Locomotion in the Aware Stage

How would the player make the creature move?
Here’s a scenario: You have an eel-like organism in the Aware stage, and you need to make it move using muscles.
Do you
A: Animate the swimming yourself
B: Choose a method of swimming (anguilliform, thunniform, etc)
Or is it auto generated? Also, how would control surfaces and displacement work? And joints?
Im really curious how development wants to tackle this challenge, it seems like it would be a major undertaking.
(Apologies for the messiness.)

Forgive me if I’m wrong, but I think the plan is to have movement be procedually animated based on the structure of your creature. I imagine this would probably take a long time to make, but thankfully this kind of procedual movement animation has been done before, so we know that this can be done! (Spore has a system to animate the player’s creature in a natural way, and that game was released over 14 years ago!) I hope this reply helped! :slight_smile:

The game would need to auto-generate movement, as the auto-evolved creatures won’t always be in fixed shapes. It would be more complex than in Spore, because we won’t be given fixed parts, such as limbs of particular shapes. The algorithm would have to determine what is a fin, tail, leg, tentacle, etc.

It would be great if the movement could be at least tweaked by the player, such as determining how much of the body is wiggling for swimming, etc. There would also probably have to be a way to reassign a body part, so that for instance, a tentacle could be used solely for locomotion, for grabbing, or for visual communication. It wouldn’t always be possible to guess what the player wanted a part to be used for.

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Except most tentacles can do all of those thigns at the same time so it would be useless to assign them.

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Depending on the placement, you might not want a tentacle to be involved in grabbing or walking, and it might actually make those actions less effective.

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