Topic

Different colors or patterns for animals.

I apologize if this has already been suggested.

When a street gets very crowded with a certain type of animal, it's hard to tell which ones you've already interacted with, especially if they don't all have names. (This is particularly annoying when you lose a recently-massaged butterfly in a crowd before you can milk it.) I've seen people suggesting that, for instance, a pig you've nibbled recently be highlighted in some way. But it seems like an easier way to make them distinguishable would be just to have each one look slightly different, possibly by means of different colors for butterflies, and randomly-selected patterns of blotches for pigs and chickens.

I'm not sure how technically-feasible this is in terms of rendering, but in addition to the usability bonus, I think it would just make things more diverse-looking in general.

One other way to make it interesting (and this part might be realllly technically-nonfeasible, for spot patterns, at least) might be to have them all look the same until they're named, and then have the name act as a seed for randomly selecting a color/pattern. It would make naming them more interesting, since it would have an immediate visible effect on the animal. Also, I like the cosmological implications of, say, all butterflies named Froofroo always being the shade of green represented by the hexadecimal code #66dd66.

(Of course, we'd have the original problem of a lot of identical animals again if, for some reason, someone decided to go around changing every animal on a certain street's name to "Dave.")

Posted 18 months ago by Snarp Subscriber! | Permalink

Replies

  • I really like the idea of certain names connected with certain colors or patterns.
    Posted 18 months ago by nekomaki Subscriber! | Permalink
  • Names having an effect on animals? Interesting! I could go for this.

    Of course then there'd be all the people naming animals after sexual organs and their euphemisms just to see what would happen lol.
    Posted 18 months ago by Liridona Subscriber! | Permalink