sugestios:

[jeremywyx]

since this game i good but still not perfect here are some sugestions i woud like to see:

1. an Enciclopedia
so i know the word "albedo" is not in the vocabulary of the common steam user so wath if we had an enciclopedia. This coud be so helpfull for new and old players and expand the future for new complicated words taht coud make the game educational.
we coud alsoe explain all of the tools and special key shortcuts.

2. species names
i know this woud be an pain to code but haveing track of all of teh species on ur planet woud be so helpfull! and if this is so hard to code then we can make it that the layer tags a creature with a name and all of the creatureds decendants with the same bodyparts be the same species.

3. a justable bodyparts
so in this game it is really hard placeing bodyparts like fins and legs and makeing them look rigth so, my idead is to replace sliders with rotation knobs and circles kinda like in spore.

4. devolveing bodyparts
well if an creature has something it will have it until the end of time. well wath if an animal doesnt need idk, wings anymore or horns. i understand soem bodypsrts liek the mouth are extreemely unlikely to devolve but when an animal has a jaw and it woud really benefit from a beak the why it cant devolve back into a primitive mouth and then to a beak?

5. creature behaviors
now creatures behave the same, they eat, figth and move. wath if we had more actions?

[sotenbox]

Thank you for the suggestions! I will add all of them to my list of things to do :-)

[jeremywyx]

:)

[jeremywyx]

also how do u plan to add the cell stage? i am curios

[sotenbox]

Originally posted by jeremywyx:

also how do u plan to add the cell stage? i am curios

Yes, there will be cell stage :)

But it's going to be a bit different to other cell stages.
In this game will be more focused on groups of cells than individual.

[jeremywyx]

cool

[Duuvian]

I wrote down some stuff while trying the demo:

Planetary Life Demo

The guidance in the tutorial seems to stall out at a few steps. After placing the energy producing thing it says you can click the slots to jump to it. However on one try I couldn't get it to go to the next step (I found later it required waiting to 200 energy so the tutorial might be better advising to lay the second one down to speed energy). However at that point the guidance for what to do seemed to stall out again; it doesn't say to unlock a second research next. Opening the researched Change core heat tool did progress the tutorial, but it seemed to stall out again afterwards at some point (I think I abandoned trying to follow the tutorial at that point). It could use a hint what to do next to get the next tip at some points, as even though it's not complicated enough to block progress it would save some time guessing.

Going to main menu to start a new game (to restart the tutorial) leads to the tutorial not properly beginning.

Merging might benefit from a small scattering effect on components, in particular eyes so they don't end up stacked on top of each other so frequently, since merging causes the eyes on both types to be on the merged creature.

The creature designer could use a button to freeze the creature so you can look at it at apply features to it while it's motionless. Some of the movement types keep squirming around in circles and it's hard to move features around to make it fancy.

Combining two creatures can put you over the energy limit if the creature has the best digestion system, and it won't let you remove parts or at least parts that don't make up the difference.

Switching skin past the one layer skin requires devolving backwards to that step. It would make more sense if that step was scales evolving to fur and feathers. Would having different dry and wet scale skins be a good idea? That way the wet scales could keep an advantage underwater. IIRC mammals (furry skin presumably) split off from thecodonts (reptile ancestors of mammals and dinosaurs) in the Triassic while proto-birds (feather skin) emerged in the Jurrassic from dinosaurs. Thanks, '90s educational software Dinosaur Safari! Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.
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I was quite impressed with how much fun this was in it's early stage. One thing I'd think was cool is if it would be able to be more representative of a biome rather than one creature per tile system. It would be cool if there were a bunch of niches that they can survive through the ages in if they are effective there despite being primitive.

There is a really old game called Odell Down Under that's probably abandoned afaik that would be a great example of a biome; I thought it would be neat if your game simulated something more like that in a tile rather than the "single toughest creature per tile" that's in the demo. That way you could click on a "reef" tile in the ocean somewhere and see all the crazy species that live there, and what the food chain is and stuff and how the reef biome differs from other ocean features like trenches or vents or underwater vegetation fields etc.

Screenshots:
Landlizard (this requires the player to keep an eye on one species to keep evolving it along the standard lizard concept instead of having it grow lots of pairs of insect legs or something)
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3168687077

Flying Pig
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3168686398

Lobsect
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3168685906

Magifish
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3168685820

Not so good:
I think I hadn't figured out how to move the second set of legs yet. It's supposed to be a frog.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3168685752

Mixed bag:
Hellmuppet
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3168685293
This thing is awesome but the generator could use some fine tuning to ease the effort of the player to make it's parts have more sensible placement, for example a way to scatter features so they don't overlap as much as possible. I want <makes up a big number> 1,000,000 eyes covering the whole creature that isn't already covered in spiky bits, not 1,000,000 eyes stacked in one spot. While that does have the appearence of being suitably horrifying if the eyes stack well with each other (which it does not currently by default especially with the most advanced eyes), it still is only 2 weird eyes rather than the desired 1,000,000 eyes all over the creature. While it can be managed by carefully placing each new part, when doing a creature merge which results in an abomination like the Hellmuppet it is a lot of features to move around.

[sotenbox]

Thanks for your feedback! I will take notes of all this :-)