Hello Everyone,
Welcome to the May development update. I'm currently midway through work on the next major update, which is the update I've been most excited about out of all of them so far, and also the one which I think will have the most substantial impact on gameplay. Currently, creatures spend a lot of time racing to their food supply or mates, or away from things that want to eat them, so there is heavy evolutionary pressure on speed. That complements the game's focus on locomotion and how the mechanics of swimming drives the form of lifeforms in the ocean, but coming soon is a combat simulation, creating a new dimension on which creatures can evolve, and new potential niches in the environment.
The combat is tightly integrated with the rest of the game's design principles, being heavily physics-based and including many new properties (and new uses of existing ones) that can be factors in a species' evolutionary future. Like real fish, every creature has a bite force potential that correlates with its overall mass, but also a bite force quotient that can allow it to 'punch above its weight' (traits like this that have no downsides are balanced by requiring more energy and thus greater food consumption to maintain). In addition to biting, creatures can do slashing or bludgeoning damage by striking others with their appendages, with damage based on the momentum of the strike. Further, if an attack throws a target's joint out of position, the simulation detects this and treats its specially: such attacks can cause the limb to become nonfunctional, dizzy the creature, impair its vision, cause bleeding, and several other types of statuses.
Additionally, creatures can evolve thicker skin in places and thicker skulls, even spikes and carapaces, which defend against certain types of attacks. In fact, targeting weak points is a central part of the combat simulation. This also helps keep the fights interesting to watch, so that instead of ramming into each other head-on repeatedly, creatures circle around each other like planes in a dogfight, aiming for exposed necks and underbellies. There's a lot more to talk about with combat but I don't want to get too far ahead of what I've actually implemented. Hopefully this will nonetheless give a helpful idea of what's coming next. Thanks for reading!
Tom Johnson