Website / Lioden

Lioden is a free Virtual Pet/breeding sim focusing on lions. It launched in August, 2012, and differs from most virtual pet games in that the player not only manages a pride of lions but plays directly as the pride’s “king”. It features the ability to breed, decorate, fight, banish, participate in elaborate storylines with, and trade these lions.

When you join the game you chose the appearance and personality of your 'King', or player avatar lion, from a randomly generated selection of options. This initial king has only basic appearance options and few markings, but is fully customizable with applicators created from collected materials or earned in events. Once your king is chosen and named, you're able to explore 7 different areas (temperate savannah, shrubland, tropical forest, dry savannah, rocky hills, desert, waterhole, and marshlands), more of which are unlocked as your lion battles the creatures it encounters and levels up. While exploring, players also encounter wild lionesses who can be persuaded to join their pride if their king is sufficiently impressive.

Lions can be customized by changing the color of their fur ("base"), their markings, their eyes, as well as having the chance for lions to be born with a rare mutation that radically changes their appearance.

Every month, a month-long optional event takes place on the site, often themed around threats to wildlife in Africa such as wildfires or poaching. These involve unique encounters while exploring, decorations that can only be earned during these events, and often a storyline involving NPCs that the player's king can interact with and whose choices effect.

In October 2020, the spinoff game Wolvden was released to the public.

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Lioden contains examples of:

• Anime Hair: The Pariah mane length looks like it came straight out of Kingdom Hearts.
• Amicable Exes: Anubis and Bast were briefly married once in the distant past, though it didn't work out. They're both still fond of the other and express relief that both of their temples survived into the present day, hoping that they can visit once everything with the Serpent has calmed down.
• Animal Jingoism: Lions and hyenas are shown to have mutual animosity towards each other, with numerous encounters allowing you to steal from, antagonize, and outright attack the hyenas you encounter. Due to this, in the Lone Wanderer storyline it takes quite a while for your king and the striped hyena Laharu to come to trust each other even while they work towards a common goal.
• Amazing Technicolor Wildlife: Not present in most of the NPCs or game-generated lions, who are almost all various shades of yellow, brown, and gray, but extremely common in players' prides due to the abundance of brightly-colored bases and markings. Until the introduction of the Moss Agate base, the only non-joke color that a lion couldn't be was green.
• Back from the Dead: After re-sealing Apophis’ soul, its body collapsed on top of the Fusion Dance form of your lion and the god you allied with. If you allied with Anubis, it actually kills your lion and he has to retrieve its soul from the afterlife.
• Big Brother Bully: Vash spends much of the Brotherhood of Zeal story alternating between ignoring his younger brother V'Kai and berating for spending all his time goofing off/smacking him around when the two of them fight.
• Black Comedy: The April Event features this with the fluffballs, who are often Too Dumb to Live. In the Wenet storyline, there are several encounters with the fluffballs where all of the options result in the player killing them, complete with quippy lines poking fun at them. Wenet herself admitted that she has trouble studying them because of eating every fluffball she approaches.
• But Thou Must!: All the storylines tend to be very linear. While there are often multiple dialogue options for choices, picking the 'wrong' option will usually just result in some additional dialogue before you're forced to pick what the game wants you to in order to continue.
• Character Level: Applied to both your king and your lionesses. Higher levels unlock more areas for your king to explore, while higher levels for lionesses allow them to catch more and bigger prey.
• Common Tongue: All animals speak the same language, regardless of species. Apart from shop keepers during events, no prey animals are shown to talk however.
• Concealed Customization:
  • The melanism and achromia mutations completely conceal a lion's base, markings, and skin colors, though those genes still exist and can be passed down to the lion's children. Melanism causes a lion to appear completely black, while achromia makes them appear completely white with pink eyes.
  • Several decors can be worn by lions to completely hide their appearance, such as Nightmare Embers (the lion appears with black fur with fire coming from their neck, paws, and tail), Toxic Embers (same as Nightmare but with green fire), and Wraith Decor (the lion turns deep blue with neon outlines of bones on their fur).
• Content Warnings: In 2018 a warning was added to the start of the "Civil War" storyline after player backlash over how unexpectedly dark and disturbing the content in it (attempted Villainous Incest of a father on his unwilling daughter, Domestic Abuse ending in murder, graphic Demonic Possession and Lion Sacrifice) was.
• Creature-Breeding Mechanic: A major focus of the game. Almost every aspect of a lion's appearance can be inherited through breeding, and in fact some bases and many markings can only be gotten only on a lion through inheriting the gene for them from a parent.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The May storyline has the player be on both ends of this trope:
    • When fighting V'Kai, the objective is to win the fight, which isn't remotely hard to do when V'Kai does 1 HP per hit, which is less damage than even low-level lion NPCs.
    • However, when battling Vashkartzen, the objective is to lose to him, and to enforce this, Vash deals up to 45 HP of damage, or nearly half of the player's health bar.
  • In the June storyline, the first battle with Apophis ends with this. Apophis will One Hit Knock Out you, which will force you and your chosen god to consider merging together to beat it.
• Dating What Daddy Hates: Menhit is a relationship with Apollyon. Her father is furious because Apollyon is from the Burning Lands, while he and Menhit are royalty of another kingdom of lions. If you choose to help Menhit, many of the quests she gives you involve distracting her father so that she can sneak away to see Apollyon.
• Defeat Means Friendship:
  • Beating V'Kai in a battle impresses him and makes him much friendlier towards the player's king. In fact, to continue very far into the Brotherhood of Zeal storyline you have to beat him so that he'll open up to you.
  • To befriend Vash, you need to accept his challenge to a Hopeless Boss Fight and lose- once you do he grows to consider you a Worthy Opponent and offers to train with you.
• Early Game Hell: The Poacher Chase and Fire Escape minigames from the March and August events. They're fairly typical sidescrolling run-and-jumpers, but the stage scrolls so slowly at first that your jumps need to be timed almost perfectly. The game actually gets easier as you play for the first few thousand points before picking up in difficulty again.
• Fireball Eyeballs: A number of decors create the appearance of fire coming out of a lion's eyes, often with other visual effects as well. Hellfire Eyes is the only one that causes the trope with no other effects.
• Fusion Dance: To defeat Apophis at the end of the Rise of the Serpent event, you must merge with the god you sided with during the storyline. The merged being is primarily your lion but grown to Godzilla-size due to being infused with godlike power, with the traits of the god altering its appearance. While control over it is technically split, it’s the god who takes charge during most of the battle.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: In the February event, one encounter in explore is a male dwarf lion having trouble mating with regular females due to how much smaller than them he is. Players who have dwarf kings have no penalties on breeding with them.
• Giant Enemy Crab: In the optional "Journey to Vredefort Crater" quest, harmful cosmic residue has fallen into the nearby rivers and caused the local crabs to mutate into enormous monsters that glow gold. If you want to complete the quest, you'll be fighting a lot of them in order to recover the residue.
• Glowing Eyelights of Undeath: Many decors create this effect, most of them only available from the October event's shop. Soulfire, Navfire, and Lich Fire all cause it, along with red/purple/blue fire to appear on the lion's back. Lich Eyes causes the effect without the additional fire.
• Heaven Versus Hell: The October Event involves a fight between the armies of heaven and hell. The player is given the option to join either side and fight angels or demons... or ignore it altogether and focus on the other supernatural events going on.
• Hopeless Boss Fight:
  • Vashkartzen has ludicrously high stats when you battle him, and rabbit's foots are disabled in your fight. To continue his storyline in Brotherhood of Zeal, you're meant to lose to him so that he'll offer to train with you. If you do somehow win, you can't proceed and will have to fight him again until you lose.
  • The Serpent of Chaos in Rise of the Serpent will automatically deal 1000 damage to your lion on its first attack, defeating you instantly. Unusually for this trope, it happens almost at the end of the storyline rather than the start, with your lion barely escaping with its life shortly before the real final battle with the Serpent.
• Horsemen of the Apocalypse: They don’t appear, but their steeds do. The horse of pestilence is a white horse dripping black liquid from its eyes and hooves, the horse of war is an enormous red war-horse with Fireball Eyeballs, the horse of famine is starved-looking black horse, and the horse of death is a completely silent dead horse with an exposed skull.
• Hot Skitty-on-Wailord Action: A male lion with the Primal mutation is close to twice the size of an ordinary male, and can mate and have cubs with a lioness with the Dwarfism mutation.
• Interspecies Romance: There is an extremely rare chance for a lioness to mate with a tiger or a leopard, producing a tigon or a leopon. She'll admit that she was afraid of your reaction, and hid the truth until she gave birth and was unable to hide it from you any longer.
• Karma Meter: Your lion's karma is effected by your actions while exploring- kind actions towards other creatures increases your karma, cruel ones decrease it. Some encounters are only possible if you are in a certain karma range, and what title your king holds also depends on how good or evil your karma is. The exact value that these encounters effect your karma is hidden by default, though by giving some beetles to the Karma Snake all subsequent encounters will show their effects.
• Nothing Is Scarier: In-universe, the narration notes that the complete silence of the white horse of death as it walks by is far scarier than the screams and roars of its fellow horses of the apocalypse.
• Palette Swap: Quite a few of the bases are this. Serruria, Medal, and Seth are all recolors of Chatoyant, for example, and the June event has several combo bases derived from its applicator bases that are recolors of each other (first Gilded, Rose Gold, and Sphinx, then Ogdoad, Ennead, and Ra). There's also Spectre, Phantom, and Mummy which are all recolors of each other.
• Pals with Jesus: The Rise of the Serpent storyline involves awakening one of the gods of ancient Egypt in order to fight the titular Serpent of Chaos. While it's initially a purely pragmatic relationship, your lion and the god you choose to wake up eventually come to see each other as friends.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: The Trivia 'Spinx' is clearly a regular lion wearing a gold mask and who tore the wings off a small bird and tied them to its back- the straps securing them can be seen and the edges are even still bloody. Despite this, no other lion bothers to question this.
• Predation Is Natural: If you chose to side with Heaven during the October event and have good karma, Aiatar will say that he doesn't hold lions killing other creatures to live against them, as its part of nature.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Trivia Spinx tell the player lion that "Who would cross the Bridge of Death must answer me these questions three, ere the other side he see!", despite the narration pointing out that they're in the middle of the savanna and there's no bridge around.
  • Choosing to kill the hyena queen at the end of the Great Hunger storyline gives the “Game of Thrones, Just Smellier” achievement.
  • Appropriately enough, there are several to The Lion King (1994):
    • One of the NPCs you can fight in explore is an emaciated reddish-brown lion with a black mane, green eyes, and a noticeable eye scar - clearly meant to resemble the character of Scar.
      • As of 2021, he has been given a new design meant to resemble the real-life lion Scarface (often called Scar for short), who passed away that year.
    • Multiple food items are described as "slimy, yet satisfying."
    • One of the backgrounds you can equip to your lion is called "Can You Feel The Love".
    • Another background, Moon Walk, has a meerkat and a warthog crossing over a fallen log in front of a full moon.
    • One decor, called Two Little Rascals, was specifically released in honor of the anniversary of the original film, and features a meerkat riding on a warthog's back.
• Uneven Hybrid: Hybrids that are second-generation and onward (having a majority of lion DNA) have a lower chance of passing their mutation onto their cubs than first-generation hybrids do. Additionally, later generation hybrids inherit fur colors and markings from their parents as all lions do, while first-generation hybrids are born with unique genetics that come from their tiger or leopard parent.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential: With certain items, you can make a lioness miscarry, or give her cub a potentially fatal birth defect. The entirety of the game's Karma system runs on this as well.
• "Well Done, Son" Guy: Anubis was always considered a disappointment to his father Seth due to his lack of physical prowess and creepy interest in dead things. If you choose to wake him up in Rise of the Serpent, he's surprised that you picked him to fight against the Serpent instead of his father, and says that he half-expects Seth to revive himself and attack out of sheer rage.
• You Cannot Grasp the True Form: When visiting Hell during the October event, souls in the forms of ghostly lions are visibly being tortured by demons. The narration notes that they probably only look like lions to you because that's the best way you can understand them.

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