Hello everyone! Dan, the community manager for Adapt here!
It's been a minute since our last development update so we thought it was about time to do another to explain what we've been working on! For the main update I'll hand over to solo dev Paul to explain what he's been up to recently.
Development Update
Adapt’s development continues to push forward, with one of the game’s first feature upgrades, and new groundwork for upcoming progression gameplay in the works. I’m very excited to announce that over the last few months, I’ve been putting a lot of time into outlining and prototyping the first major progression mechanics in the game; Requests.
Requests represent the wants and needs of the AI animals around the player, and offer a proactive means of befriending and courting other animals. In this first release, Requests will be limited to edible food for an animal, and random materials such as sticks and rocks, but in the future this system will be expanded to include encounter-based objectives such as deterring a potential threat, rescuing lost young, or building a new nest. As a huge bonus, this new infrastructure has allowed for a new and significantly improved Nest building mechanic, which requires players to collect stones in order to construct a new nest.
Note that these new mechanics are the starting point for critical future progression content, namely, daily quests; which will allow players to complete objectives to unlock new genetics, DNA, and other rewards.
Another major improvement which will be immediately obvious to active testers is a huge streamlining pass on all Attributes and Abilities in the game as well as more improvements to the still-young Status Effect system. It’s my hope that these changes will positively impact player’s understanding of their animal’s strengths and serve as a solid launch-pad for further improvements and additions with upcoming genetics.
A good deal of effort has been placed on some important improvements to vegetation and habitats. So I’ll dive a little deeper into each one separately.
Vegetation: Thanks to the recent introduction of sleep and daily cycles, vegetation now grows, dies, and reproduces when the player sleeps. This has many positive impacts in the background, including greatly reducing the amount of ongoing processing required by plants in the world, removing the distracting ticks of growth for semi-grown plants, and allowing for clear and efficient respawn times for berries, leaves, flowers, etc…
Habitats: Historically, Adapt’s habitat / biome types have been calculated using a combination of humidity (referred to as climate), and temperature, with pretty extreme ranges and overlap between many plant types. In order to streamline this system, as well as provide better scalability, I’ve recently added a 3rd metric, called nutrients, which represents the health and fullness of the soil. This addition has allowed for a drastic simplification of the biome system, which now supports 27 (3x3x3) sub-biomes. With each attribute containing a value from 1 - 3, or low, med, high. This system drastically reduces the number of possible combinations, while still offering plenty of range, with each combination having a much more clearly defined identity; opening the door for more future biome types such as Swamps, Shrublands, Grasslands, etc…
As with any complex game, optimization is an ongoing effort. Included in the upcoming patch, are a number of improvements to world generation which have a positive impact on performance; in addition to some other fun benefits.
What a year!
2023 was a crazy time for Adapt exhibiting at both PAX East in Boston back in March, and Tokyo Game Show this September, as well as digital only events such as a the Earth Appreciation Festival.
This marketing activity has seen the game grow beyond our expectation and we're so thankful for everyone who's taken the time to wishlist Adapt and join our Discord.
Community Creatures
Speaking of the Discord, we've got a channel where people show off the weird and wonderful creatures they've been making and I wanted to share just a couple of my favourites.
First up we have these monstrosities from user "Egg".
Followed by this little cutie from user "Strangest Creature"
And finally this Godzilla-esque creature from user "Turtlecroc_1332"
