Clicking Cows and Other Distractions

An illustrated farm at night. Some text and buttons suggest you'll have money and game actions you can take.

I'll soon share a bit about my big game experiment. That sprawlingly complex roleplaying adventure based on my love of Corruption of Champions is a very fun ball of wax that I can't wait to pull apart here...

BUT any gamedev worth their salt knows that the real fun of making games is taking a break from one game to make another game instead.

When kicking off a "little" side project, what I'm often looking for is:

  • a break from the parts of my main project that are really difficult.
  • a way to break off a system into its own game to test it earlier.

e.g. In my main roleplaying game I want to have lots of storylets 1, with dynamic branching dialog choices, connected over a large game map, dependent on both phase of story and your character's body and traits. 😵‍💫

In this little side project I want story to be delivered in simple one off dialog windows, independent of each other, with only yes / no choices, and only responding to a few systemic conditions.

e.g. In my main roleplaying game I want to make a character system with many different body shapes, changable and combinable body parts, and a bunch of swappable traits. 😱

In this little side project I want to boil that down to just 3 body shapes, one body part, and a few face traits.

So what are you actually making?

I'm making a hucow farming simulator.

That is, an incremental clicker game where you recruit human cows, milk them, and sell their milk to get money to repeat the cycle and upgrade your farm.

Having a "juicy" milking interaction was the inciting spark: instead of a text game where you click a button labeled [Milk] could I have a character model you click? And when you click can their breasts bounce and milk particles spatter out? The answer was yes:

Drafting the cow stall. Starting with a sketch, blocking interactive regions, placeholder color art with animated bouncy interaction.
Evolution of the cow stall. Not final art.

I've been continuing to build out the actual gameplay around this interaction and have been making good progress. For example I've added a day night cycle and cow behaviors that differ by time of day - like sleeping at night.

I'll continue to post dev logs here and on patreon as I work towards a release.

Footnotes

  1. If you are wondering what a storylet is, Emily Short's writing on the topic is my definitive source ↩

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Hi, I'm NixyXO.
The stories, comics, and games I make are for adults only.

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