I'm genuiney excited for this.

[takratzer]

This is what I wanted Spore to be. This is so much much better than that game. I know it's gonna be a masterpiece when it comes out!

[Duuvian]

I took a sweet screenshot and made it my background:

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3390035823

The thing on the right is a tree with a creature's face poking through it, but I think it looks cool like that.

Here are some ideas I spouted without knowing whether they are feasible or not:

I'm guessing these giant lungfish won't be floating on land after some bugfixes, though a gas containing body part for floating around slowly could be cool I guess, especially if elevation and water depth are added. It seems like winged things would eat them up but maybe they could stay up very, very high where less birds and bugs might be. That way you could have skywhales or jellyfish or such, though I don't know how they would work up there. Maybe photosynthesis once the options to combine plant and animal components together is added? A jellyfish that dangles long tentacles to catch birds? Some kind of sky plankton or foliage? Maybe it makes less sense for lack of real world comparison, but the floating creatures in the screenshot look kind of cool.

I was thinking about seeing these things chasing each other when walking on the planet, especially if plans are to allow creatures to share a tile with smaller creatures. That way smaller creatures could form groups to attack larger creatures. In the demo out at the date of this post they evolve to giant size and only giant sized things can survive well after that. If they pursued and escaped from each other, or hit each other with their appendages and took damage from well-placed spikes that would be cool.

For example, If it was able to determine an attacker's paw or jaw making contact with spikes or dorsal plates with collision detection so that if the player sees a whacky beast flailing at a spiky beast the player could note that whacky beast's claws landed on the spikes and the attacker took damage or wounds to appropriate parts. If it misses the spikes it hits skin or armor or whatnot and does damage to the defender or rips at it's armor. A speed setting to slow down the whacky beast's attack to watch how well the beasts are flailing at each other would be cool here, though also the option to keep the speed up.

I noticed leg placement is important to make insect legs seem like they work without clipping, though I think they still move the same speed. I think it would be cool to figure out how leg placements change how the creature moves and attacks, so that changing the angles or length or even number of joints of a limb might help hit a soft spot on a spiky beast by getting around the spines for example. A practice window to set how the creatures prepare and the animations they do for attacks and how they use their body parts in an attack would also be awesome. That way you could have evolved giant snakes with wings to fly up to a spacegoat and constrict around one of it's spikeless body part(s) and then bite onto their unarmored legs or whatnot. That would be pretty cool to see finally succeed I bet. Plus, maybe it would be cool for fighting them against other player's best creatures if that were to be an option if the designer could arrange how the creatures move around to that level.