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Strange Seed

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Strange Seed

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Evolve your creature using parts from mammals, birds, insects, and even dinosaurs! From your humble beginnings as a shape-shifting slime, build up your genetic potential and adapt your way through the islands of New Haven.

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Most popular community and official content for the past week. (?)

Early 2024 dev log: environments, quests and more!

Apr 20

We’re well into the phase where the game starts to feel pretty cohesive. Here’s our new “forest hallway” environment that I haven’t yet added to the Steam screenshots:

Some of the tasks that went into making our new environments included:

A fully featured lighting and shadow system
New shaders for all vegetation and environment objects
Completing the climbing system
A bunch of new vegetation models made in Speedtree

The challenge is getting these environments to work well on lower-end computers.

I’m testing on my old Nvidia 1060 laptop and they’re stable at >30 FPS; I wonder if anyone with a lower end rig will be wanting to play? Luckily there is still some low-hanging fruit left for optimization.

The quest system

The other major feature we’re working on polishing right now is a quest system. After some back and forth about how to code the quests, we settled on a pretty powerful system using a visual scripting system, via a 3rd party package.

We've successfully put together a quest that involves grabbing a hat for the Queen Ant. Maybe you'll get to wear the hat afterward...?

Finally, a grab bag of other things we’ve been working on:

Set up permanently flying creatures (like bees)
Implemented a wrapper scene and sub-scene switcher that should both ease our workflow and make the game more stable
Investigated and fixed various weird results from unexpected part combos
Added a “treasure chest” feature tied to completing enemy encounters

Is a demo ever coming? Well, the game is nearly ready for it! … but, we kept putting off final polish on the movement system. Early playtesting surfaced a few bugs in that area, so we’re spending time stomping those out before doing a fully public demo.

I think we’ll be ready in a couple months (probably after Steam Next Fest, because releasing a demo in that time frame without being in the Fest is a bad idea). That said, if you want in on pre-public playtesting, DM me or join the Discord.

That’s all for today, thank you for reading and following Strange Seed!

Strange Seed

Comment with what kind of creature you want to see!

Hi everyone! As you've probably noticed, we're still early in production for this game. That means we've still got a lot of creatures to produce! Unlike some other evolution games (like Spore, Adapt or Thrive) ALL of the parts in our games come from "real" creatures such as hermit crabs, chickens, deer, or our cute triceratops. (If you aren't sure what I mean about the other games: their parts start off as deformable blobs and are then shaped by the player.) So, what do you want to see in the game? Comme...

cstmorr

Oct 23, 2023 @ 6:44pm

General Discussions

October dev log: combat lock-on, controllers, insects!

Nov 2, 2023

October was a very productive month for us! Strange Seed is beginning to feel very “playable”, even though there’s much work left to be done.

Combat lock-on

Combat feels completely different with this change: locking-on to enemies. This includes an auto-rotate to attack and auto camera rotation while moving around.

New creatures: ant and bee

😀

Controllers (of all types!) enabled

Pretty much everything should work now! I’m a controller-first guy and being able to constantly test Strange Seed using a controller is a huge, positive change for me.

… actually, I haven’t tried playing with a joystick or rhythm game accessory yet, so I can’t claim “everything” 😅 Let’s just say, any typical game controller.

Controller: ranged attack hold to aim

Once we had the controller in, we realized that ranged attacks need a special control scheme when there’s no mouse. With a mouse, you just click wherever you want to attack. With the controller, hold L1 and move the joystick to position the landing zone. (This makes me want to play Valkyria Chronicles again…)

Final word

Originally I thought we’d have a rough demo out by now, but the plan was to have very incomplete combat mechanics. When it came down to it, combat felt so central to the game that we needed to work on polishing it before the demo.

So that’s what we’re doing right now — in November, we’ll be running some private playtests of combat in greybox levels, ensuring that our attack timing, movement scheme, encounter design and so forth is really solid.

Thanks for reading!

Strange Seed

September dev log: adding skin swapping

Oct 1, 2023

This month we added a material and color user interface. Every creature has its own skin, and now that skin can be applied to others and recolored. Here's a quick video:

… I have a personal compulsion to make everything neon, but normal colors work just fine too.

This was pretty complex to set up because of all the small details: tying into our evolve system; making decisions for sub-parts and special cases; and accounting for a variety of shaders. All that said, the feature was completed within the allotted time (there are still future improvements to make, of course).

Other things we completed this month:

New creatures: tortoise and snake
Performance testing and work within scenes to improve FPS for low-end devices
Some dance animations (just for fun… for now)
Continued improvements on AI movement via the NavMesh
Started on ambient enviro sounds, bugfixes for existing creature sounds

Headed into October, we’re working on controller implementation, combat polish, and some new environments. By the end of the month, we'll also revamp our Steam store page with a bunch of new assets -- exciting!

Thanks for reading!

Strange Seed

Artwork

Award

A few tail and leg parts

cstmorr

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A game to look out for.

I agree with you devs, evolution (in the rpg kinda sense) never has been done justice before, the closest that came to it was E.V.O (on the SNES), and that has been three decades soon. And even E.V.O. kinda had a lot of rough parts, then and now. Spore is a joke, and 7th cross evolution on Dreamcast was jank as hell. There are tons of biome-evolution simulators, but no decent game where you are the creature and evolve constantly and battle it out with rpg type like progression that is not weird or utter...

RayofLight

Aug 25, 2023 @ 8:54pm

General Discussions

Artwork

Award

New forest environment

cstmorr

View artwork

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No more content. So sad.

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