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I have 2 questions:
1. Is there a discord server or some other community outlet besides steam?
2. Would it be possible to extend this game to terrestrial creatures?
Thanks to both of you, I really appreciate all the support. There are a lot of new things coming up that I'm excited to add and that I think will contribute a lot of depth to the game.
I don't have a Discord server yet but that seems like a good idea. I'll talk to my publisher about setting one up.
I've experimented with terrestrial creatures a little already! I was able to evolve creatures that dragged their body along the ground; they often looked a bit like crustaceans to me, and interestingly, I think this is how the first real-life land animals may have actually actually moved. I never managed to get one that could balance on its legs and hold its body up the way most terrestrial animals do. So something like crustaceans is very possible, but it may be that other terrestrial animals are just a little too complex to evolve in a normal gameplay timeframe. If I can find a way to make them work, I definitely would, but it may just not be possible at the time.
Hey Tom! Hope you are doing well. I was super excited to see the ecosystem demo come out today. I got a chance to play it a bit and I have some feedback.
1. Predators seem to have a rough time. They don't really seem to hunt down prey very well and almost always end up dying even when in close proximity to prey.
2. I think there needs to be a way to indefinitely gain points for nutritional items. After you achieve goals currently, that is the end of placing any plantlife while populations grow and will inevitably need more.
3. The nursery system is currently a bit wonky. One small adjustment can make something that was a nursery into an area that isnt a nursery at all.
4. It is hard to tell anything is going on without the log. There doesn't seem to be any animations for eating other fish or laying eggs. If so they are very hard to see.
5. There is no interaction. It is fun to make an ecosystem and see what comes out of it, but once there are a few established species, nothing really happens. They don't interact, there is no evolution causing a new species to come out of an existing one. I let the game run for a few hours to see how everything went and I had 2 species that pretty much stayed the same the whole time once everything else died out.
6. The lifespan of individuals is a bit short. Some individuals dont lay eggs or even seem to eat before dying of old age.
All in all I am loving what little I have gotten to play. I think that making species interact and wander around more would be a big help. It is cool to see how everything evolves and what species ends up taking the top spot. But once the top spot is established the game gets a bit dull. I never really see many species survive for a long period of time so the end is always 1-3 species just sort of existing. Keep up the great work, can't wait to see what the game becomes!
In the end I hope the game to become a complex simulation and have an educational impact too.
https://www.hcn.org/issues/46.21/have-returning-wolves-really-saved-yellowstone
I mean playing and observing algorithms can be fascinating, but the game could even present the player some scenarios/challenges accompanied by references to real life.
Just like some strategy games like to simulate historical battles, this one could do the same but from ecosystem point of view.
When I play Banished, the beginning is interesting but later I set the game to max speed and I still have to wait to reach the next milestone in my plan.
I wonder if having a detailed creature simulation will impact performance and the possibility to speed up the game.
Predators do have a tough time! In early versions of the game, prey didn't know to flee from them, which resulted in the opposite situation, in which predators would always wipe out their prey. One thing I found interesting is that it can be difficult to balance predator and prey populations in real-life lab conditions as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffaker%27s_mite_experiment. Because an AI adjustment was enough to switch from predator-dominant to prey-dominant, I'm hoping that with further adjustments (there is a lot of work to come), I can get zero-in on a more even balance.
The physics and AI for creatures can be CPU-intensive, so the game has to be careful about how many creatures exist at the same time. That's actually why the nutrient points are so limited: because, just like in nature, food supply is what ultimately determines the size of the population. Allowing for more creatures and more different species is definitely something I am interested in though, which could allow for more nutrients, and I was also planning on allowing the player to grow out into nearby zones (e.g. out into the deeper ocean or up a river) which could pause creatures in zones you weren't in and allow for spawning a whole new batch.
That's good to know. That's something I've been working on; previous versions didn't have the blue highlight or the percent-completion display. I'll try to make it more usable.
There are some animations for laying eggs, but I can emphasize them a little more so they are more noticeable. I was trying to go for 'realistic' but maybe erred in making it too subtle. Predators have bite animations and there is a little blood splatter when they eat prey, but I can definitely come up with something that looks better.
I think this is the main challenge of development for this game and its the main thing I will be working on in the future. I was a little worried about releasing the demo for this reason - it's just a little taste of the core idea. I hope to add more interaction and also more depth to the systems / more interlocking systems.
Lifespans are short at first to speed up evolution of simple swimming ability (otherwise it can take a long time for swimmers to evolve). Those are the creatures that you are seeing that don't lay eggs or eat. The fiction is that they reproduce asexually and are getting energy from microscopic plankton, but in practice it's to prevent the game from being to slow. As the game goes on, their lifespans get longer, and I will make them even longer once I get to the point where creatures can evolve higher level behaviors and complex traits like bioluminescence.
That makes sense, I think having species interact and wander around more would be a big help too. Thanks for all your feedback. It's clear that you put a lot of thought into it and I think it will help make the game better. :)
I hope to add a lot more depth over time: the demo is kind of short and simple, aiming only to present the main idea. Adding challenges based on real historical ecological events is a great idea. I was partially inspired by real-life examples such as the famous Lake Victoria case where they introduced Nile perch from outside, which ate a lot of algae-eating native fish to extinction, resulting in large algae blooms and creating dead-zones with depleted oxygen. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Victoria#Environmental_issues. I can't promise I'll get it in (just because I have a big to-do list) but I will definitely try it out and see if I can make it work.
The game is somewhat CPU intensive from simulating physics and AI for all the creatures, so it may be difficult to get a sped-up mode to work. If I can improve performance, I am often more tempted to increase the number of creatures that can exist at a time because I think the game is more interesting with larger populations and more different species. But it's good to know that such a mode is wanted, and I will look into clever workarounds.
When you spawn them in at first, creature bodies and brains are actually completely random. Many of these won't be capable of swimming so it's often useful to spawn several at a time. If the random flailing of one of them is even a little bit effective, they should be on the way to eventually giving birth to offspring that can genuinely swim.
Thank you, to both of you. It's really encouraging to know you are interested.
https://ecosystem-game.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/dna.gif
That's no good; it's not paused by any chance, is it? Once or twice when I watched someone play, that happened. You can unpause with the spacebar if so.
Someone made a video where he spawned some creatures, if you do exactly this, does it work?
https://youtu.be/Y1-ZN3AH3LE?t=95
If not, it may be a bug and I'll try to fix it!