Tuesday 13 October 2015

Lonely Norns—Update

Just checking in real quick to let y'all know that the Lonely Norns are available for download now, and a full list of their genetic modifications is up on their pages too. You can get them from here.

Have fun with them :)

Wednesday 7 October 2015

Lonely Norns

Dr. Shoy is back! Sorry for the absence.

The idea behind the lonely Norns was to create a breed of Norns that would avoid each other's company, but would still have a trigger that would fill them with sex drive so that they would still want to breed. Guess how that turned out???????

Yep. So, Monty, Erin, Quella, and Cornelius are all Lonely Norns. There's quite a few changes in their genome so I'll merely summarise the changes rather than listing every edited gene compared with the original version. Keep in mind while you read this that the changes probably don't have all that much logic to them as I knew very little of genetics when I made these.

A main feature of the Lonely Norns was my attempt to make them change from hating each other to horny in an instant - which was going to be done by slapping and patting them. Patting was supposed to make the Norns sex drive go down and slapping was supposed to bring it up. That at least did work, but at the time I didn't realise that saying 'yes' and 'no' have the same affect as physically patting/slapping the Norns, so I didn't realise that this would leave me with no way to punish and reward them without putting other chemicals in that might affect their learning.

The other main aspect was controlling three chemicals: loneliness, sex drive, and crowdedness. Of course, being the inexperienced little mad scientist that I was back then, I'm not sure I fully understood what I was doing. It seems I was operating under the assumption that these three drives, upon being changed, would automatically convince the Norns to act in different ways, when that's not the case; the drives affect the neurons in the drive lobe (which can be used to form concepts) and punishment/reward is used to reinforce the concepts.