Hey, I want you to know that this is gorgeous
And I freaking love eco-system simulators.
Well, I love them conceptually. In practice they are really,
really hard to pull off in a satisfying way (at least they always were for me when I tried to fiddle around on my own.
I have some thoughts I'd like to share later, mainly related to how these webs of life are ful of
intransitive relationships and how that can lead to really unusual results when brought together, but I don't have the time right now.
But here is some interesting reading on the matter:
https://aeon.co/essays/attempts-to-choose-the-best-life-may-be-doomed-to-failurehttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontransitive_diceReally looking forward to reading more of your thoughts on where you're going to take this!
Thanks! Yeah, constructing a robust, engaging, and surprising ecosystem simulation has proven to be a thoroughly humbling experience
I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on relationship dynamics and stuff -- I checked out your links and they seem really useful. I remembered hearing about nontransitive dice on a Numberphile youtube vid at some point, but had forgotten about it, so thanks for linking!
This looks really good. I like the idea! Good luck with the development.
Thank you! Really nice to hear that!
So the next major milestone is to get a minimum core-loop version of a playable build, that I can start distributing and begin getting player feedback. My internal deadline for this is about 2 weeks away now, so after stepping back and re-evaluating the project scope and my production timeline, here's the current plan:
I'm cutting the game-mode for direct player control over individual creatures.Instead, I will focus exclusively on the current 'observer mode' which is much closer to the more classic God Game, or genetic Fishtank sim. Having 2 major game-modes (that often had conflicting goals) was complicating development and I had to focus on one or the other. It was a tough decision but I think it needed to happen.
Gameplay will be closer to existing evolution simulators.I had been resisting this from the beginning, since I really wanted to invent some more novel gameplay related to evolution. However, after about ~2 years of tinkering around with different experimental directions (including
Planet Crawlers) I think cruel reality has made its point that this is an
extremely difficult thing to pull off, and ultimately out of scope for my first commercial game.
Having the gameplay itself be a little more cliche/traditional will have the benefit of making the product more easily understandable from a glance at a store page, though, which is a positive from a business perspective, if a little disappointing creatively.
This should also allow me to focus more on graphics, which I personally enjoy working on much more than re-writing gameplay code and thus helps make development easier mentally.
Thus, gameplay will primarily revolve around observation & divine manipulation. I'll be focusing on refining the graphics in a way to convey as much information as possible about what is actually happening in the simulation (i.e. if some event occurs in the sim, it should be visually represented in some way). On the flipside, the player will be given a number of tools to alter and interfere in the simulation (and then observe the repercussions over time).
I'll go into more detail in the coming weeks, but here are some examples:
-Ease of camera navigation (move freely around the environment + able to focus on individual creatures/objects). There should be as little friction as possible for the Player seeing and focusing on what he/she's interested in viewing.
-Basic simulation parameters. Ex. Mutation rates, food abundance, etc. I'll try to come up with alternatives to simple UI Sliders for these.
-Physical Manipulations: Stir up the water, skip a pebble across the pond, drag a creature somewhere, possible alter the terrain, etc.
Lower Priority:
-Direct design (i.e. direct control over creature body - character creator, basically) -- I'll probably save this for post-launch additions, as it can eat up a ton of dev time.
-Other??? I've got a bunch of weird ideas I'd like to prototype at some point, but I really want to actually publish something so I have to be more ruthless about cutting things.
Community
