Niche 2?? Brainstorming time

[Simian]

Hey! Feels weird making this my first post, but I used to be one of the super early beta testers from the facebook days. I've still been playing from time-to-time so here are some suggestions partially based on the older demos:

The first version I played was before you guys introduced the island idea. It was one giant land mass with hot edges and a temperate center. It would be neat if the next game took a que from dwarf fortress or rimworld and let us choose a "site" on a much larger continent to live on, with the ability to adjust how big the gameplay area is. The main difference between this idea and the islands is that it allows more biome diversity, since there wouldn't always be an ocean on the edge of the map, and those biomes can be significantly larger so if a player decides to move their tribe across the continent it wouldn't always be a (relatively) quick hop to the other side of a harsh environment.

Depending on what you guys plan to do, settings options to choose between being on a continent vs island might work. Alternatively, you could improve how dwarf fortress' "site" system works and allow players to move the playable area similarly to how the islands work now, by moving all of the ones your plan to take to the edges of their "territory" before the players push to move in that direction. The "site" would then move a square over on the world map, and allow larger tribes to stick together instead of picking a handful who can move on.

I think this system would also allow weather and seasons to provide some impact to gameplay. In the original, it didn't make too much sense to add difficult weather outside of certain islands to help differentiate them. With a global map and "site" system, players might be in a single biome for a rather long time, so adapting your species to the weather in that area as well as the climate would add to the gameplay. Along with the weather acting as a signal that you should adapt your species before you keep going forward.

For example, if your temperate-aligned animals are moving north, the rains get colder. The area would normally be warm but the cold rains signal that your species needs to adapt before they hit an icy region. Cold rains can also be a signal that winters here get much colder than your animals can handle, even if they can live in the area during summer, and it would be a good idea to move back down south before it gets too cold.

 

Next idea comes from one of the facebook beta builds: Age-related traits. At the time you guys had the nichelings' fur get darker with age, it was removed in later builds. I think that should be brought back if you plan to expand the genetics system, it would be neat to have different genes affect aging. Different white or black fur patterns that show for age-related reasons, and animals losing strength and speed after reaching their elder years, would be neat to see.

 

 

Now here are ideas I've had over the years from playing the finished product:

Let adults pick up babies. The main reason I've personally never had an entirely sneak and speed-based species is that if I build a nest and a carnivorous animal shows up the next turn, I can not move the mom. The baby will be eaten. Admittedly, feeding your babies to carnivorous animals is a strategy some animals use, but most of the ones that have children who can't immediately walk will try to pick one up as they're running away.

In-Depth family trees. I'm not sure how viable this is for you guys so it's not a huge deal, but there is a little open-source project called Clangen with a neat family tree system. The main reason it works, I think, is because of the afterlife menu that allows you to keep cats around or let them fade. Fading allows their details to be deleted by the game and leave little ghost image in their place that lets you know "someone existed there", and how long it takes for them to fade can be customized. You can't, for instance, click on the little ghost image to see if they had descendants, you can only mouse over and see their name. For Niche 2, I probably wouldn't call it an afterlife, but having a similarly styled menu off to the side as an "archive" or "graveyard" would allow people to scroll through their family tree, should the player choose to make sure that specific animal's details don't fade. Fading would also prevent the Crusader Kings 2 problem where the family tree will lag horrifically after enough generations pass. Clangen also allows renaming the not-faded dead and adding biographies, which is neat for players who like to tell stories that involve current generations changing details from the past or mythologizing their ancestors. That last part really isn't necessary for this kind of game but it's something to consider.

Auto-resource gathering. Clicking on every individual animal to get food and straw is a bigger population cap than the resources themselves and part of why I never return to old saves anymore. I like playing with big tribes but I can't remember what all 50+ of them were supposed to be doing when I get back. On paper, it's not a big deal to roll with it, but it also slows things down so much that it turns into death by 1000 cuts.

Sex-linked genes. I'm specifically referring to the mane. Sometimes I just want the mane to not be sex-linked. At the same time, sometimes I want other traits to be sex-linked. Genetically, I have no idea how traits develop sex linkage or how it's possible for them to stop being sex-linked, but since the original game does allow us to mutate gills and webbed feet onto a baby whose parents were both bear hybrids with no family history of either of those traits, I'm not sure how hung up on accuracy we need to be for making traits sex-linked or removing the sex-linkage from other traits.

Give birth without a nest. It should be dangerous, harmful to the mother, and potentially result in a stillbirth; but I'd vastly prefer the risk of losing the baby to the eternal pregnancy thing we have in the original. Especially when part of the challenge was supposed to come from having rogues around trying to sneak-breed your females. Why would I ever have the ones I want to breed move around before they're pregnant by the creatures in my tribe? Why would I let a creature I never planned to breed take up the limited space and resources on a nest just to have a baby I'll likely throw into the ocean? Admittedly they only go into the ocean if they're eternally sick, but the point stands. It's honestly something I've always been annoyed about but tolerated because it was the first type of game going into this kind of depth. I really, really don't want to see eternal pregnancies in the second game.

Others have already brought up splitting the tribe so they have their own resources and allowing creatures who aren't part of your tribe(s) to reproduce on their own, so I won't rehash that, I'm just putting this here to let it be known I've also had that idea for a while and would like to see them as well.

[Broom Wielder]

I said this once already in the niche discord server, but visual differences on the horn genes as Nichelings grow! Not including when Nichelings grow old but not starting out with full grown horns (I'm looking at you megaloceros horns.)

Concept drawing. Plus, if put this way, babies on blind gene mode can be more interesting. Did they get horns or did they not? Gotta wait until they're a child to find out! And until a teen for what kind of horns specifically!

Just noticed that Hehak mentioned something similar, last post on the second page

Edited March 30 by Broom Wielder
Someone somewhat mentioned this idea

[alex602h]

I would like to see small wanderer groups, of maybe 2-4 members. They wouldn't quite be like foreign settler tribes, as they wouldn't have dens or anything, nor a reputation system.

They'd just stick around a few tiles from eachother, and get spooked/defend eachother if one of them got attacked by your own nichelings. They might breed, don't know. If you want to invite them to your own tribe, you'd need to have enough food to invite them all at the same time. Say the base food you need to befriend a wanderer is 5, and you want to befriend a group of 3 wanderers, you'd need to give one of them 15 food, and then they'd all become part of your tribe.

[CABINET]

Here are some ideas based on a conversation I had with Coco a long time ago. They're also heavily inspired by similar systems in WolfQuest

Acquired disabilities, or injuries. So basically when a nicheling gets hurt, there's a chance that they get injured and get a penalty depending on what the injury is. For example, a leg injury would give a speed or collecting penalty. A nicheling could also be blinded this way. Depending on the severity of the injuries, they could be temporary or permanent. So even if you don't have the genes for certain disabilities in your population, it's not impossible to get them. Not all disabilities are genetic, after all, and life in nature is tough!

On a similar note, many disabilities like blindness in real life are caused by ageing, so perhaps similar effects could happen as nichelings age. I don't think elderly nichelings should be useless though, so giving them perks of some sort would be a nice offset. I sadly don't have any ideas for this right now

This would obviously make the game harder, and I imagine not everyone would want that, so an option to change the chances of injuries would be nice.

[alex602h]

It would be cool if you could also export/import different nichelings. Like, have a button on each nicheling to copy a code, and then be able to paste that code into the sandbox mode nicheling creator. 

On 1/21/2024 at 8:14 PM, CABINET said:

I've thought that it would be neat if some genes, namely horns/antlers had small cosmetic variation! So there could be several different antler models that are randomly chosen. Maybe there could be a gene that controls the variation, or it could be completely up to RNG. I like the former better since it would allow for easier customization in sandbox mode

Also, to expand a bit on Cabinet's idea, maybe the random cosmetic variations could get numbers? The variations could still be random, but you would be able to put your desired variation into sandbox mode, maybe via a dropdown box or hoverbox. Little concept with the poison body gene, since the variations on it are random. As an example, maybe variation 1 is green, while variation 2 is purple, and so on.

 

[Modiano Urania]

On 1/21/2024 at 5:05 PM, Modiano Urania said:

Moor biome

The moor would have peat tiles which would have a chance to randomly set a fire every day which would spread to the other peat tiles (maybe this could be after a potential lightning storm ignites a peat vein. Peat fires are persistent)

[BirbMonster]

I'm not sure if someone's suggested it on this thread, but being able to seperate your Nichelings into seperate groups within save files, along with options to set gem colour for the whole of the group and seperate food and nesting material stores for the groups. It would be useful for organisation and for various challenges!

Plus, I love playing on the Archipeligo and watching different 'subspecies' form as I play on the small islands (eg: On one save file that I used to have, on one island everyone had cracker jaw and spiky body, and on a different island everyone was a bearyena hybrid) . It would be fun to group them up and give them seperate food storages for realism!

[fluroko]

Having played Niche as a teen when it was still in its early developmental stages and having since gone on to study biology, it's super special to me and I would love to see it expanded or a sequel! I'm a bit late to this post and stumbled across it by accident, but many of the following ideas have lived in my mind since forever and saw some of them had already been brought up. I saw some mention of seasons, I think it would be really nice to also include hibernation as a survival tactic for the winter months.

 

I would love to see the underwater scene expanded more! I've been missing water based predators. There were already some suggestions on underwater "islands" or biomes and thought this could even go as far as making a deep sea location with limited/no light and a bunch of traits to adapt to this (bioluminescence, angler fish light to attract prey, tentacles for detection instead of vision, water filtering for food like baleen whales, mollusc body to deal with the pressure etc.). One thing I was missing a lot in water Nichelings was electro receptors. Many underwater species make use of these (including platypus) and for that to allow underwater detection of fish outside of sight range or to detect the digging spots for platypus would be great. Or even an extra sense being added to water body, as the lateral line in fish can detect water movement and this would allow for muddy water to exist with limited sight visibility.

 

Since the addition of birds and them being able to sit in trees, I thought arboreal traits would have gone real well as an alternative to getting your Nichelings take to the trees. The bugs and seeds of trees can now only be exploited by birds and having a prehensile tail or climbing paw/hindlegs would be a great addition to expanding this mechanic.

On the opposite end I would also love to see a (semi) fossorial system included, it's quite a common tactic in animals and to be able to make burrows to escape predators would be great! I believe there was already some mention of dens. I could imagine it as premade burrowing spots that your Nicheling needs digging trait to make a burrow, or even fallen logs or tree hollows. What would be really cool but maybe more difficult to implement would be to allow Nichelings to create burrows and expand them to any tile and make several entrances (could be restricted to meadow or sand tiles).

 

I couldn't have agreed more with the posts about traits evolving on a scale, this would be super exciting! It could even go as far as to have intermediate stages between wing development from paws or even hip morphology changes to allow for an upright stance, to mimic the main evolutionary pathways that we see in paleontological/evolutionary studies. Ideally the intermediate stages would already have some advantage, as otherwise they wouldn't stay in the population for  long enough to progress.

The 50% mutation rate that the player can implement for two genes in the current Niche makes it a bit too easy in my opinion. Ideally this could be adjustable by the player depending on how easy or difficult they want to make it to themselves. Useful mutations are quite rare in nature and most of the mutations occurring tend to be detrimental. Although theoretically one mutation in one gene can do the trick, often an accumulation of a bunch of mutations is necessary to really create a phenotypic change. I'm not sure how this could be implemented in underlying game mechanics, but to see a more realistic approach to the genes and mutating traits would be really cool. Although the idea of having a photosynthesising Nicheling also gets me quite excited, but it's a bit further from realistic systems.

 

Last point I'll bring up for now, would be to implement herbivores, omnivores and carnivores (etc.), Nichelings being able or unable to digest certain foods would be really interesting. As example omnivores could be able to eat everything but get less nutrients out of both, whilst the more specialised diets would allow maximum nutrient uptake. Overall I would generally like to see a lot more variety and widespread traits, genes and survival tactics, so that there is more to discover and explore. There are is so much inspiration to take from all the different species out there! But of course this would make the game a lot bigger, which also comes with a developmental cost. I think even the current Niche still has a lot of space for new cool traits and interactable creatures to be added. I still had a few more trait ideas, but this has become lengthy enough already

[Lilytuft]

On 4/17/2024 at 4:53 PM, fluroko said:

I've been missing water based predators

Goldleeches are predators to me /j