I was in the shower the other day, coughing and working out a sinus problem I was dealing with at the time. While I breathed in the steam and let the hot water wash over my face, I had a thought.
“Better a sinus infection than dealing with worms. Again.”
I don’t remember how it happened because it had been over a week since I even launched a Creatures game before then, but I started to think about how parasites might work in the Creatures universe. I got to thinking about ticks and worms. Between picking ticks off of my dogs and my personal experience with intestinal worms, I was weirdly personally invested and fascinated.
Then I thought “I wonder if I could make parasites in Docking Station. It wouldn’t be too different from bacteria in the way that they latch on to a creature, and instead of just adding toxins, I could make them take resources… couldn’t I?”
Granted, my CAOS skills aren’t quite up to snuff, and I’ve been feeling overwhelmed lately with my pregnancy (my own cute little parasite), so I don’t know if I’ll actually have the time or energy to dedicate to a project like this. Still, in my experience, the best way to start with a product is to lay out exactly what I want it to do.
Enter Design Notes!
I’d like there to be at least 2 different types of parasite. Specifically, ticks and worms. Those are the only ones I know anything about. (Admittedly, I don’t know a TON about either outside of what I’ve gleaned from personal experience.)
Ticks
Ticks could have a graphic, or not. Since ticks can be imperceptibly small until they’ve fed, maybe they could have a graphic only once the tick has fed and is ready to fall off.
They would ride on a creature similar to the way bacteria does and draw blood from the creature directly. Since creatures don’t have “blood” per se, I have a few options. I could actually create a genome that pairs with the parasites (which is on the table). I could also have a tick draw minute amounts of glucose from the creature’s body to emulate blood being drawn.
Of course, I would also give the ticks a chance to give the creature hosting it something like Lyme disease. Two of the main symptoms of Lyme disease are fever and fatigue, which are easy enough to trigger in a creature. Simply inject fever toxin and sleep toxin.
Once ticks are large enough, if I decide on a graphic, maybe the hand could manually remove a tick. Wild ticks tend to climb up plants to reach hosts, so maybe I’d have a tiny graphic for that. Short of that, the best medicine might be a spray like some people use on their animals or a preventative like a pill.
Worms
They would attach to a creature similarly to bacteria. Worms would be invisible no matter what because they are an internal parasite. My personal experience with intestinal worms is that they cause stomach pain, and lessen appetite. Eggs might be visible on food or in bodies of water. Specifically, I had round worms (which I likely caught from handling chickens) so that’s what I would base these on. A tape worm may come later.
These would instead take some food sources directly while also causing the creature pain and reducing appetite. If the creature ever runs out of food resources for the worms the worms would “die” and leave the creature’s body. Of course, the creature would have to be in pretty bad shape by this point. In this case, I would probably have plain protein or carbs be what the worms ate. I’ll have to play with this idea to see what works and what doesn’t. For balancing, I wouldn’t have the worms take things like amino acids or adipose tissue, only food that’s still moving through the digestive system.
Side effects of the worms would be likely be pain and I might even increase hunger drives. Since real life worms are a hard problem to identify there would likely be a chemical trace of them rather than a visual one. I’m not yet sure what this would look like.
Treatment for worms would be the same as they are in real life – a pill taken orally. Since the pill is pretty rough on the host too, it might cause fatigue and temporarily reduce all hunger drives to zero. I also had a lot of pain and headaches when I was *clears throat* dewormed. It was actually more painful than just having the worms…
Prevention would be possible by treating bodies of water or identifying and removing tainted food from the creature’s environment.
I won’t be adding or changing anything on this particular post if/when I make progress on this project. Instead, I’ll be giving updates and changes their own blog posts. At any rate, as I said before, my CAOS skills aren’t quite where they need to be to even start an undertaking like this, but I’ll keep you all updated as best as I can.
Speaking of the blog, I’ve been on a bit of a Pixelmon (Minecraft modded) and Pokemon Legends kick lately, so posts have been and will likely continue to be sporadic for a while. Still, I hope you’re enjoying this.
Thanks for reading!
Kez