Just posting some thoughts. The main character needs a way to interact and "play god" with the world. So the simulation will be run from his ship. Which will be transformed into a giant robot, and disguised as one of the creatures of the world, because you know... giants robots are cool. It will probably be one of the first missions to locate the giant robot and activate it. The main character will also have a personal A.I. that will follow him around, this A.I. will serve as a tool for dialogue, and moving the plot forward.

So if Stu is reading this, you may be happy about the next step. The way this game is eventually going is that the animals will evolve into anthropomorphic sentient creatures and start to alter the world even more. I would like it to develop a bit differently every time you play the game, but one idea I have in mind is for wars to start between species. I have some design ideas for demolition/ rocket foxes and assault wolves. I might make my orc an evolution of a pig.

Should be pretty fun, I'm running out of time though :[

Here's a monkey I made:

Next up.

I just thought I would do a post explaining what isn't in this version, and what people can expect next, as well as the long term story and aim for this project.

This version basically shows the first level of the aesthetic and "game feel", I wanted to get the glitch art look in there, and enough animals to give the presence of an ecological simulator. However, it's not an ecological simulator yet, unlike the last, similar game I made (if anyone played that), the animals don't hunt and breed yet. I will be introducing that as well as a hydro system in the next update. I want the animal behavior to be a little more advanced too; the fawns and cubs should follow a parent until they are old enough to live on their own, and I'd like to have the animals face off against each other too, instead of just gobbling up anything smaller than them, like my last game. This might be in the style of a Pokemon/ RPG battle system.

Why all the game and digital references in an environmental simulator? The basic story is this; the main character has escaped a fallen home world. Something went wrong, and he is trying to figure out what by running a digital simulation over top of a desolate moon/planet somewhere.

Eventually you will be able to find tools to fix glitches in the simulation, tweak the breeding rates of animals, even the chemical makeup of the digital atmosphere. Somewhere in the story it will be explained that the characters home was also possibly a simulation, and that by running his own, he can observe the similarities and make a conclusion.

The current character sprite is just a placeholder, my other space guy character didn't hold up for some reason and I didn't have the time to mess around with it. He will face dangers from the "real world" like running out of oxygen and needing to find water, food, tools. In the game he will also learn to communicate with the creatures of the simulation, and other characters will evolve and appear, hopefully a little differently every time....

Oh yea! This world is randomly generated. That's something I've always wanted to do, and it turned out to be pretty easy.

Going to Neapl next week, so the the next update probably won't be until January.

.____.

No posts for a while. I've mostly been doing programming, and I don't really know how to blog that. Well, here is a few screens and a link to the first semi playable version of the game.

WSAD + and -.

.....Game.....

Back to my other game!

Animations are all working in game, here are a few gifs of my favorite animals.

So I tested  out my first educational game. It went okay.... kids seemed to like it a lot, but I know what I would change now, and have some ideas for next time. I wish I'd started testing games with these kids earlier.

In that last pic one of the kids is using a MaKey MaKey kit, which is set up with one of the cardboard and graphite game controllers I got them to design.