Asleep on Their Parent

There hasn’t been a video in a while, so this post is the update. The short version: we made a lot of small visual changes to the babies, and they are adorable.

Babies, held properly

Carrying a baby used to look wrong. Some of the carry art drew its own baby on top of the real one, so the parent was holding two. Some sets kept looping a pick-up off the floor, and two of them were four-legged deer for some reason. A parent who fell asleep mid-carry stayed on their feet, still rocking.

All 24 carry sets are redrawn. Now a carried baby does one of three things:

• When its parent stands still, it’s cradled, with the parent rocking it gently.
• When its parent walks, it clings to their chest and bobs along with each step.
• When its parent lies down to sleep, it falls asleep on top of them.

Babies have moods while they’re held: content, happy, fussy, asleep. They keep their own colours, too. A baby in its parent’s arms is the same baby you saw on the floor, worn in its own genes’ palette.

Nobody is eating the baby

The founder’s bug report, more or less word for word: when they pick up the baby, it looks like they eat the baby.

They weren’t, we promise. But it did look that way, and we found out why. In 4 of 26 pickups we measured, the parent was in the middle of a meal and lifted the baby in the very next step, so the last thing you saw before the baby vanished into their arms was chewing.

Now the lift is its own moment. The parent stands still for a beat and the baby comes up into its arms. A parent never lifts a baby mid-meal, or right after one. A parent who’s only a little hungry picks up a crying baby first and eats afterwards, with the baby in their arms. The baby nurses while they eat. A parent who’s starving takes the baby straight to the food.

They touch each other more

Fixing the pickup turned up a bigger problem: a lot of animations hardly ever played. Picking food up off the ground happened once in a whole test game run at 20× speed. After the fix, the same run had 2,163. At normal speed it went from zero to 474. At normal speed, grooming each other went from 4 times to 24, nuzzling from 10 to 30, and cuddling from 4 to 10.

Hugs are still rare. That turns out to be honest, not a bug: a hug answers loneliness, and Norns in a crowded room just aren’t very lonely.

Under the hood, every animation that holds a Norn in place is now one line in one table: what it looks like, what it outranks, how long it lasts, what’s allowed to interrupt it. Adding a new one takes three steps, which matters, because we’re going to add a lot of them.

The baby nobody could hear

This one was sad. If a parent carried a baby through a door into another room and put it down there, the game still had the baby filed under the room it came from. Everything that asks “who’s near me?” looked in the wrong room. So the baby would lie there crying, with adults standing right next to it, and none of them could hear it. In one test run a baby cried for about four minutes beside grown-ups who badly wanted to help.

Now they hear it. Carried babies also get fed whenever their parent eats. Before, that only happened on one of the three ways a Norn can eat. We should be honest about the limits, though: this fixes babies nobody could hear, not babies who go hungry because food is scarce. Food can still run short, and the little ones still lose out when it does.

Any two can court

Until now, two Norns of the same sex could never court. The check for who could have an egg together sat in front of courtship itself. Now it only gates conception. Any pair can court, with the hearts, the gestures and the warm chemistry. In a batch of test colonies, 135 of 286 courtships were same-sex pairs, against zero before.

The game’s words got gentler too. “Carried by Mom” is now “carried by their parent”, and the inspect panel says Parent. That fits Norn culture: their main kin word is velma, and it means parent.

Hormones, from genes

The founder asked whether the hormones were “a bunch of random numbers.” We checked, and several of them were. One was stuck at its maximum all game, and nothing ever read it. The stress hormone drained away in seconds, so stress couldn’t build up.

Now sex hormones come from genes. They’re the first sex-linked genes in a live Norn genome. A sleep gene makes the calming chemical. A Norn’s sensitivity to stress is genetic, and stress itself rises when things go badly and fades over minutes, not seconds. Babies grow up in about an hour and a half, down from around four. Before, more than half of them never reached adulthood in a five-hour test game at all.

Boarding the pod

When it’s time to go down to a world, a voice over the speaker announces it. A countdown starts, and the announcement repeats every minute: the pod is going down to new ground, and food is growing there.

Nobody gets moved by the game. Each Norn decides for itself, every time it hears the call. Curiosity, comfort, loneliness and hearing it again all make a Norn more likely to go. Fear makes it less likely. If you speak during the countdown, it counts as a suggestion: it can tip a Norn into going, but it can’t make them. The ones who decide to go walk to the pod room on their own, where the food is growing.

If fewer than two are aboard when the countdown ends, boarding is called off and tried again later. If enough go, the descent is quiet: a dark screen, a few words, no camera shake. You can skip it.

Smaller things

• Credits. Click Credits to bring your own OpenRouter key or buy credits, which supports development. Credits only pay for the more advanced thinking, and the basics are free. New players get enough for about one full game.
• A proper welcome. The intro now asks your name, and a short tour points at every control. It also explains that what you hear is Nornish, and that the speech bubble is the translation.
• Phones. On an iPhone the game used to start and then the tab died. It was using 1.9 GB of graphics memory, and iOS kills a tab at about 1.5 GB. It now peaks at 246 MB.
• Toxin. Norns were being poisoned in ordinary play. The dose was counted per frame instead of per second, so they got four to eight times what they should have. That’s fixed, and the first two areas they explore don’t poison them at all now.
• The dead are laid to rest. Sometimes a creature that died stayed in the world forever. Now they don’t.

Play it now at play.multiversegames.ai/precursors/ (or play.multiversestudios.xyz/precursors/). Pay what you can.