From PsyHelp
Summary
- Ben will create a poll to see if people want more badges involving paying with $
- With the inclusion of the new father feature, Fertility Draughts just make the pet pregnant and do not give the babies a father
- Optimally, Ben would like a friends feature from which pets chose their partner
- There could be a Pet Shelter feature that allowed players to see the partners of pregnant pets before the pet gave birth (but no abortion)
- Paypal will stay the payment method for favors. Ben is going to look into payments by mobile phones
- The chances for pets to become pregnant are already there; there need not be actions to increase chances for pets to become pregnant
- A retroactive vacation confirmation pop-up can be implemented
- Pet sizes do not correspond to actual measurements, nor do item size/weight numbers
- There is no current advanced search implementation on psypets for airship parts, equipment, food. Use the wiki for now (even though it is not accurate)
- Minipalms cannot be "harvested" like Potted Orange Trees or Amethyst Rose Bushes unless there is a semi-major renovation of the Domesticated Robot Monkey, too
- Arugula can have more uses if Ben is shown specific recipes that include it
- Scroll of Monster Summonings will be changed so that Familiars or Demons are summoned into the room in which the scroll was used to facilitate Familiar/Demon donations to the Museum
- Ben is working on new reincarnation powers for reincarnated pets, possibly using a merits system
Full Transcript
The broadcast was delayed by fifteen minutes due to a game with friends.
???: How about instead of the donator badge, it's "Use a Favor" badge.
People keep saying donate, and I wonder why that is. We'll run a poll (do people want a poll?). I don't like badges that require people to pay money; they should be generally available. So I don't want to create a badge where people have to pay money. But we'll run a poll. I wonder if there should be more pet badges (being ressurected, renamed). I don't know if people want to fill up the profiles with random badges.
giraki27: Hello, but people don't ignore this. In response to the broadcast on March 13th, I would like to make a couple of suggestions about the new father feature. I personally love seeing that my male pets are having kids, however I can see where people come in having a lower chance of the right pet graphic design and with breeding goats as well. Suggestion 1: When you use a Fertility Draught, you should be able to pick a father from your house to fertilize your choice female. Suggestion 2: There should be a higher probability of a pet from your house being the father for your females since the number of unfixed males in your house is supposed to play into how often/quickly your females get pregnant. I know nothing about how difficult this would be to implement, but it would help situations where players only want more of one kind of pet.
The fertility draught now, I have changed to make it, I don't even think I needed the change, but there could have been a possible bug, so I fixed it in advance; I don't think it should affect anyone. But anyway. When you use a fertility draught to make a pet pregnant, there is no father. It does not pick a father; it just sets the pet as pregnant. The only possible way that that could have not happened would have been a bug, and I fixed, is if the pet was pregnant before and there was a father, and you used a fertility draught on it, it might have kept that old father mate data in this case, so the same pet would have been the father. So that's the only place where I think it could have occured. I'd have to check the code and see if it could have been a possible problem.
But if you used a fertility draught after I changed the father update, but your pet had not been pregnant since then, then there is no change that your pet from the fertility draught will have a father. The pet will be [pregnant without a father].
Concerning the fact thatthere should be a higher probability that the pet is from your house. That seems reasonable to me. What I would optimally like to do is have the pets keep track of friends. It's just that the coding for that is really weird. So that pets make friends and keep track of friends so that a father would have to be one of the pet's friends. They only have sex with their friends, to put it bluntly. That way, you could say that your pet couldn't hang out with this pet anymore and they would be upset at you if you did that; it seems like a fair trade. But I worry that that won't give players the same amount of control that they want necessarily. Although it wouldn't just be inside the house. The other possibility, if you want to go more controversial, is once you've discovered a pet is pregnant, why don't you take them down to the lab and find out who the father is before they give birth, and you could decide what to do before then. I still don't want to let you abort pets; that feels like that's getting a little too crazy. I wish people weren't so concerned about who the father was, and maybe that was my fault. But I feel as if people worry about it way too much. But you worry about it, so I'll try to work with it to a degree. Perhaps I brought it upon myself, so it's my own fault. But maybe that would be an interesting thing in general, would be to find out who the father is in advance once you find out it's pregnant; that owuld be kinda cool. I don't know why people would say no; it would cost 200 monies or 400 monies, not a lot. I was going to say 50, but that was like 4 years ago, before inflation; today that would be around 200. At the Pet Shelter (Family Services).
Katze: Will there be other options to buy favors besides Paypal. I've played a game that takes donations by mobile. The company that facilitates this is called OneBit. This would make people who can't pay by paypal happy campers and I know I would be happy if I can buy favors.
I should have other options. Just out of my own personal interest, Paypal had an issue years ago before I relied upon them at all where they were down for three days. But that lost people who rely on paypal money for three days. I can imagine how that would be bad, even for psypets down. That would kind of suck, but it wouldn't be the worse thing for me. But it could, it would be good in the future to have options. I ran a poll earlier about Google Checkout; it seemed no one cared about Google Checkout. I think Paypal has kind of dominated that market, so you've got three people that are like "Google Checkout is awesome! Paypal sucks" and the rest of them are like "Paypal's fine". The extra coding didn't seem worth it. Cell phone options have come up before, actually. One of them advertised to me directly, contacted me and said, "You should accept payments through our fantastic cell phone system". No, it's a fine option. I'll run a poll for this I guess and see how many people are really going to do it, because if only a handful of people are really going to do this over paypal I don't know why it would be incentive to go through all of this trouble.
Brooke_Marie: You could make something that you could click every day that could tell you if you would like your pets to go out of the house every hour and when you let it out it has a chance to get pregnant for girls.
I'm not going to do that. The chances are already there. Would this be an item? I don't like the things that tell your pet what to do every hour. The point is that the pets do what they feel inclined to do. I wouldn't mind having it as an option, what would I say, "At 11:46, your pet was in heat and was out in the streets?" I think hourly actions are doing just fine. People have made suggestions that tell your pets to smith this hour and the pet should do it. Anyway.
Gordon: I have been talking to other players and think there should be a confirmation box for the retroactive vacation, much like the delete your account button.
What is the reason that... are you accidentally clicking the retroactive vacation button and you really didn't mean to? I'm not seeing how... I would except people to want a confirmation asking if they forget to click the retroactive vacation box. That would make more sense to me, where you log in after four days and the game asks you if you want to do retroactive vacation. That would make sense. But if you log in and accidentally did retroactive vacation, big deal. But maybe there is something that I'm not thinking about that something important did happen. In some ways, I wish that we could have a real-time chatting thing because I would like to ask people what is the impetus, why do people want this? I mean, I can add that button, it just seems so funny. I could make a pop up the moment you click the check box: "Do you really want retroactive vacation?" But I just feel like that will be more obnoxious than it is helpful.
Then again, the way people are doing this, maybe there is a less obnoxious way. It depends on what you want it for. If it really is you don't want the lost time, then I guess it's the only way. I just feel as if it will be really annoying for some people. You said you talked to people about this; I want to see a thread, I really do. I want to see what people were saying and the reasons and everything else before I implement something that's going to annoy even me every time I want to click that box. Because again, that's the safety box; you do it and it's safe to do that than to not. I'll take note of this and search around the plaza and see if people were talking about this. And if I am confused and you want a confirmation when you fail to click it, that makes a lot more sense and maybe that's what you mean and I'm not... but maybe you do want this. Whatever.
Mikari Crow: Out of curiosity, how do pet sizes correspond to actual measurements? Size 8 only says so much. Any straight size-to-unit conversion would be a little odd. 8 feet would be implausable, so would be 8 inches. For example, with the hydras, they're given to us as psypets, I shouldn't be surprised if those are the case. If we have 8-foot tall hydras or 8-inches tall hydras, is there actually any correspondance?
There isn't, really. I've said this before; sizes are a little out of whack. I try to keep swords and things about 7 or 8, in that range, that's what I kind of imagine size 7 or 8 objects as a sword. There are many swords that come up in Psypets. But it really is best not to think about it. If you look at, compare two items, you will find contradictions all over the place. It's really hard, especially with so many items, to keep things making a lot of sense, because there isn't a straight conversion in my mind. When I first made it, a size 1, weight 1 was a jar of jelly. I know I've talked about this before on the broadcast. But since then, that was four years ago, and sometimes I implement things. And lots of items get sized down. Look at the catapult. The catapult should be really, really big, a lot bigger than it says it is. But I can't, like if I have items, it's just going to be stupid to even have one in the house. It would destroy any purpose you might have that item for. In favour of making the item manageable, it is smaller than it probably should be. That kind of fudging goes on all over the place.
Half a Mel: I've been wondering, ever since you put in the ability to search the encyclopedia for standard items, custom items, etc., if it would be possible to search for some other traits, too. Specifically, I really wish I could look at all the equipment at once, all of the profile items at once without all the other stuff. I keep trying to compile a list of those items by hand, but it's slow and boring and I give up every time you add a new item. So could you consider it please.
No, that's a very fair request. You shouldn't have to do something like that by hand, especially when a computer can do it for you in like, a second. And I kind of knew it was a matter of time before people asked for that, especially when I did that. So we want to search the encyclopedia. There are a lot of things we could search by: airship parts, equipment, does it have hourly effects. But here's the other thing, though. If people are keeping the wiki up to date, it should be doing a lot of this for you. If you look at an item in psyhelp, it will say on the bottom what categories does this item belongs to, and there is an Equipment category. And if you click on that, it will take you to the equipment category and you will see all of the equipments. But that relies on people's abilities to really be keeping all the items in their proper categories and especially... I like to add items without telling people because people just like to discover the new items; I discover that people have more fun when I don't just release the items on the City Hall, so, especially that kind of secretive nature works against the wiki. It's harder for those people to keep those lists up-to-date. But until I get the search feature, look at the wiki, the wiki should give you a pretty good job of most of the items, but there will be inaccuracies; you can't take what it says as being 100% accurate, because it isn't going to be. I don't maintain the wiki, sometimes I go and poke and add at things and change things, but for the most part, it's player-maintained and I don't point out when people do things wrong because that would be cheating.
So we would like to search the encyclopedia. Airship parts, I'm sure people would like to know, equipment, hourly effects, if it's food, if it's a toy, if it has a "Use" action, you might like even to search by size. I mean, there's so many things to search for, I'll have to made an advanced search thing. It's all entirely possible and quick; the database could pool and filter everything really fast. Entirely plausible.
From a new question: Brooke Marie wants a robot that can do orders every 30 minutes so you can feed it, kind of like the hungry items, but like a hungry robot.
We should implement oil for that purpose. What would it do every 30 minutes? It's an interesting thing because as it leveled up it would gain more features, I suppose, but I don't know what those features would be. We could make the rake obsolete by letting it do those things. I don't know what sorts of things we'd like for it to do. That's kind of the detail. But it's a fun idea. I'll write it down; maybe I'll come up with some ideas on my own. And I love hungry items in psypets because they give worthless items in game that pets make a value because that's a prime thing to feed a hungry item. Like, I have no use for this stupid Cloak of Clover, to the hungry item it goes. They're good for the psypets economy. So I like hungry items.
Victor Arcadian: Is there any plans for the Minipalm to be switched over to the Harvest plant code, like the potted orange trees and bushes. For that matter, are other such plants planned for the future, or will we only have what is already made?
And they continue to say that this isn't an innocent question; they are already have a suggestion in a thread. The only reason I haven't updated minipalms ('cause I've certainly thought about it) is that minipalms work a little differently in the other items that work with minipalms, so it's more to update. There is a robot, the domesticated robot monkey, and it mass-collects for you coconuts from the minipalms. But if I change how the minipalms work, especially with the harvest plant code, where they grow a certain amount, I'd just have to completely redo the robot monkey, which probably means taking the robot monkey off, removing its use for a little while I work out the code. So that's the only thing from preventing that; it's going to be a bit more work because other items already interact with it and I would have to upgrade those so that there isn't a huge contradiction where one of them is much more less efficient or whatever, they should work out the same. Minipalm should be use the harvest thing. 'cause changing it over to the new code is easy; it's just copy and paste from the orange, replace orange with coconut, done. But I have to make sure to update the robot monkey.
And will I add more plant items? I might. I have to be careful about adding those; they're really good at putting more items in the game when we don't necessarily need the items. It will cause the value of the item to drop so we don't want those sorts of items anyway. So I've been preferring not to.
From a new question: The Shadow Knight wants arugula to have a use. All it does is clog up my house.
Mine, too. But there's no use for it in the game; I don't know what to do with it. I know people say salads, but I've made a few salads. I looked at, I think there is a category for salads on wikipedia and I found a bunch of recipes and added a few things, that's why there is Olive Oil in the game. But I didn't find anything that called for arugula, a specific recipe. I want a specific recipe because if you essentially say make salad, what do I put in it? There are lots of ways to make salad and I kind of want to have a name for each individual one so we kind of need to have a real life object that we can pull it from. So if there are any, I mean, if it's on allrecipes.com or any of those recipes sites.
Carisio: It's immaculate conception.
Thank you. And pez tells me.
simpleyetcomplex: Can the Familiar and Demon not be donateable because they are cursed and cannot be moved from the house? It is driving me nuts in saying that it is donateable and I can't ever fix that.
I should probably make it so it can't accept cursed items. There are some cursed items that you can put into your storage, which is why I haven't done that, is because the Keyhole (which is stupidly rare anyway, so maybe we don't need to make that donateable). The Keyhole comes from a Wand of Wonder and if you use a Wand of Wonder in your Storage, it will put the keyhole in your storage, I'm pretty sure. It puts it into whatever room you use it in. So that is an example of a cursed item that could be in your storage and therefore could be donateable to the museum. But the Demons and Familiar you can't put in your storage; you have no way of doing that. Because what summons a Demon? Right. And I'm pretty sure that the Scroll of Monster Summoning makes sure to put the demon in your house where it's sure it'll affect you and not in your storage where you would never be able to move it and it would make you have storage fees. Yeah, that would be terrible. Although you might argue that the house space taken is terrible, too, that's why you have the Seal of Solomon to unsummon them and put them in a little bottle.
I think I would kind of prefer, to instead of making it so that it can't be moved from the house/it can't be donated, make it so that there is a way for them to go into storage. For example, by using a Scroll of Monster Summoning in your storage. But that's so specific; is that too mean or is it, that's one of those clever things that only the hardcore collectors know how to do? There's a balance there. And I don't know on what side it would be here, if it's too stupidly convoluted or a cool thing, a feature you have to figure it out yourself. I kind of feel like it's a fun thing. Well, if I change it, I'll let people know so that it's not there was never a clue for the old people who were like "It doesn't matter where I use it; it always goes in my house". That wouldn't be very fair if you didn't know about the change in that case.
I think that's the route I wanna go; I really do think it is, unless people really think that that's a terrible solution; that's gonna be what I'm gonna do.
The Shadow Knight: Additionally, reincarnated pets have access to equipment and eventually bizzare powers reincarnated pets do not have. There are also several badges involved? Could you explain these bizzare powers?
You're just asking that because you know there aren't any implemented yet. I think Hara at one time had made actually a cool suggestion, you know, uber crazy spiritual form or whatever, to draw these additional graphics. And there is, if you've played role-playing games, table top role-playing games before, because I think those are more typical than online ones or computerized, where there is a merits and flaws system. I feel like I have the flaw arachenophobia or the merit ambidextrous. Things like that I feel would be really cool to have in psypets and would be what I want to do for extra powers, where you could be like, instead of choosing checkboxes for stats, you could choose a checkbox where you want this pet to be a lightning calculator for a bonus to inventing. And maybe some specific, like anything else in the game where I feel like lightning calculator is a bonus here, then that would apply. That could be really fun, and then we could have more bizzare things, too. You could just do anything with that; you could have tons of bizzare merits.
And I would prefer to do just merits and not the flaws because when you put in flaws, people become upset. They don't want their pet to be lame, only has one leg, blind, we don't want to deal with that. But have weird bonuses for reincarnation would be fun. Those are sort of the bizzare powers I was thinking of. But I mean, even then, even one of the checkboxes could be "Hara's crazy spirit form for pets" and I don't remember what the idea with that was, I think they went into this avatar form, glowing with light, kind of from the graphics he had, and it would boost all of the stats of your pets or something in the house. I kind of worry about what would happen if you had multiple pets doing this at once, unless their effects just don't stack; I'd have to manage something. So anyway, those are the sets of bizzare powers; I just haven't gotten to them yet. We're going to focus on the merits and not the flaws for reincarnation. Some of the daily adventures, I think, would be a place where some merits would really kick in. I'd have to look at what all of the daily adventures are, but if there were something where lightning calculator would definitely apply, or I'm trying to think what some of the other advantages or... ambidextrous was usually one of them, being tall, but that's being silly, because I don't want pets to be tall. Pets already have their own sizes. But there are other weird merits you could go for in psypets. And I can make up my own and borrow them from other systems and things like that.
Anyway, that is about it.