August 24th-27th 2012 :: Theme: Evolution
Description: View a world, where creatures mutate and evolve by themselves. Their traits are passed onto their offspring, so watch natural selection in action or start some artificial selection by killing what you don't like.
Goal: Breed 1 or more "Care Bears" and find the Easter egg animal!
Instructions: In Game
Browser Requirements: uses an HTML-5 Canvas, so it won't run in Internet Explorer.
The link is to the html page in my public drop-box folder so it may not cope with high traffic and is slightly slower to refresh. If that is a problem, please download the .zip file and run it from your computer.
Please comment your thoughts along with your rating and I will do likewise! Thank you for playing my first ever LD game! :)
Downloads and Links
Ratings
 | Coolness | 88% |
| #9 | Theme(Jam) | 3.98 |
| #100 | Innovation(Jam) | 3.04 |
| #202 | Humor(Jam) | 1.59 |
| #215 | Overall(Jam) | 2.59 |
| #226 | Audio(Jam) | 1.07 |
| #227 | Mood(Jam) | 2.03 |
| #250 | Graphics(Jam) | 2.16 |
| #252 | Fun(Jam) | 1.91 |
Comments
I have fixed the slowness problem with a slider bar that sets the mutation rate. It is now possible to win the game if you are not patient.
Very interesting game concept. It should have much more interactive elements.
Hint: Update the mutations via slider bar without the need of button pressing.
All i all it's nice to see this concept. Try to evolve it. It has huge potential! Look at dwarven fortress.
Fascinating little sandbox! Game does stop sometimes and I'm not sure what I'm doing that makes that happen. Seems to be random. The actual evolution bit is nicely implemented. Fun to watch new species appear. I like the variation in traits as well, that's nicely done. :)
Thanks for the comment, my original plan was to include more interaction from terraforming the world and placing events but unfortunately I ran out of time.
I will try, I'm a bit of a noob when it comes to HTML and modifying it with the DOM. The slider bar is placed in form which seems like it is more designed to submit server requests, the button called the function properly so I stuck it in.
Now you mention it I see the similarity, the original goal was for a game where you don't interact directly with the creatures and instead influence them through events. I will have to work on that as I didn't have time to write any other events than to splat them with my mouse.
I think I've fixed the freezing bug, or rather found that despite the fact I fixed it last night somehow I had forgotten to upload the revision.
for anyone interested the bug, was the game manager running a loop that goes through all the creatures, but as it was checking to see if the creature was a certain type after it told the creature make its move. So in the rare case the creature was the last in the array and died the check was looking outside the bound of the array.
I like to sit and watch how my little stupid creations mutate.
It would be nice to have button "spawn amoeba". :)
Really interesting idea - I think if I had a lot of time - I'd be able to play all the way through - it moved a bit slow - but I love the way you used the theme
I dont understand why should we need to kill creatures to let others evolve, that is the task of nature...
In fact, the less evolved creatures are food for the evolved, you know, if zombies or vampires exists we are f*** XD
It does not looks like a game, a science project describes this, to teach children things about evolution, and that's fine, a good idea
Love the little touches like the graph and the amount of information you've put on the webpage. I also like the way you gamified the concept by letting the player kill creatures.
I would have liked some sort of tooltip to display when you have your mouse pointer over an animal so you can see what they are. Also it might have been nice to see the root levels of the evolution tree... eg: are you screwed if you kill all the amoeba, fish, and proto fish yet don't have any mamals? It seemed that might be the case but I had no way in-game to know.
Population graph was a nice touch. Messages could have a little bit of buffer/log so you could see a bit of last few events.
Very slow game with not much for the player to do, still kind of appealing.
I like the messages. Gives a bit of a dwarf fortress feeling. It makes you care more for the creatures. Good take on evolution. There isn't much interaction and therefore my mind did wander quit quiickly. I DO like the way your tiles look! If the rest of the graphics were in the same style it would have been great.
I like it. You took "evolution" literally but pushed it far enough!
Nice entry, gameplay is rather limited but the game has its charm. Too bad there is no sound. It is interesting to see life develop.
A great take on the evolution theme. Very interesting. I was very close to my Care Bears but hit a stupid button on my mouse by accident which refreshes the browser. AAahhh!!! After all that time. I also wanted to see the mystery creature. Oh well, that will teach me to be more careful. Sucks though. Never mind, loved playing it. Related well to the theme. So glad you put in the slider though!! Thanks for that. Well done, great effort and something to build on for sure.
Thanks for all your helpful comments. I had been away for a while but I will be making a post-compo version of the game once the rating period is over.
It's a neat idea & good use of the theme. It kinda felt like I could have just left it running though - not really enough player interaction for my tastes.
Interesting. I like how the trees are consumed and grow back.
I'd like to see more interactivity, and a message log showing the previous few messages.
I would also like the animals to be a bit larger - I sometimes had trouble seeing them.
This reminded me of a very old game called Primordial Life by Jason Spofford. If you haven't already seen it, you might find it interesting :)
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the game is quiet slow in pace. not so much for me.
i like that you did it as a browser game. too many entries still require to download an executable.