[WIP] Vegetative State - Winona, Widdershins, and whatnot

[Dyne]

Hallo, folks.  Been lurking around for a bit, but hadn't gotten a chance to post until now.

 

I started on this far far faaaaar too late to actually finish anything for the Halloween Mod Contest (especially given that I tend to be most busy around October, just started a second job to help make ends meet, and have several other projects on the burners), but it did get me inspired. 

 

The original line of thought went like this: Halloween.  Pumpkins.  Who looks like a Pumpkin?  Chester.

 

Since Chester is my favorite character in Don't Starve, in large part due to his resemblance to pumpkins, it occurred to me that it would be amusing if I made him a playable character for Halloween

 

Except that Chester himself appears to have the behavior and intelligence of a dog.  Why?  How would something like that work as a playable character?

 

 

And therein lies a tale ...  a tale of Romance!  Of Witchcraft!  Of plant-based Warfare!

 

A tale (and mod) which I call Vegetative State.

 

The short form is that I invented an entire race and society of intelligent pumpkin-like creatures called the Curcurbita, of which Chester is an atypical example, since he was cursed.  His lady love, Winona (playable character), who witnessed the curse, is now on a quest to find a way to restore him.

 

Among other things, the design calls for a 'dark' offshoot of the Curcurbita ... essentially animate jack o lanterns ,,. as well as the Curcurbita's relationship to a few other beings in Don't Starve.

 

It's not entirely random ideas on paper, I have actually done a little work on this already: preliminary sketches and prototyping some character artwork for animation/scripting testing purposes.  I have also started delving into the lua scripting guts and learning Spriter (I am a 3d artist, so I already understand the basic concepts like bones and such, just not the UI), though those things have less visible results.

 

Of course, this would be a nontrivial undertaking for a full team.  By myself, it's massive, quite possibly too much so.  As such, I can't promise that everything or anything will get finished.  To make the effort more manageable (and thus more likely), I intend to do it piecemeal ... starting with an item or one playable character rather than everything all at once.

 

Mainly at the moment I'm looking for feedback (and if I'm lucky, folks will find it amusing rather than dumb).

 

If you are interested in the more detailed (and spoileriffic) design that I wrote up, or seeing the initial bits of art, they are in the attached PDF (I'd just post that stuff here, but it's already nicely formatted and it's a few pages long)

 

VegetativeState.pdf

[mox]

Seems fun. I'll help as much as I can. Been a rather odd week for me. 

[kylekunfox]

I want to know more about the curse that affects the only true friend you have in the game

[Dyne]

Upon further research, I am given to understand that DS's mod tools don't currently have the ability to add entirely new player animations, which would make it a bit difficult to implement a PC with Chester-like behavior.

 

More importantly, I've not been ignoring this thread, I've just been really busy with Halloween and then with real life stuff.  I decided that I needed to practice with smaller scale mods (probably to nobody's surprise).  I started working on some ... and haven't even had time to do anything with those for over a week.  Sigh.  So it goes.

 

I do hope to eventually return to this, though.