that's a lot of friendship

i've made fluffy mothers feed their babies. now, it's time for them to love them... or not. i decided to add a new relationship variable that stored the last location that particular fluffy was seen in, then started doing relationship stuff in the nursing script. i added a bunch of variables while i did that, and at some point, i got tired of it and went to sleep. i spent the next day, christmas, and most of the day after that alternating between aimlessly bullshitting on the internet and drawing fluffy abuse on a graphics tablet until i burned myself out and went back to coding.

i went all-out with the functions, creating a function to modify a relationship, as well as one that would return a relationship depending on the identifier of the fluffy in question and return an empty one if there was none. then, in the nursing script, i put that shit to use. when a foal attempted to nurse, there would be a check to determine if the mare being nursed from gave two shits about the foal. if the mare had low morality and didn't recognize the foal as her own child, she would hit it, and it wouldn't be allowed to nurse.

being a programmer makes you feel weird things! for instance, being proud when one mare happily lets a stranger's foal nurse and the other kills it for trying. all she did was smack the foal, but the triple damage combined with the fact that it was unable to learn to stop trying meant that it kept attempting to nurse until she smacked it to death. in the next test run, i added a quick check and a relationship change, causing the foal to fear the mare and not try to nurse.

the initial test with the foals fearing mares failed due to me being a dumb bitch and forgetting to add an 'else', but then it worked pretty well!

the foal died at a ludicrous speed after i took that picture, because in addition to starving, it was also badly beaten, but i feel like it was reasonable, as anyone would notice a newborn foal screaming as its would-be surrogate mother beat it up. after seeing that i had a solid system in place, i replaced the foal dialogue for suckling with dialogue from the mother to provide context and stopped mares from actually hitting foals unless they persisted, then moved on.

where to begin next... well, rape was always a good option. i started with baby rape and moved down the list. even a fluffy can agree that baby rape, as well as rape in general, is unforgivable, so naturally, fluffies who witness it are going to completely hate the one responsible. just as naturally, most fluffies have garbage memory, and memories from more than a month ago are like those weird baby memories people have that probably didn't even happen, so theoretically, with some socializing, a fluffy could forget that anything even happened. of course, the one being raped is going to hate the rapist just as much, assuming they survive.

not all special huggies take the form of rape, so consensual enfing made the one on the bottom love the one on top a little more. after that, i moved to wall smashing, which was very fun, if a bit of a shitshow to navigate. i changed some of the stranger dialogue to have less of an emotional response and added different lines depending on the type of relationship the fluffies had.

good shit. i lost track of everything i was doing, but i know i added some cannibal-related stuff.

that's a unicorn, and that pegasus is running because she knows she's about to get murdered. with all the interaction bullshit in place, it was time to implement a new interaction: talking. instead of just greeting their intangible sky daddy, the player, when wandering, fluffies would socialize, and the things mares said instead of "hi, daddeh!" would be moved to the resting action. of course, lengthy conversations didn't exactly work when ten minutes was the equivalent of a month for them, so they would just greet each other and possibly do something depending on their relationship.

now, that's wholesome. they kept spamming that 'nyu fwend' routine, though, so i tweaked the script and took a closer look at the variables of some other fluffies. my tweak seemed to have fixed it for the most part, but then my testers started having gay sex. that came out of nowhere, didn't it? i thought so, too. i fleshed out the dialogue a little and then observed two male fluffies...

...yeah, they're totally trying to fuck each other. also, cobalt is a chirpy rapist and dusty is a foal rapist, so that's not helping their relationship. i decided to just let them fuck each other's assholes while i looked through the code in an attempt to figure out why.

the fact that they're so protective of each other is honestly kind of cute, and i got a little attached. eventually, however, i had to let them go and focus on figuring out the bug. the results were... not very helpful. i managed to figure out what part of the code was allowing them to consider other males when looking for fluffies to enf, but basic logic showed that that specific area of the code was not reachable when seeking fluffies. what the fuck.

of course, like most weird things, the cause was just me being a fucking idiot and not adding a set of brackets where there should have been one.