Why people hide their pets

Own

Moderator
People largely only keep their pets visible for a small portion of the game. This implies that something is making the pets annoying to the point where they just want them to go away. And now I know why:

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Don't stand so close to me.

Fighting a boss with your pet slamming themselves up against you is distracting and annoying, and makes them seem completely oblivious to danger. When wandering around the world they're not as big a problem, but even CrossCode has your pets set to keep a farther distance for a short time after you've hit something. But that's not what makes people hide their pets. It's usually bosses, and after that they're never un-hidden.

The solution?

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Designated pet zones for players 1-4 on every single boss screen. Start of the battle, your pet vanishes and reappears on their designated spot. Throughout the battle they can hop up and down or float in place, where they're nice and out of everyones way. You don't have to worry about the nightmare of four players with pets all bunched up in a tiny battlefield.

But that just solves the problem of pets being too close. They still, well... just awkwardly there, aren't they? Your pets don't really feel like pets that care about what's happening.

The solution?

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Reactions! Every 10-15 seconds in battle your pet assesses the situation and emotes accordingly, which makes each pet a sort of judge for how their respective player is doing. It gives them something of a personality, makes them cute and interesting enough to keep out.

Upset: You took a ton of damage recently.
Angry: You've done a ton of damage recently. Yeah!
Sweat drop: You have taken and dealt little damage recently. The battle is at a standstill.
Cute smile: You've been guarding a lot of attacks!
Skull and crossbones: My player is DEAD.
Heart: My player was resurrected!
Exclamation point: You've been perfect guarding attacks!
 

The G-Meister

Giga Slime
On areas like the ferrets fight, you could even have them hop around a little, though that would seem like they aren't that interested in the action. Maybe if they could face the player at all times it would be like they're watching the action.
 

Teddy

Developer
Staff member
Own understands our main design objective of releasing sometime in the late 2030's! :D

This is a pretty hilarious idea though, which actually does fit our MO of fluff so outrageously pointless it makes people like it. :fish:

To spin the yarn further, it might be fun to have the pets do grindea-ified popular twitch emotes like pogchamp and the like.

Buuut my first order of business when it comes to making pets less annoying is a CrossCode-ish "stay away from both me and enemies while I fight", and outright hiding them during bosses is probably what's going to happen unless I get very drunk one night and wake up with that cheerleading idea implemented instead!

Or Fred and Vilya reads it and decides to allocate my sober programming hours there
 

Own

Moderator
Own understands our main design objective of releasing sometime in the late 2030's! :D

You have designated spots for summons to go to during cutscenes, don't you? Or am I misremembering that?

Would it take a lot of extra dev hours just to go the first route (at least as a start) and have pets be tethered to a single location on the battlefield by the edges, like summons in cutscenes? Undo the 'follow-the-player' script and have them stuck at one spot?

I suppose force-hiding them during boss battles is a quick and easy solution too. :D They're just clutter otherwise, especially during fights like Cursed Priestess and Power Flower.
 
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