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[grubbymonster]

I forgot to mention, I saw a couple of your creatures in my simulation

[variablenonsense]

Got your link but haven't had time to test it. I will let you know when I do, hopefully tomorrow!

[Spiderking50]

I forgot to mention, I saw a couple of your creatures in my simulation

What do you mean by this?

[grubbymonster]

creatures are stored online from other pools, because its a very alpha version I assumed any creature that wasn't one of mine was probably yours.

[Spiderking50]

Oh wow! Thats really cool. Yeah, if they were made by Roboson, then that's me. There should be a lot of really complex purple guys. Idk what that means, but I ended up getting a bunch with 8-9 or even more parts.

[Spiderking50]

Oh, I have so many questions.

What do all the colors for bodies mean?

I have a creature (my favorite) with no eyes and a sort of clear body color. It doesn't unless I control it, what is this thing?

Why are the single celled red guys so successful?

Besides body color and number, is there any other factors that go into a creature?

[grubbymonster]

Good questions. Color, cell /nucleus, is related to their stats (atk,def,speed,storage) eyes are mostly random but unique to the species.  Species is imp because the can sense if anther cell is from their species so their behavior can change based on that.  Behavior is a bit more complicated. The creature senses the world and its health/energy then sets signals. Each cell can move or extend/contract based on signals or combinations of signals.  Also the can set signals so you get oscillations and delayed or complex behaviors.  It can be hard to tell why they do stuff but it helps to know what they could do.  If you force feed them until they reproduce , the offspring might behave differently.   Those red ones are just offspring that had behaviors that found food better.  My guess is that at some point they will be food for some predator but that may take a while.

[Spiderking50]

I had gathered that the colors did something, what i what to know is what each color relates to exactly.

Is there going to be a point where creatures can be designed or modifiable?

Do you have a list of behaviors/signals?

EDIT: I still don't understand this unmoving eyeless creature. It is my favorite simply because it hardly exists but I'm forcing it into existence.It neither moves or actively feeds, and doesn't reproduce until I play it. It is simply quite strange. 

[DoctorMcTaalik]

I am not 100% sure which other modes I will implement but laboratory is on the top of my list.  I am happy just to see what evolves but I suspect only a small fraction of people are like me and just want to see what happens.  Anything that 'gamifies' the simulation and makes it more fun is ok with me.(really I just want to keep people running the game to create new creatures) A laboratory would give you a window into their DNA and see how they tick.  I could let the player tweak the dna to see what happens or put it through a tumbler to get 100 variations then have those fight it out?  Really not sure, its a tough first project to get traction on tbh.   

I am still toying with the miniaturized ship idea to make an actual game where the enemies keep getting harder to beat.  You could play against creatures by level and if they kill a player they level up.  The odd thing is I don't know what would happen, it may keep getting harder forever, become impossible, or level off in a month/year/?  It was a very ambitious project to start with and I cant even begin to describe how complex it was to set up a dna system that procedurally generates such a variety of creatures with virtually unlimited behaviors.  There are somewhere around 2^8000 combinations, I think that number has about 2500 zeros after it, give or take a Googol or two.

I really like the look of this so far. It reminds of a bit of Species ALRE.

I like the idea of giving the player some control, but I'd personally be content with simply seeing what evolves on its own.

[Spiderking50]

I love species, I've wasted soo much time just running the game and watching things evolve. Had some pretty great creatures too.

[Spiderking50]

Two bugs I'vw seen:

Occasionally a dude will disappear (but not be dead, just be gone all of a sudden with no red orbs left or anything). Larger creatures tend to disapear, which sucks because those are the interesting ones.

Secondly, occasionally when moving and birthing a new creature the baby will shoot off screen and never be heard from again.

Gonna run this all night and see what I get.

[grubbymonster]

When a creature is born it is sometimes not a viable structure and will 'pop'. Also, some creatures die because they run out of energy, the red things are meat and represent the energy left.   Both of these are by design but I plan on displaying some particle system to make it more obvious that they died.

The ones that fly off the screen is a bug and I plan on fixing it.  It happens because the 'egg' is actually an invisible object and the creature sometimes moves a bit based on the other objects.  The egg is just a container object that keeps its initial position and this is only a problem when the creature is growing.  It grows in size but also grows relative to the egg object which is a problem when they are not in the same position.  Its a bit of testing and one of those cases where its a bit of work to duplicate the conditions before I can even start testing.

Thanks again for the input!

Also, the game is going to be included in the next steam greenlight Groupee (www.groupees.com) which will increase the number of alpha testers and hopefully generate some interesting creatures.

[Spiderking50]

Here's a few things I noticed:

 I'm getting overrun by little single body creatures and am getting few multibody creatures throughout the simulation. I am manually killing off creatures I don't like, but I cant get a good genepool because either the simulation tries to keep a minimum number of creatures by spawning some new ones or there is a max number of creatures/body parts it can handle and I'm hitting that with a vast number of single celled organisms. Either way, I'm not getting cool or complex creatures, which I think is a big part of the simulation.

Sorta related to that, my creatures aren't giving birth. I'll click on one of my guys and its "new" number is full (the changing number has matched the static number), but it isn't giving birth. It could be for the same reasons I mentioned above (creature/part cap) or a completely different reason. Either way they aren't giving birth to the next generation unless I take control of them for a while and move them around until something clicks and they go into labor.

I'm just speculating on both of these issues and I could likely be wrong. You know better however, and so maybe take a look into it. I left my game running about 24 hours just to make sure and still had these issues.

[grubbymonster]

For those of you with the alpha version I have uploaded a new build.  You can now control the amount of food, sounds, wall damage, and where your creatures get generated from.

[DoctorMcTaalik]

For those of you with the alpha version I have uploaded a new build.  You can now control the amount of food, sounds, wall damage, and where your creatures get generated from.

Did you downsize the UI? I played the last build on a 17 inch mac, and found that it covered a lot of the screen and was obtrusive. The new build is significantly better, at least now that I'm using a desktop pc. I don't know whether this was an improvement, or simply due to me switching computers, but I thought I'd mention it.