One of the more ambitious features of Life Altered is its evolution system. The system is designed to solve two problems:
1. How do players further customize a die that already has 6 creatures on them?
2. How do players get rid of creatures that no longer fit the deck they are building?
The solution: in order to evolve a creature, you have to sacrifice another - and the kind of creature you sacrificed will determine which upgrade the evolved creature will receive. I want the players to able to upgrade the creatures on the dice multiple times and in multiple ways. So sacrificing a plant will reward players with a different kind of upgrade for their chosen creature than sacrificing a mammal or an arthropod.
Each evolution is unique
While evolving a creature by sacrificing one of the same class will usually result in a numerical upgrade (say dealing 10 attack instead of 6), things get more interesting when sacrificing across classes. Each creature has a set of unique evolutions that can (mostly) only be discovered through sacrificing. That means choosing you party members will also determine which evolutions will be available to you during this run. My hope is to encourage experimentation and re-playability.
Synergies across party members
Each evolution is carefully designed to increase synergies between the chosen party members. For example: one of the key tactics of the arthropod character is to lay eggs inside enemies for devastating delayed effects. An arthropod evolution on a mammal creature might therefore be to increase damage based on the number of eggs in the enemy or to hasten the time until hatching with every attack.
Stacking evolutions
But my favorite aspect of this system is stacking multiple evolutions on one creature. Getting the plant evolution does not keep you from also getting the mammal and/or the arthropod evolution for that same creature, making for pretty powerful creatures:
There are a few other ways to gain evolutions through special events and certain creatures, but I might talk about them another time.
--- APRIL 2025 PROGRESS REPORT ---
The first half of the month has been devoted to improving a few visuals, mainly on the newly refurbished UI as well as adding some animations to liven things up. The second half I've been chipping away at adding content - mainly new creatures to fill out the deck of the mammals, plants and arthropods characters. Here are some of my favorites:
Darwin's bark spider: Gain shield equal to the amount of rerolls you have left.
Hero shrew: Gain shield every time you reroll a die.
Coffee plant: Play your next creature twice.
Read up on those first two, if you want to discover fascinating life forms (I assume, most of you are already familiar with coffee).