Raising Pets

[diaskeaus]

I'm not a software engineer nor a modder, plus I've only been playing the game for a few days, but I just got my first pet and thought it would be cool if somebody did a mod where you could raise pets and evolve them into various forms with different powers, based on what kind of food you gave them.  The cooking system would be an excellent in-road to a system like this.  You could start with the four initial forms and based on food intake, they could transform into various kinds of sealife based on their original model.  You could probably work in a mythology as well, tying into the Aquaria worldmyth.  You could also feed them rare foods to make them stronger, faster, etc.

[Alphasoldier]

Mod would propably be possible, but that would require to script beyond the normal lua scripting, especially with the food as far as I know. It's a nice idea though. Maybe and hopefull this is going to be added to the next sequel. To add a more RPG stylish game, which I thought is what Aquaria started like.

[Xiagan]

That'd be awesome, I always liked it much to raise the pet in Eternal Daughter. I missed this part in Aquaria (but you get more pets, so maybe it balances out).

[Alphasoldier]

Hmm, I don't know if 4 pets are that much more, a part of me was kind of disappointed that there were only four, and I also expected/hoped that the pets would grow. After a while the pets were just little helpers, I didn't mind them a lot, but I also didn't find them a big help. They were a nice touch to the game but nothing too essential. So, yes, indeed, Alec and Derek, if you ever make a sequel of Aquaria, please make upgradeable/grow-able pets.

Even though a mod for this would be awesome too, I just know that I will not be the one who will make it. :p

[Alec]

We considered this at one point, at least having a way to feed your pets ingredients/food. Instead, we simplified it down to the "Leadership Roll" food item.

But yeah, entities can be programmed to eat food when you throw it out into the world. It'd be cool to see a mod with a creature that did different things based on what food it ate.

[inkblob]

this happens in Dungeon Siege 2. in the first DS you could add a mule as a party member just as a glorified backpack and they expanded that to about a dozen different animals each one having some similar ability to the core classes ( nature/combat mage, melee tank, ranged )  their class attributes changed however depending on what you feed them, eating armour increases armour, eating bows increases ranged attack etc. it's all sort of averaged out and when the pet 'molts' or goes up a level then it gets a few extra bonuses that are dependent on the sorts of things you were feeding it to level up.  to clarify, the pet levels up by eating loot, not by normal combat experience. this works well in the context of DS as there is plenty of loot and your backpack is generally too full ( only mod I play is an expanded backpack ) 

I think the pets part of the game is great, I found that I was hesitant to use the leadership roll as it took quite a few ingredients to make and I was always saving stuff for a big battle when it would have been fairly useful to use it during a skirmish in the middle of the kelp forest. by the end of the game I was fairly stocked with every sort of food and recipe item, hoarding became habitual and I was reluctant to eat hard to make food.  I think that was my own hangup but partly because the game was filled with so much of the unknown, you didn't really ever know how far through the game you were either. especially with red bulb food items, I never wanted to eat those as it was definitly a finite amount. I think that I'm digressing a bit now tho 

[Glamador]

Well you can add me to the list of people who'd love to see this happen.  But as far as "growing up" well, how far do you want that to go?  Like the baby nautilus progresses up the chain until it's the size of those EVIL BIG ONES in the body?  I can see that happening for the Nautilus but how would the dumbo elephant grow up or the pirahna?  I like that idea of them eating things tho, maybe have SUPER FOOD akin to the legendary cake (you know, insanely hard to find the ingredients for) that will turn the baby nautilus into Nautilus Prime temporarily.  But again, I can't think of things to do like that for the other pets.  But since you can switch them on the fly, maybe you could have different super food effects for each one?  Like Nautilus Prime UBER DAMAGE would be unique to the baby nautilus and you could have like, bursts of light set people on fire for a time with the dumbo.

[inkblob]

the piranha could turn into one of those big red fish that live in the caves and the blaster peg could be as big as the mini-boss that guarded it.  I like your idea of feeding it something and it turns into it's big form for a duration    maybe with the dumbo elephant it's light field could be statickly charged for a duration so anyone coming in contact with it would suffer owies.

[Hiro]

Well for the dumbo you could also say that when you feed it certain stuff it lights up the whole screen/map for a while.

[Glamador]

What's more, that sounds doable with mods to an extent.  Growing up and whatnot I think is just not in the cards, but the feeding thing I think is a viable idea.

[eil]

the idea is great and I'm rather willing to see it in whatever mod or sequel!.