Extinction is inevitable by thetatautau

Basic gameplay explanations
You control the evolution of a specie. When it goes extinct, you lose!
You DON'T control your creatures directly, you just chose how they evolve. They will seek food by themselves, and reproduce once they have eaten enough.
You get DNA point over time, each point allows you to add or replace an organ.
- You start with no mouth so your creatures only get 1/3 of the energy of the food they eat, and can't eat grass at all. So evolve a mouth ASAP.
- Legs are usefull too. You know, for walking.
- Once you have your fundamentals, increase your fighting power a little so you don't get bullied by everyone.
Then it's a matter of evolving the right organ when you need it.

Controls
"Space" to pause
"+" and "-" to increase/decrease simulation speed.
Maintain "X" pressed to display an icon over your creatures.
In depth explanations
Creatures will go to the most "desirable" target. Desirability take into account food quantity, if the creature can digest it or not, fighting power difference with a potential prey, and distance. Desirability checks are performed every 0.5 seconds.
Energy is lost over time or when attacked. When it reach 0, the creature dies and drop meat. Losses over time are reduced by the energy efficiency stat.
Creatures don't flee from predators, althought they can outspeed them if they are running in the good direction.
Stats
The fight stat is used both offensively and defensively. If two species have the same fight power, they don't fight. If not, the one with the higher value will attack the other. The damage inflicted is proportional to the difference.
Being able to digest food means creatures get 100% of energy from food. Otherwise they get only 33%, or 0 for grass. Better digestion means they get 200%. Incisors is the only body part that give better digestion (for grass).
Speed increase how fast creatures move.
Detection radius increases how far creatures check for the most desirable target.
Energy efficiency reduces the energy lost over time.
Stealthy creatures have 80% to avoid detection when a predator check for most desirable target.
Toxic creatures drop meat with low energy value. They also are a 33% less desirable target so predators are more likely to attack someone else.
Perspective
The game is obviously very rough as it was made in 48 hours. Or 30 really, as I wasted time with other ideas during the first day. The game is ugly, lack content and is unbalanced.
Also let me know if you find the gameplay interesting and would like a better game based on this idea (with better graphics, a big map with biomes, lot of bodyparts, an AI that doesn't suck etc.).

| Link | https://thetatautau.itch.io/extinction |
| Link | https://thetatautau.itch.io/extinction |
| Original URL | https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/50/extinction-is-inevitable |
Ratings
| Overall | 51th | 3.978⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Fun | 102th | 3.804⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Innovation | 31th | 4.152⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Theme | 46th | 4.182⭐ | 24🧑⚖️ |
| Graphics | 219th | 3.674⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Audio | 227th | 3.391⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Humor | 135th | 3.476⭐ | 23🧑⚖️ |
| Mood | 149th | 3.587⭐ | 25🧑⚖️ |
| Given | 32🗳️ | 21🗨️ |
At some point it kind of spyral out of controll.
Maybe it could use some sort of score system to understand how well you are dooing.
I'm not sure if I was supposed to use the evolution to adapt to the environment (ie. different enemies, amounts of vegetation) or to try to guide evolution towards a more specific end goal of my choosing. Personally, what initially really excited me is the idea of being able to decide what sort of organism I'm trying to "create" (a fast predator, an evasive prey animal etc) and guiding evolution in that direction.
I love the idea of making evolutionary tradeoffs instead of just improving stats, and would love to see this explored further! Really cool game.
Generally I really like the weirdness that comes, when a lot of random creatures start walking in. One small little feedback: Maybe it would be cool to highlight your own creatures. I found it a little bit hard in the "late"-game to differenciate my species from other because at some point a lot of them looked nearly identical.
Overall great game/simualation!
tldr, i think this game is neat. multi-biome content would be so cool tbqh
Two things I might suggest would be to show the current bonuses and allow skipping or rerolling a trait selection. I know the second would be a design change so maybe not what you were going for. If you could save up DNA points for more expensive traits that would add some depth. It works well as is though.
Great job making a game in 48 hours!
I would have liked a little more control over my choices, sometimes I had three choices that all seemed worse than what I had, or they replaced something that I couldn't remember what it did, so I wasn't sure if I should choose it. Maybe some choice that is basically saving up DNA points for an extra big upgrade later or better cards in the next draw or something like that would be really fun and add a layer of strategy.
I would definitely be interested in a post-jam version of this with expanded content.
I thought I had found a winning strategy with omnivorous + fangs but actually no :P ^^#
impressive balance!
I'd argue it would be handy to shuffle evolution possibilities
other such quality of life improvements could be considered
but we're deffo in the "nice to have" realm hehe
like a jam-spawned somewhat passive spore-like
super cool!
loved it!
take car yall <3 :D

So we really like your game and we're streaming Ludum Dare 50 games this week-end both Saturday April 16th & Sunday April 17th starting at 10AM CEST [--> Paris summer time] on our Twitch channel --> https://www.twitch.tv/teamchoochoo
Would you like us to feature your game? This may redirect some traffic to your page for more people to try your LD50 game :smile:
If you would, please e-mails us anecdotes and sneak peeks of your creative process (photos, screenshots, beta/WIP asset renders, mood boards, concept Art, etc.) so we can present them alongside and illustrate your LD50 adventure to our audience :slight_smile:
Here's our e-mail to send us all that good stuff to --> TeamChooChoo.GameJams@gmail.com
Please include your game's name in the e-mail's title
Have a great day, I hope to hear from you soon - thanks for that great moment I spent testing your little nugget of a game, and see you in the chat during the stream, I hope :heart: