and a woman called Ember would have a child called Something Ember-Canyon. If that child - a girl - mated with a man called Sandsky, the child would be called Something Ember-Sandsky.

- I wonder if the fig leaves are too risque. o_O
I wanted to have a 'garden of Eden' feel at the beginning, though, before anyone can make any clothes.

- The 'Gen [Number]' bit is the person's generation; a generation 2 person mating with a generation 4 person would give a generation 5 child, for example.
Image size
1980x615px 367.18 KB
© 2014 - 2024 Pseudolonewolf
Comments7
Join the community to add your comment. Already a deviant? Log In
I'm your fan. I love your games. Please release this game when you finish. You should have faith in yourself. Well done, Pseudolonewolf. By the way, could you please give me a link to your beta version?