Hey everyone,
Dan here with a special dev update this time...it's our birthday!
That's right, Ecosystem has now been out in Early Access for a whole year - we've had lots happen in that time frame and we thought we'd do a bit of a round up of the first year of development followed by a look to the future of Ecosystem!
Thank you for all your support this past year, it's been great seeing what the community have created and the potential of the mods that are starting to pop up for the game too :)
Here's some of the key highlights from our first year of Early Access:
As you can tell, Tom has put a lot of work into the game so far and has achieved so much in the first year and he's just getting started with some exciting updates to come in the future too - keep reading to see what exactly they are...
But first, let's pester Tom with some of the communities most asked questions:
Will we ever see plant evolution / more dynamic plant growth?
I haven't completely written this off but it is unlikely, or at best quite far back on my to-do list. When I started work on Ecosystem, I ran some tests to determine the viability of plant evolution, using the same system that governs fish evolution but with immobile bodies and a simple fitness score where the main measure of success was how much surface area was exposed to sunlight. It mostly worked, although many of the plants that evolved weren't very interesting. So this isn't impossible, but there are two things that make it difficult: (1) it may take a fair amount of trial and error to get the plant simulation sophisticated enough that evolution produces varied and interesting plant species, and (2) plants would need a very different procedural mesh system compared to the existing one for fish. While crustaceans or even something like land animals would need adjustments to the existing system to work, plants or corals would likely need almost everything to be different. Addressing both of these would take a lot of time, and there are a lot of improvements I would like to make to creature interaction and simulation that I think would pay off more in terms of adding depth and longevity to the game.
Will we ever see brighter colour options come to creatures and coral?
Yes, I'm hoping to add some options for brighter skin colours for creatures in an upcoming minor update. I don't have any specific plans for more corals at the moment since I'm mostly focusing on animal life simulation in the immediate future.
Are there any plans to add more complex evolution such as special hunting or specific diets? Are there any plans to make the predator-prey interaction more complex?
Yes, these will be the subjects of the next major updates after the current one is completed. Creatures in the game spend most of their time racing to food sources or mates, or away from things that want to eat them, so being a good swimmer is a very dominant evolutionary strategy. This makes sense for a game with a big focus on how motion drives physiology, but I think it would add a lot to have more dimensions on which creatures can evolve and thus more niches in the environment. I hope to do this firstly by adding a simulation of fighting and damage, so that predators need to actually attack their prey and prey can evolve defences beyond just fleeing. Incorporating existing traits like muscle strength and body mass and new ones like bite strength and thickness of skin, I hope that evolving specific ways of attacking and physiology suitable for it will be almost as much of a driver of evolution as swimming is now. Secondly, I hope to get creatures interacting with each other, both on an intra and inter-species level, by implementing more high-level behaviours. I have some ideas for both fighting and interaction that I'm really excited about, but I don't want to go into too much detail until I have them working in a prototype form: there are some behaviours that creatures struggle to evolve to do in reasonable timeframes or at the (small compared to real life) population numbers that current computers can support, and I don't want to disappoint people if something doesn't pan out.
Will the option for lowering the water level ever come to the game, to have “shallower” ecosystems?
Players have figured out how to do this via modding and I recently made some changes to ensure the game handles it correctly in online maps where it was changed. So while I hadn't specifically planned to do this, it wouldn't be too hard to fit into a minor update at some point in the near future.
Do you have plans to add any new creature types in later updates? You’ve mentioned Crustaceans previously, are these still planned?
Yes, crustaceans are still in the works, though they may not be introduced until after a few more updates to the core game systems. Some players, like Stobz on the Steam forums, have figured out a way to get the camera above the water line and spawn creatures up there, in some cases eventually getting them to evolve to move around on land. This is actually rather similar to my preliminary tests on crustaceans and I think works as a nice proof of concept that they should be viable to implement.
When a creature's mutation rate is set to 0, will a creature's brain still evolve?
No, if the mutation rate is set to zero, there won't be any mutations to the brain either. However, the next update will include an option to freeze the physiology of a species while leaving its nervous system free to mutate.
Would you ever consider temperature to play a role in having successful ecosystems, with underground vents etc?
It's a good idea and I have long wanted to add vents to the deep sea regions! Features like this would be most likely to come later in development, around the time of the official 1.0 release or even after that, and it may be that which features will add the most will depend on how the other updates turn out in practice.
What was your inspiration for Ecosystem?
Ecosystem was inspired by an extremely innovative research project carried out by Karl Sims at MIT in the early 90s, in which he experimented with evolving virtual creatures, both aquatic and on land. He made a fantastic video about it and there were some associated articles in SIGGRAPH. I found it really captivating at the time and it had always been at the back of my mind; at some point, it occured to me that we've reached the point where you can simulate this kind of thing on a desktop in real time instead of on a supercomputer overnight, and I thought it would be a really fun and interesting topic to explore in a game. I am a big fan of systemic games that have their own 'life' to them, in the sense that they are a lot more and can do a lot more than their developer intended.
How long have you been working on Ecosystem?
A long time! My last game was a turn-based tactics game called Enemy and I started working on Ecosystem around when the last update to that finished in 2017. Some of the early phases of the game were really time-consuming, getting the creatures to actually evolve in a reasonable time frame. The first successful test I had, it took a population a whole night to evolve to swim. Since this isn't a game within a very established genre, there isn't a best practices guide and a lot has to be figured out through experimentation.
Could you tell us more about the next “Major” update you are working on?
I've been thinking of the next major update as the evolution sandbox update. There are a lot of things behind-the-scenes that have a big effect on how creatures evolve, including properties like the drag and aerodynamics of body parts, mass / muscle density, and a new 'dizziness' penalty for not swimming upright. With this update, they will become something players can control. It will also allow for the evolution of a species to be kept within specific constraints, such as a fixed size range or always possessing specific types of body parts, so you can try to evolve a type of whale or something with a lot of tentacles. Lastly, I'm experimenting with ways to draw attention to important mutations when they occur in the environment and to immediately provide options for artificial selection. In general, it should be possible to actually play with evolution in a way you never could before.
How about the next “minor” update?
This year is a bit heavier on major updates than last year! The most likely next minor updates will involve extra camera options, support for languages other than English, and brighter creature colours.
Are there any “novel” genes that aren’t related to the movement of fish, for example do fish have preferred “direction to swim” and if so is this gene related?
Not really! Creature DNA is pretty complicated (DNA files are about 8KB) but virtually everything relates to either movement, physiology, or skin colour/texture in a way that is pretty immediately visible. The only other values are the mating strategy (Mono/Poly/Mass), food (Forager/Predator/Apex), and a few more technical ones like whether neurons start in the off or on state and if a creature was made or modified in the editor (players can make creatures in the editor that would normally be thrown out if they were a result of mutations, such as having very many or very few parts in the body in total). Fish don't actually have a preferred swimming direction; they just try to explore around and fill in a mental map of where different food sources and mates are.
Are there any planned updates to the terrain generation system? For example pre-populating maps with plants ahead of time etc.
I hope that the recent terraforming update was a good answer to this question. My hope is that it is a lot easier to mix environments, carve out mountain ranges and trenches, and just generally be creative with the landscape. With regard to plants, it may be possible to add something like that to the start of one or both of the game modes, running the plant simulation at a very high speed to simulate many generations of time. I can't 100% promise it but I do like the idea.
I hope that answered a lot of your burning questions - if you have any others let us know and we will try to answer them in the future :)
But for now let's hook you up with a new updated Ecosystem roadmap shall we!?
Let's now take a deeper dive into what is planned for each of these updates:
Evolutionary Sandbox - Major Update
There are a lot of things behind-the-scenes that have a big effect on how creatures evolve and with this update they will become something you can control. This includes properties like the drag and aerodynamics of body parts, mass / muscle density, and a new 'dizziness' penalty for not swimming upright. This update will also allow for the evolution of a species to be kept within specific constraints, such as a fixed size range or always possessing specific types of body parts, so you can try to evolve a type of whale or something with a lot of tentacles. Lastly, it will draw attention to important mutations when they occur in the environment and to immediately provide options for artificial selection. It should be possible to actually play with evolution in a way you never could before.
Camera Menu - Minor Update
This minor update will add options for smoothing out the motion and rotation of the camera, which should be useful to people who would like some more cinematic views or to just turn on a follow-camera and relax.
Brighter Creature Colours - Minor Update
This minor update will add some options for brighter, more tropical colours to creatures to complement the current set.
Translations - Minor Update
This minor update will finally bring Ecosystem to languages other than English!
Fighting - Major Update
Creatures in the game spend most of their time racing to food sources or mates, or away from things that want to eat them, so being a good swimmer is a very dominant evolutionary strategy. This update will add more dimensions on which creatures can evolve and more niches to the environment by adding a simulation of fighting and damage, so that predators must actually attack their prey and prey can evolve defences beyond just fleeing. Incorporating existing traits like muscle strength and size and new ones like bite strength and thickness of skin, I hope that evolving specific ways of attacking and physiology suitable for it will be almost as much of a driver of evolution as swimming is now.
That's it for now everyone - I hope you enjoyed the post and see there's a lot to get excited about when it comes to Ecosystem and the year ahead!