Breeders - Dev Dairy #2 - Leopard Amoeba!

Play now at http://BreedersGame.com

A walk-through of the current build of Breeders. This week I created a few new critters, including a predatory amoeba that uses the Interactive Clother features of Unity 3D. There's also the Katamari Bomb and some new source of the Catalyst objects that the Breeders need to survive.

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• indie games
• dev
• unity 3d
• videogames
• virtual life
• simulation

[qiui12345]

make a nother vid

[kitchendon]

@qiui12345 I'm encoding and uploading the next dev diary right now. :)

[superhappyize]

keep on playing with god rules, ( eg. your exploding creature that uses resources then explodes, leaving only its own genetic material behind, is like a pine cone in a forest fire. - the first to re-spawn. Maybe you could include second growth respawners or dormant seed that take years to germinate. Your thought is thought provoking.

[kitchendon]

@superhappyize Dormant seeds are a fun idea. I have something similar as part of the Catalyst Mushroom things, but something long-term would be totally different. I'll have to look up second growth respawner, but that sounds interesting too.

[qmontague]

Maybe a fun part of the game could be tweaking the rule set of each animal species.

Trying to "optimize" the rule to reach a goal. The goal could be trying to balance the number of animals and not have any go extinct.

[kitchendon]

@qmontague I like this idea. Maybe a set of sliders for a creature so a player could easily experiment with different settings

[MistaRoushi]

you can put a timer for how long they look for a catalyst, and if it goes for too long they stop and look for another

[Airsfizz]

How About your a person that showed up and have to survive from the lepords

[kitchendon]

@Shaleblade "Crevice": The story of a cube's unrequited love for her Catalyst. (^_^)

[Shaleblade]

"Where they can sit here against the crevice trying to get one catalyst when another one is available."

Love and loss in breeders?

[Rhouder]

hey this is really awesome. you're doing a good job. it's really creative too lol

[TheLoLgen]

A good add-on to the game would be harmful weather effects to certain creatures. If it's too hot, some creatures need to find a cool area (mushrooms?), or if it's raining, some creatures need to find an area with trees to keep them warm. It could help solve the territory problem, since the creatures would be looking for permanent shelter. You could also make predatory creatures nearly immune to weather effects, let them prey on the creatures, and give the creatures a sort of fleeing mechanism

[kitchendon]

@SpaceMongoose I've put up a page on the BreedersGame site that gives more details about the critters.

[giacomand]

To control the predators from wiping everything, you could make the prey detect the cloth monster and attempt to run away.

[SpaceMongoose]

Could you dedicate a part of your website to descriptions of each of the critters, I'm having trouble understanding each of their different properties? Also, do you plan to make more detailed and realistic skins for the critters?

[Hexodam]

Loving what you are doing. You talked about set numbers per species that are in the world. Since you have both food and lifetime per creature you can easily control the population with the boxes and all the sources of energy in the world. That way the amoeba thing can eat almost everything until it has no food close enough to survive. Just like in nature it dies off but the cubes will live on since they have a different source of energy. Just like nature :) But good luck, I'll be watching this

[kitchendon]

@sameiru A pit crieature would be pretty deadly in this sim, since most of the critters end up on the lowest elevation available. If I can figure out terrain deformation, I'd like to make some sort of burrowing or pit trap.

[kitchendon]

@Flying1Kotte good idea for the battling predators.  I'd like to have them breed but need a way to control numbers. This might just do the trick. :)

[kitchendon]

@iXArkXi starting with evolved colors would be a good first step. :) I think I will be using a set of variables as a sort of DNA eventually. The critters as they are now are too hacked together to add this feature, but eventually I'll sort of start over with a better core system to control the critters stats.

[aryk505]

Amazing work

[iXArkXi]

For the Evolution, perhaps you could just focus on the evolution of colour right now so pretty much the texture changes colour randomly slightly and that gets passed on, though it would be more random then survival of the fittest. Then later maybe each is born with a random set of variables like speed, size, ect and they pass on a certain amount if they succeed to reproduce.

[Flying1Kotte]

I have a an idea that could solve the amoeba framerate problem. If you add that when 2 amoebas see each other they try to kill each other and ignore all other things. This will always make sure that there are few amoebas since they kill each other all the time. I think you should try to make all creatures focus on terretorial so the cubes hold of the balls from a cave that has a lot of shroms and then the cubes forish while the balls die of slowly

[ElliotovHull]

Looks sick. 

[SmashingPixels]

Genius! Reminds me very much of spore and minecraft, in a good way. Unity looks like a very nice engine. Quick suggestion: Make a herbivore which will slowly seek out the little mushrooms in order to get enough energy to reproduce. It might also be a huge effort, but some form of flying creature would be nice.

[jhtilly]

This looks really cool and somthing that I've been waiting for. I really like how simple it looks it really looks fun as is. An evolution aspect would really interest me because right now I can only find such games on flash websites.keep up all the work it really looks good!