Tiny Eco by Truce
Tiny Eco is my take on Conway's Game of Life, crossed with an old shareware game I played as a kid called "Eco Master". I started about halfway through the competition, so it's rough around the edges, but it's a fun little game/toy with an elaborate simulation driving it.
Construct a small ecosystem out of terrain tiles and place animals into the world. When you click "Lock In", the game of survival begins.
Balance is key: too many hares on a tile and they will reduce the rate at which edible plants grow. Too many foxes on a tile and they'll hunt the hares to extinction. No hares for the foxes and they'll starve.
When the simulation is complete, you will receive points for each surviving animal: 5 points for a fox and 1 for a hare. The highest score on each puzzle is recorded. There are 12 puzzles for you to try.
Hope you enjoy playing! =)
- Truce
TL;DR - Drag land tiles and animal tokens to complete the map, click Lock In. Watch it go, then reset and try for more points.
Construct a small ecosystem out of terrain tiles and place animals into the world. When you click "Lock In", the game of survival begins.
Balance is key: too many hares on a tile and they will reduce the rate at which edible plants grow. Too many foxes on a tile and they'll hunt the hares to extinction. No hares for the foxes and they'll starve.
When the simulation is complete, you will receive points for each surviving animal: 5 points for a fox and 1 for a hare. The highest score on each puzzle is recorded. There are 12 puzzles for you to try.
Hope you enjoy playing! =)
- Truce
TL;DR - Drag land tiles and animal tokens to complete the map, click Lock In. Watch it go, then reset and try for more points.
Ratings
| Coolness | 39% | 777 |
| Overall | 2.14 | 843 |
| Fun | 1.77 | 860 |
| Graphics | 2.14 | 781 |
| Humor | 1.18 | 800 |
| Innovation | 2.95 | 423 |
| Mood | 1.80 | 840 |
| Theme | 2.59 | 638 |
Though other than that an interesting implentation of a common thought problem and simulation. Though you didn't provide enough feedback to the play so what could be an interesting puzzle can starts feeling like a blind pin the tail on the donkey.
Really awesome idea just needs more feedback to the player and it could be really fun.
The first puzzle starts with all tiles placed, just the animal tokens to put down. Seems like that's confusing people. Oops. =(
You can click on any of the red puzzle numbers to switch to a different setup.
@ Skully:
Thanks for the encouragement!
@ Kimau:
Yeah, I ran out of time before converting most of the text-based events produced by the simulation into visual cues in the game. Sounds like I would have done better to just show all that info on the screen. Live and learn, I guess. =) I'll do better next time.
The other comments here do an excellent job of highlighting the shortcomings (in-game instructions, amount & clarity of visual feedback, goals). It's a shame you didn't have time to implement more visualization of the variables in play; done abstractly, I could imagine the simulation being quite hypnotizing.