New Evolution Game

Not Thrive
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Hi, I have just published my first game on Steam. It is a small evolution game called “Eon of Life”:

I was also inspired by the concept of Spore and wanted to make my own version of an evolution game. It is much smaller and less ambitious than Thrive, and it only covers the Creature stage/Aware stage. It has a mix of 2D sprites and 3D environments, you start as a tiny fish eating plankton (inspired by Haikouichthys) and evolve changing different parts of your creature, gaining new skills, and adapting to new environments. The other creatures on the environment also evolve on their own.

I hope you like it, and I welcome any feedback on it.

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Welcome to the forum!

Have you found some inspiration in Thrive to find concepts for YOUR game?

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Welcome, @PaleoEvo! It looks like you made a fun game. Have you thought about applying to the Thrive Dev team?

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Just wanted to say that too. If you already have such experience you could make your very own evo game, you could make good material for a Thrive developer, if you agree to it of course.

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Welcome to the Forum, @PaleoEvo.

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I discovered Thrive around 2013, and it seemed like my dream game. At the time I didnt know much about game development, and I was dissapointed by the slow progress of the game, so I just checked from a distance from time to time.

I am impressed by how far Thrive has come since then, as it seems like the microbe stage is almost finished and the development is going to focus now on the multicellular stage. As of right now I have a main job, and can only work on games on my free time (It took me a few years to make Eon of Life). I prefer dedicating this free time to develop my own ideas, but if at some point I find myself with more time to spare I would love to contribute to Thrive.

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Good to hear that. Not much is expected from volunteers so don’t worry if you ever ran out of this extra free time.

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I bought and played your game, so far it’s pretty decent. I think the creatures are pretty goofy (in a good way). Although one suggestion I would add is to perhaps make more ways for small creatures to survive considering most of them just get eaten immediately and aren’t fast enough to run away.

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R-type reproduction could do them good.

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Yeah the population of each individual creature is completely randomized regardless of their size (or at least that’s what I think). But overall a pretty fun game for something that costs less than a box of small pizza in my area.

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I suppose it should follow a rule similar to autoevo where instead perhaps the energy of a species is randomized and then it takes an amount of energy based on the size to convert that energy into individuals.

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Yeah it’s not really the same game as what Thrive is trying to be, but it’s pretty good.

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I suppose it is still trying to simulate an ecosystem to some degree…

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Thanks for playing the game and for the feedback! You are right, I think it is a problem right now, but I cant think of a good solution besides adding something like a camouflage/detection system, which would be too big a feature to add. Maybe I could do something to represent the R-type reproduction such as what @aah31415 mentioned, which I imagine as having more “lives” if you are a small creature. Something like that is small enough that I could add it.

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It is very, very simple, but yes. When you evolve the game generates 6 biomes with random temperature and humidity, some ocean, some coastal, and some land-based, trying to make sure that the player’s creature can survive in at least one. Each biome has a slot for a herbivore/planktivore, and a carnivore for each of the 5 sizes of creature. I mutate the species of the last generation, and see which herbivores are able to eat the plants/Plankton of the biome, and from which i select the ones with “higher stats”, and then I select the carnivores with best stats that are able to predate the herbivore of their size. When playing the level, herbivores try to eat and carnivores try to hunt, and both can die of hunger, but the populations of each creature are fixed for each size and each time a creature dies another respawns off camera (it seemed very difficult to balance real reproduction with the rates of death, and also I had optimization problems). The real time in-game success of each species isnt taken into account when evolving the next generation.

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Seems like a pretty good baseline for a better ecosystem system. Also please do not doublepost, you can edit your later post into your former one and then delete the later one.

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Yes that’s what I was thinking, maybe have the really small creatures have multiple lives when dying before going extinct. Like if I get killed by a predator I have like 2 more tries or something instead of just immediately going to the extinct page.

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So much like how it works in Thrive, where more population at small organism size gives more tries.

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