Very cool, lots of fun

Enjoyed your game for a few minutes man, You have a great consistent art style, and a very cool control scheme there man. I think that adding Story text, as well as varying backgrounds could make your game engaging, and very fun!
thanks for makin this cool little game, def gives me lots of ideas!
-@Zakchaos

Fun, pretty - It would have been nice if you could have had the map always spawning a mix of the creatures, so it doesn't seem like everyone is evolving exactly as you do, but rather that you are rising up :)

it's like pokemon simulator, i like it :)

Very cool graphics and gameplay, well done!

I like it, The graphics are great and consistent and the game play is challenging.

thanks guys :)

I wanted to include other species, about a dozen, and different color variations and abilites - but there is only so much I can do in 48h

Awesome, i love this one! :)

Extremely cute and fun!

Wow, very cool graphics! The game was fun to play, but I seemed to get owned by dinosaurs spawning right next to me and shooting fireballs. Overall the game felt very complete. Great job!

yeah, you have to look out for those, that's what the trees are for, try staying in between them
games are supposed to get harder - especially game I make ;)

The graphics are really good! Plays fine. I enjoyed it.

Fun little game! Straight-forward and has a very nice pace to it.

I did catch myself realizing a bit late that I had evolved. I guess the new icons on the screen should have been evidence enough, but I was naturally expecting more of a Mario-style grow/shrink sort of thing.

Oh, however, GAH, chording E+D to dash right. Maybe throw a key like that on shift instead? My fingers will love you for it.

I'll have to go back and play Asylum, and I look forward to playing more games built by you. Thanks for the awesome!

Amazing as usual as all ur ludumdare entries :) I like it :)

Amazing visual work. I like style and gameplay very good. And he look like charmander :)

Nice game! My absolute favorite feature: Enemies shooting at each other :)

Fun game and cute art style =)
I also like how you can actually look around with the mouse.

Awesome, very fun

Cool game. Love the Graphics.

maaaan, this game is insane, from all the guys that used the theme "evolution" this way, you're the one that added it to the gameplay the more professional way so far.

The game is absolutely clean from any bug and/or problem and the art is shiny.

the roguelike style fits prefectly and dying is absolutely not frustrating ( in the bad way i mean ). Great job, i'm now trying another time to go to the top of the food chain !

I'm very amazed you guys like it that much!

I had to scratch so many features I planned to do that I feared the "remaining" stuff wouldn't be enough for a fun game.

It's a shame I hadn't 2-3 more hours to invest ... I could've implemented more polishing effects (screen shakes and shadows and sound effects and such things) as well as more content (like more abilities) and improve the AI more. I think the AI turned out more or less decent, but being a long time Robocode coder I could improve it (much much) further

sadly I don't think I'll make a post-compo version, since the game concept has quite limited potential

The graphics are really lovely, and there's quite a lot of fun to be had from marching around a fire breathing dinosaur, too. :) Good Job!

I love this, whole-heartedly! It takes a simple motive and adds a fantastic art style and intuitive gameplay without losing the sense of direction and purpose. Great Game!

Very fun game and will be pretty neat to have a post-compo with that 2-3 plus hours. Add a childish anime short story to it, a couple of cute light-hearted companions to relief the loneliness of the main char. It's always good for a portifolio or just for fun haha

Really like it, and by the way, I feel like a charmander and thats pretty cool

Nice and addictive game. Here is my feedback:

- If I got a levelup, there are spawning enemies on my level. That's a bit sad, because it makes no sense to try to be fast. Instead you can fight single enemies and then regenerate slowly. It would be funnier, if a lot of enemies spawn at once at the start and everybody tries to kill as much as possible to get on the higher levels.
- Sometimes enemies killed me instantly with 2 or more hearths. I'm not absolutely sure about this.
- An enemie spawned into me and killed me instantly. A spawnfree-radius would be nice.

@Jeremias:
thx for your feedback - all your points are good ideas which I somehow didn't think of during development (my head was buzing from all that coding anyway)

actually the enemies progress on their own - if you evolve too slow they will start spawning on higher stages than you (making your life considerably harder) but I agree - I didn't think this through

Great graphics, great controls, great game! :D keep it up!

Great graphics and very fun.

Interesting concept, i like the way that the world is so free, and all of the lifeforms are againts each other not just you :)

Fun game, if a little to hard. Good job =)

Good all round :)

Very cool. I interpreted the theme being a fix of evolution and survival of the fittest :D It felt pretty cool walking around fighting my own species, and then realizing sometimes when a more developed race appears, it sorta scares you for a moment, sort of tells you how it would feel to be a real animal walking around in nature encountering a more dangerous and bigger animal :)

Liked the graphics, gameplay and evolution system. Good job.

Wow, nice one! Great gfx. I liked the tree so much, I had to have a go at my own tree, lol: http://styts.deviantart.com/#/d5cuwcw
What was annoying is when you were turned at a slightly wrong level you would not hit your enemy and get killed very quickly, so I never made it beyond the firebreathing level.
Also, nice particle effects on the fires.
I'm bookmarking this one ;)

Never made it to the winged one... it hard ! But I really, reeeaaally enjoyed it ! Congrats :)

Cursor position affecting the camera and the player turning to face the cursor were nice touches.

great little game. It definitely gets a lot more fun when you throw in the long range attack. well done!

Good game, it was very fun. Graphics are also cool.

Very good graphics! The controls were not good though, I don't think using the mouse was all that necessary. In general a cool little game, well done!

Cute and fun! And man, it's hard when comes the fire!

The main character sprite enticed me to check this out. solid gameplay, looked forward to seeing what the upgrades were.

NICE

Looks really good. I could never evolve past fireballs though, it just got too hard.

Not bad at all. :)

Game was pretty solid, though I think it could use a bit of backstory or something.

This is a crazy good game, man! Difficult, addictive, AND you could tell you had no idea what you were going to do before you got the theme. Which is the point of LD, I think. Wonderful job. This should win.

Very fun!

Really nice! Simple concept but executed very well. The enemy AI is actually pretty good (especially for 48 hrs). Graphics are solid as well. But why F5 to restart?? Haha, not that it's a big deal, but kind of annoying on a mac keyboard.

@kato9:
because I initially didn't have the time to make a restart function and thought that the browser would simply reload the swf on F5 ... but I was wrong about that and had to change that but somehow kept the F5 key (well, it was late, I was tired ^^)

@barry abrams:
I can't really think of a backstory for this - but if you have some cool idea, please tell me :D

@BenW:
yeah - it is hard. but I've managed to beat it twice so it's doable although I have to say that some little tweaks (like a spawnfree radius around the player and a small delay before enemies could shoot fireballs) would improve balance a lot (funny, those are changes I could make in 5 minutes but somehow didn't saw during development)

I was alone in the world. Discontent with my predicament, I went off in search of a partner, an equal, to share my company, and finally end my solitude.

After some time in the woods I indeed saw another! Oh blessed be the spirits, my loneliness was finally at an end. Eager, euphorically I approached my new friend-to-be, and

SO I MURDERED HIM AND ATE HIS HEART

Seriously. This is how the "story" of the game reads.

Enough about that, though: Graphics are beautiful, gameplay is punchy, and the evolution-aspect is well done. Also nice work on the crontrols, they work so flawlessly I wasn't inconvenienced at any point.

But still. Your enemies are "your kind"? Make them another color, it would be a first step towards defusing this

Nice game, but a bit simplistic (as you mentioned). What's here is fun though! :)

Great entry! I found myself dying instantly a few times, but it was fun to level up and evolve!

Fun game. Camera controls felt a bit loose, but the fighting was still good.

Your pixel graphic is very nice! I would choose the mouse buttons as weapon controls instead of keyboard.

Fun game. I liked the way you can move the camera with the mouse.

Really nice, fun game. I felt like I was a Pokemon, which was great. The art was really nice too, although I noticed some tiny mistakes. Stuff like just flipping the sprite to do left/right movement. That doesn't work because the lighting swaps sides and that looks a bit weird. Still, that tiny gripe aside it's a really nice game. Good job.

Great graphics and really fun! Hey if you need music for anything I'd be happy to help, I love making music! Love the extra abilities with E and Q, really felt like I could kick ass when I got them

Excellent game, great fun.
Sometimes it felt like I was dying for no reason, but I think that is because the game over screen is so abrupt I didn't see what did kill me.
Also the monsters attacking the second they spawned right next to you was irritating.

Pretty fun game :D Camera control was well done, and a great feature!

I really loved the graphics and the idea. But too bad there is no music or any goal except destroy them all :p

Really nice graphics. I got a bit frustrated, it would be nice if there were checkpoints at each stage of evolution. The combat seemed weird - sometimes I could fight, other times the attacks would randomly one-shot-kill me and I would have to start all the way back at the beginning.

Loved the way you handled the camera. Great entry o/

At first I didn't like the way the camera moved but as I played more I really liked the frantic looking around feeling as if I was playing an FPS. Graphics are fantastic. Audio was good but could have used some music I think. Gameplay was also great but I found that a couple of my deaths seemed a bit unfair. Fantastic work for the 48 hours. Probably the highest rating I have given a game thus far.

Great little game, would love to see this developed further. I think you could extend the game concept if you included multiple species, perhaps some that don't attack their own kind (swarm), and reproduction with mutation. Make it asexual, so after a certain time/when full health/enough space in the environment it splits into two (including the player) with some alteration in stats or random level-ups. That would give you both natural selection and evolution.

Anyway, it's great fun as it is! Thanks for making it.

A really great entry! It was easy to learn and really addictive. The graphics and polish were really good!

The only thing I would like to change is the balance of the firepower and enemies generations.
What is the tree chopping stuff for?
Thanks for an awesome game!

Great work, and nice consistent graphic style. Quite addictive, too, but I quit after the third failure in fireball age, because I did not want to play through the easy levels again.

Wow, that was fun!

Nicely done, loved the art :)

I liked you rgame, well done!

I thought the idea was good, but the controls were a little difficult to get, especially when the camera changes, but the mouse cursor doesn't. I like the idea though, especially how the trees end up as casualties of the battles.

Everybody else covered all the highlights I would have said, lol, so I'll try to give more feedback.

The fireball battles were definitely the sweet spot. :) I found myself hoping for more abilities and design centered around that mechanic (wind buffers, teleports, stuns?), maybe at the cost of skipping one of the earlier melee evolutions or somehow adopting procedurally generated sprites (ala Bubble Tanks). Deaths came pretty quickly though, and I seldom knew what hit me. :( Then again I may just be terrible at this, lol.

I disagree with you that "the game concept has quite limited potential" :P I can totally see a free-for-all DotA/LoL-esque battles with this system. Different evolution paths determined by how you play and earned by successfully killing other players and "farming" trees. Add in regenerating health, running away, stuns, and it'll still be an awesome gaming metaphor of natural selection. ;) Make it happen, man. :D

Really awesome man, super addicting!