It’s 2 hours into Ludum Dare for me. Well, actually more. I woke up at 5-6 AM and checked out the theme and went to sleep. My unconscious mind started working on an idea.

I was toying with an idea to publish a Unity game with just a cube in it. Nothing more. Call it a game, and then evolve the cube and environment from your feedback. What does the cube do, what should I turn it into. A kind of play on “4th/5th wall”, but in game design. I’m not going to do this. This is a fun idea but not for Ludum Dare.

What I’m going to pursue is going to be a bit more classical.

Have you played Swarm? Have you played SimLife? Have you played flOw? I’m making a game inspired by these three.

My plan so far:

• The player will get a swarm of creatures of different features and behaviors to control.
• The player will control the swarm, not individual creatures.
• The creatures will just follow the hints given by the player (the general direction player chooses), but their exact behavior will be affected by their features like: size, speed, acceleration, laziness, curiosity, hunger, energy, motivation, attraction towards a specific terrain feature, etc.
• The goal of the game is to move a number of creatures from the Spawn Point to the Breed Point.The level areas will have different features like: temperature, light, humidity.
• There will be many levels in the game.
• At the end of each level, some stats of survivors and non-survivors will be displayed.
• In the first Spawn Point, the creatures are generated at random, with random features.
• In all the Breed Points, the creatures that got there will get to breed. Features of the survivors will have the best chances to be picked from in the next Spawn Point.
• In the subsequent Spawn Points, the creatures will be generated at random, but with features biased towards those of survivors.
• The controls will be simple WASD/Arrows and maybe some mouse clicking.
• The player will be given tools to kill off creatures he doesn’t like, but only during the level playthrough.
• The graphics are going to be simple, just to illustrate different features of the creatures. So, probably abstract cubes or spheres with add-ons.
• Focus on the behaviors. I can churn out code quickly, I suck at graphics.
• There will be food and predators that will affect how the swarm behaves.

I’m going to use Unity3D.

Tags: evolution