Hello everyone!
Welcome to the third development update. This is a small series which aims to keep everyone up-to-date on where the game is and where it is headed.
Today's update is a little smaller than the previous two. In it we will cover:
- A message from Tom about the first major update
- A call for questions!
- Mods
- Community screenshot roundup!
There is no patch associated with today's update.
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What Have You Been Up To Tom?
Hello everyone,
Welcome to the third development update. I'm midway through work on the first major update, which is all about better displaying information. For this post, I thought I would walk through some of the changes coming when it's completed.
I am currently reworking the ranking and history menu (opened via the F5 key) into a suite of information displays. It will include charts of animal and plant populations over time, which can be zoomed into or out of, and which also allow for toggling the display of the different species, to let you focus on just the information that is pertinent to what you're interested in at any given moment. If a plant or animal goes extinct, this should help with the investigation into why, and by analyzing trends in the data, you should be able to see if trouble is coming and act to prevent it. There tend to be interesting alternating sinusoidal curves as you go down the food chain, with crests of prey population leading to crests of predator population as its food supply booms, which then leads to valleys in the prey population as the large predator population feeds upon it, and so on.
Also coming soon are displays aimed to help pinpoint what kind of niche each species occupies and how that is changing. This will include charts of its overall diet and most common causes of death, along with info panels with every trait I can think of that might influence its fitness. It will also feature a few ways to interact with entire species at once: adjusting the mutation rate of each species, setting soft population caps, setting population minimums under which a species will not be preyed upon, and removing entire species at once. The most important visualization is yet to come though: the phylogenetic tree, which should allow for a full evolutionary history of creatures in the ecosystem, allowing you to trace all the way back to the dawn of life. If it is possible, I hope to allow for zooming all the way in to the level of the individual creature, pinpointing when key mutations occurred and the effect that they had on the individuals who carried them, whether they led to success or ruin.
I'll continue to provide these updates as development continues. Thank you for reading!
Tom
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A Call For Questions
Normally in this spot we would have space for some pressing community questions but so far there doesn't seem to be any major burning questions for this weeks dev update. Is there something you would like to know about the game? Leave a comment below!
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Mods
Whilst mods aren't officially supported in the game we have seen a small community pop up on Nexus Mods, where people are sharing maps for the game and we thought we would flag it here for those of you who want to share maps you're proud of!
We are currently looking into Steam Workshop support for a future update (possibly after the first major update) - whilst we can't make any promises, if we can get it up and running we think this would be a great way for players to share maps and fish with one another! But for now, Nexus mods seems like the community go to :)
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Community Screenshots
Arara posted this tentacled delight!
TheColorAndTheChaos shared this lovely screenshot with us
Djemelhi posted this serene scene
BeanbagToad shared these two happy fish
Finally we have this GIF from Stobz over on Discord who showed his land map in action with this land fish making it's way over some small rocks!