and then i made them cannibals and the sun existed

upon impulsively deciding to add cannibal fluffies, the first thing i did was add a new tag, a corpse tag. for corpses. then, i put food scripts in the body parts, with some new lines for eating them, and gave severely starving fluffies the ability to seek out this new corpse tag along with the usual food tag. it went smoothly, but for the longest time, i couldn't tell why my code wasn't working...

turns out i typed 'corspe' instead of 'corpse'.

boom, now they can eat dead bodies. the food amounts even scale depending on the size of the fluffy. that was easier than i thought it would be.

and of course, i had to fuck around with it. i started a test and spawned a shitload of fluffies until i got an alicorn breeding pair, then put the alicorns in a big box with no food while the rest of the fluffies ran around and poisoned themselves. when the fluffies outside started dying, that was what was fed to the alicorns. they're monsters, aren't they? shouldn't monsters be eating a healthy diet of meat?

of course, the 'monsters' wouldn't eat or even notice the corpses until they were starving to death, screaming and crying when they did, because that was what they were programmed to do. i soon got bored and went back to programming shit. i made limbs break off when eaten by fluffies, and then i added a cannibalism variable that goes up by an amount that depends on morality when eating parts of corpses.

as i was writing the cannibal hunting lines, i decided that the current system of named fluffies referring to themselves was tedious as hell and rewrote it so that name substitutions would be handled by the message function itself and triggered through the use of "<name>" in a line. as i went through everything, changing lines to use the new system and also writing new ones, i made cannibals seem more independent, only directly asking the player for food when on the brink of starvation.

getting the new name system to work was a little weird, but i managed to pull it off, and soon moved on to the actual cannibalism. as i worked on it, the possibility of mares hunting and eating their own children came up.

i finished my draft, started a test, and immediately noticed something wrong. number one, my cannibal tester wasn't actively hunting, instead only going after pre-killed fluffies. number two, this.

i'm not sure what i did, but i managed to fix that, and then i fucked with a mare's variables to force her to eat the corpses of a few fluffies until she gave in.

i got hunting behavior up and running as well. seeking behavior with body parts is inherently fucked up due to the way fluffy sprites are set up, and i had to choose between body parts glitching out horribly and body parts getting deleted when the parent part is fully eaten. i chose deletion.

then, i got a terrible idea!

that's the sun. instead of just polishing and releasing this build, which is as complete as it'll get at this point, i'm going to make it go up and down.

making the sun move was easy. then, i accidentally fucked up the sky, which led me to make new sprites for sunset and night. after that, i ran off and did random bullshit for about an hour before actually getting to the sky transitions. i watched the sun rise a few times with no less than ten fluffies shitting themselves and thinking their legs are made out of butter on readily available poison and hard drugs as i tried to get the transitions right. at some point, i decided to add a really faint overlay over everything for a lighting effect, and i think it turned out pretty good. moving on to other times of day was pretty exciting.

i present to you casual fluffies at dawn.