Reimagine them as "tests" of the monsters' capabilities -- part of the studying aspect!
That's... a
really good idea. I'll definitely spend some time to ponder that, thank you.
As far as turns go, sure, let's dig into it some. The pure camp view stuff feels a little detached from the turn aspect compared to the challenges, which is something I've had to consider as I was wading deeper into it, to make sure I felt like it could still belong in the same game.
At its core, I want a cerebral, thoughtful experience which is ultimately unstressful to play moment-to-moment. I'll try to explain what I mean, apologies if this gets rambley and disorganised. (Editing to add, I have just finished writing this post, and it's a bit of a monster. If you ask me interesting questions then you bring it upon yourself! I can't help myself!
I hope this answers your question and didn't go too off-track.)
While the concept has moved significantly more towards a calmer theme, I still want there to be some consideration towards good and bad choices to make, both in the short and long term. But I tend to prefer playing games which let me make my choices in my own pace, because I'm a bit of an optimiser. I like to hum and haw and make the best possible decision for any moment, and adding time pressure makes that harder. That works for a lot of games, and a lot that I have played and enjoyed, but making Monstrus turn-based was a conscious decision made very early on to let me accommodate that kind of player behaviour. I also often think about games in terms of 'could my mum play this successfully'; she's a gamer in her own right, but tends to learn and process things slowly. She would need gradual progression she could control, minimal to no instances of reaction or twitched-based gameplay, and clear communication of goals and available functionality. Making this kind of gameplay available wouldn't prevent a faster player from engaging, because they would simply catch on to game concepts and demands faster, make more progress faster and deliberately, and ultimately go through a lot more turns in a shorter span of play time.
I've realised lately that an aspect of my gameplay derives a lot from my (unsatisfied) demands of the Petz series. I loved them as a kid, but really quickly grew bored of the moment-to-moment gameplay, because the creatures were so obviously artificial but the meat of the game was supposed to be interacting with them as though they were not. As someone who had real animals as pets, as well as the fact that I lived on a farm and had exposure to livestock, the cats and dogs were cute but obviously fake. I was way more interested in breeding them and seeing what kinds of babies I could get. That particular focus allowed the importance of the pet behaviour to be less important to me, because now it was just a heavy dose of flavour on top of my breeding program instead of the main meal, which made breeding Petz more engaging than other breeding games which focused entirely on the genetics and not on the creature behaviour at all, like the online games Wajas or Howrse.
That combo of semi-alive creature and the breeding hooked me, but unfortunately the Petz series was not at all designed with the dedicated breeder in mind. You had to wait multiple days for each pet to grow up, then convince two to like each other enough to breed, and then wait days for the mother to give birth, and then wait days for the offspring to grow up in order to pick your favs for the next generation. You could, of course, mess with the game's internal clock and trick it into fast forwarding time, but that was a lot of effort and felt unsatisfying because of how obvious it was that this was not the game as intended. And that was only one problem with treating Petz like a breeding simulator; another one was the overly simple family tree, and the fact that if you removed a pet from the game their image would disappear from all family trees, thereby robbing you of your ability to see your custom cat lineage's progression through the generations. And why would you remove a pet from the game? Because you would have to feed and engage with them basically every day otherwise they would just run away anyway, and when you start to accumulate enough pets for a breeding program, then factor in that you are artificially fast-forwarding time - and the passing of every fake day means you had to go and stroke and feed all your fake animals - the sheer level of clunkiness involved in the relatively straightforward goal of seeing whether or not you could consistently breed cute little white persian cats with tabby tiger stripes suddenly explodes into something unwieldy and distinctly unfun.
Maybe there are mods which could have helped, but I was possibly too young to find and figure them out. Just messing with the system clock was enough tech sophistication for me. But that doesn't help the fact that the Petz game couldn't ultimately give me the experience I was craving.
The simple inclusion of a turn eliminates the vast majority of that. Monstrus doesn't tell you to come back and poke your monsters every single real life day and gate their lifecycle behind actual time. You can just end the turn and voila, eggs hatching. It will tell you to feed them and provide for them, and at first this will probably be a more time-consuming and micro-manage-y task, but that's only until you gain the right tools to automate away the parts of the monster husbandry that you don't want to repetitively deal with. You enjoy having small numbers of monsters you can get attached to, you like hand-placing food in the troughs every turn, and checking on every single monster individually, and doing everything manually? You can do that, the game won't take that away from you. You want to have a massive ecosystem of camps and breeding programs because you love the big-picture and the macro-decisions, like trying to introduce that particular winged gene into your established line of tentacle dog monsters, then go for it. The game will give you the tools to automate the micro-care of the monsters so you can just spam that end-turn button waiting for the report to say 'winged tentacle dog monster hatched!' safely knowing that nothing will explode or break down just because you're not watching it
because you've already put the time in to sensibly balance and automate it. You earned the right to not worry, like a successful Factorio player who built a mega-factory and is just interested in the end result. But the player had to construct all that architecture to get to that point in the first place.
So both ends of the spectrum are satisfied, ideally; the sentimental player who wants a handful of monsters to tend and fall in love with, to enjoy watching and interacting with for the pure joy of it, all the way up to the industrial player who knows what their end-goals are and wants tools at their disposal to accomplish them with minimal frustration. I fall somewhere in between the two, personally. I like the appeal of seeing the monsters as some degree of alive, of nurturing them, while also knowing that I am allowed - and encouraged - to reach for higher-level goals as I set them, and that the game will do its best not to get in the way.
This is the fundamental design decision that is served by using turns. It does mean that elements of the 'ecosystem' side are flattened by necessity, like breeding, eating, and fighting. By moving everything meaningful to only happening at the end of a turn, and enforcing that in every facet, you necessarily quash the moment-to-moment behaviour of the creatures. If you let a monster eat 'during a turn', and have that meal mean something more than just a superficial visual behaviour, you are removing the power of the turn. It makes everything fuzzier; do I need to visit every camp to make sure that every monster eats something? I know that these two monsters don't get along; do I need to constantly keep tabbing back to their camp just to make sure that they don't kill each other while I'm not watching? I know that this monster is unhappy; do I need to keep watching her to make sure she doesn't run away while I'm not watching? I know that this monster is an egg eater, and that his camp-mate is expected to lay eggs at any moment; do I have to keep tabbing back to make sure that she hasn't suddenly laid eggs, and that the ovivore hasn't noticed and gotten to them before I could grab them and place them safely in the incubator?
For sure, these questions - and the problems they represent - could result in fascinating and excellent gameplay. Something more feral, something more survival-based. That kind of gameplay would shine if you were playing a monster directly, or a group of them, and you and everyone in your ecosystem are existing and hunting and mating and dying in real-time, just like you are. I would love to make that. Love love love. And who knows, maybe one day I will, and in exactly that context - Monstrus monstrus: Feral Edition. Where the turns are gone and everything happens by the world clock instead, and you have to keep on your toes or you'll miss something important.
But that isn't the kind of gameplay I want for this version of Monstrus. Here, turns rule all. Whether or not a monster decides to do the 'go to food and eat' behaviour in a camp does not dictate whether or not that monster considers himself well-fed and happy. That monster will only make that check at a turn's end, at which point he will go;
how much food was made available when this turn ended? Was it of the kind that I personally eat? How many other monsters did I have to share it with? If the monster calculates that there was enough food for them, then he considers himself well-fed and happy. Maybe another monster in his camp, a weaker, less dominant monster, was competing with that first monster for the same share of food... but because he was less dominant, could only eat what was leftover after the first had his fill, and maybe it wasn't enough for that second monster. But the first one doesn't have to care. He doesn't have any kind of altruistic gene.
Maybe a mother monster in a different camp also calculated that there wasn't enough food to go around, so she chose to take her share last, after her offspring, despite the fact that it left her underfed and unhappy.
Maybe yet another mother in a different camp was in a similar situation, but decided to compensate for this lack of food by eating one of her own children. Because hey, nature is metal, and there could be a gene tied to that kind of behaviour.
So this all turns the camp stuff into a bit of an artificial show, which is an unfortunate side effect, because it means that nothing that you watch 'as it happens' is happening as far as the overarching game is concerned. That fight won't result in either monster dying; that meal won't fill that monster up; that cute interaction won't shift the monsters' relationship with each other. You can safely walk away from your computer even on the most tumultuous, unhappy of camps, and they'll all still be there in the same state when you get back. But every behaviour that you can watch will strongly indicate how the underlying simulation will shift when you press that end turn button. Those two monsters who were getting into fights, well one of them might have actually killed the other once the new turn starts. That previously-starving monster who happily bounced from trough to trough will change her status from 'starving' to 'sated' in the new turn. Those monsters who kept following each other around and spitting out little love hearts whenever the other one got close might now be expectant parents in the new turn.
Unless you spotted those constant fights, however, and made the intelligent decision to rehome one of the troublemakers so that you removed the opportunity for them to murder each other. Or you saw the starving monster act so happy to have food available and wanted to be cruel, so you put him in a camp with no food before ending the turn and so he saw no food available and thus either starved to death or ran away. Or you noticed that those two monsters were getting real flirty, and you didn't want to risk them reproducing for whatever reason, so you moved one to a different camp before turn end.
I kinda contextualise it by seeing a turn end as a significant amount of in-game time passing. Just because that starving monster seemed to get one meal in while you were watching, doesn't make much difference if you promptly moved him somewhere barren and then passed the equivalent of a month's time. He still starved, ultimately.
This means that the things you see in the camps are still important, and can still be reacted to, but the necessary deadline of 'when you have to react by' is entirely controlled by you and that end turn button. If you're finding it tedious to keep manually checking the food troughs in each of your camps every turn, then maybe you need to invest in some kind of auto-feeder, or maybe in cultivating a bit of grass for the herbivores that, for some reason, you decided to put in a camp which grows no natural vegetation. Then once the grass is growing faster than the local herbivores can eat it, you can feel comfortable in checking in on that particular detail a little less frequently. Maybe just once every other turn, or every 5 turns - or hell, that camp has been stable for 100 turns and you've not even glanced at it in all that time, you can be pretty sure it's balanced for their survival, and comfortably.
Or maybe you
want to limit yourself to clicking that end-turn button once per real-life day, so that the births, deaths and every milestone in between feels that much more impactful, because you just love watching them, growing attached to them, and playing with them in the moment. In that case, more power to you, and I hope Monstrus gives you the experience you wanted.
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