Circle of Life

Circle of Life

Circle of Life is a little evolution simulator I'm currently working on for fun. Hit F1 while running the program to view the documentation. Perhaps sometime in the future (or if someone asks) I'll type up some stuff explaining some of the mechanics behind how they work.

Current Build: 2.0

Past Builds:
2.0
1.0

Note: This is made with Game Maker, and thus has problems running on Mac (and possibly Linux) computers. I'm afraid there's really not much I can do about this.

It always ends up with lots of colonies of photosynthesizing turrets. Typically laser turrets. The photosynthesizing melee turrets didn't last long once food started running thin.

It always ends up with lots of colonies of photosynthesizing turrets. Typically laser turrets. The photosynthesizing melee turrets didn't last long once food started running thin.

Yeah, balancing out the photosynthesis is an ongoing thing. I've had some ideas I might look into implementing later that could help (e.g. nearby plants dampening each others' ability to photosynthesize) but it will probably come down to tweaking the values of how much food they recover, how long they take to mate, and how long their maximum lifespan is until I hit the right combination.

Just finished an awesome day of coding that resulted in a huge overhaul of the way genes work. I've introduced behavioral toggles now by way of multiplexers (which can turn a single value into a larger number of them) so that a single gene can represent several switches. Tomorrow I'll be adding in prey preferences, which will make use of these toggles to tell critters which attributes they find attractive in creatures they'd like to hunt.

After a number of very fun behind-the-scenes coding that you will probably never see but that I am still very happy with, Build 2.0 is completed!

Changelog:

• Added alphanumeric genes.
  
• Added toggle genes (a single gene that provides a set of 6 yes/no values).
  
• Added prey preferences. Creatures will only attack critters that fit ALL of their preferences. (If two preferences are mutually exclusive, only one must be met.)
  
• Added a gene to control how hungry a critter must be before it decides to look for food.
  
• Added the food tank. When the food tank is empty, food pellets will not spawn.
  
• Plants now start at 20% health and heal up to full health over the course of their lifetime.
  
• Fixed a bug where, instead of combining the genes of both parents, the breeding process would return an exact copy of one parent's genes.
  

Everybody keeps killing everyone else and then starving!

I would really like to see an informative menu option that allows me to view these little graphical guys in chart form!

I mean, I can make a completely new creature by right clicking...but they die so shortly after!

Everybody keeps killing everyone else and then starving!

I would really like to see an informative menu option that allows me to view these little graphical guys in chart form!

I mean, I can make a completely new creature by right clicking...but they die so shortly after!

The reason they're dying so fast is because (as I only realized a couple of hours after releasing the build) there's a weird bug that makes it so that critters can get stuck in the "wandering" state until they starve to death. I'll have a crack at fixing that tomorrow.

Can you elaborate on the chart idea? New ideas are never a bad thing, a number of the things I've put in were from suggestions people made in IRC. :P

what

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what no stop that

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nooo

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so i guess a couple critters decided to mate uncontrollably and fill the screen with their babies until the lag took over my computer. I'm pretty sure this is not supposed to happen.

also in case it matters, you can only see O's and V's appearing here, but i'm pretty sure i saw a few Y's and a couple rectangles.

Oh god. Thanks for the heads-up, Epam. I'm...going to have to work on that one. D:

(I really like the second screenshot where you can see the invaders taking over by force)