It's really sad, that I didn't see some of featured functions in this version of a game. BUT! It works and it will be really intresting to see a modernized version of this project!!! :*

@dillinger Sorry that the magic resonance thing wasn't included, but the alleles should still be working! You can breed visual qualities by using the '+' button on a mutated plant or animal then placing a few close to each other, but far from others. Let me know if there were any missing features other than the magic resonance!

An interesting idea, but even with the instructions included I found it hard to determine what to do.

Making a game isn't easy though, well done!

I think there's a bug or something's not installed in my computer, but I can't play the game yet.. (SDL Error: Could not create GL context). Hopefully it's just my PC, but I think you might want to now this.

PS: I do have all the drivers installed and updated for my video card...

@frankitox16 I'm not sure what the problem is, these graphics things like to give vague errors. Do you have an NVidia card by any chance? A few people have had problems with my engine when using NVidia cards, but I still haven't been able to track down the problem.

Also, even though your drivers are updated, it may be possible that if the card itself is old, the OpenGL version I am using may not be supported (I use 4.3)

@spacialseasoning indeed I do have a (pretty old) Nvidia Card (GeForce 9600 lol) so yeah, that's a good reason why things didn't work :sweat_smile:

@frankitox16 Sorry about that! My engine is a bit overpowered for the simplistic graphics I have here, so it uses a lot of newer OpenGL features (the engine is really meant to do large-scale space simulations, but I use it for game jams too lol)

So the game sounded super interesting, however I couldn't quite understood the graphic interface. I think your entry is gonna be hurt for being quite complex in nature, you don't quite know what to do and how to do it.

However, the procedural genrated terrain is great. I found myself opening and closing the game just to see all the types of islands I got.

I enjoyed this a lot more than I thought I would. I can't say I completely understood everything - I read the instructions a few times through, but I didn't quite have the patience to keep trying to learn in that way. That being said, I think I got the basics down - and started small, by placing 2 of one thing close together, then 2 of another thing...and there was a cool payoff! It was really cool seeing my little ecosystem grow and grow - and after I got the victory message, I clicked fastforward and enjoyed watching things unfold even more. Not the most accessible as others have mentioned, and I did run into a crash the first time I played (I was only placing plants at that point), but there's a surprising amount of depth and a cool payoff. I still have my little ecosystem up and running :)

Like what everyone else is saying, it's an awesome game, but you should really help the player along a bit. Although awesome job anyway! Best of luck to you!

A very nice concept and the terrain looks quite nice. Navigating with Shift took quite a bit of time to get used to, I kept trying to hold the mouse wheel button instead :wink:

I was sadly not able to finish the game as it kept crashing on my after some time. Tried few times, always with the same result. No error message, just puff, gone.

I hope you keep developing this! It's very interesting, as others noted some stability quirks, but that's too be expected; nice work!

@fabula-rasa This is interesting because I haven't run into any crashes myself. Do you recall doing some specific action before it happened, like placing a plant or animal? It is possible that there is something wrong with the breeding loop (it's easy to cause crashes in C++ when you are using as many pointers as I am lol)

@spacialseasoning I believe it was always while placing an animal.

@fabula-rasa Thanks! I'll look into it when I get the chance.

innovative idea! kinda like it!

Good job :D

Interesting concept, but pretty confusing to play in practice. I got hung up for a while at the start since I didn't realize you could only place some lifeforms on certain terrain (I think?). I won somehow without even seeing a single creature with magic resonance :P I also got a crash, I think when trying to clone a flat mushroom. Would be cool to have more of a tutorial rather than one big explanation screen (though I did appreciate the explanation, like I said, the game sort of finished itself without me having any idea of how to breed thing selectively or whatnot.) Also it might be nice if WSAD panned the camera as well - using the mouse for all possible interactions was a little awkward at first. Sound would help the atmosphere too of course. Pretty interesting experience though, nice work.

@adhesion Thanks for the feedback! The only placement limitation for basic types is that algae and fish can only be placed on water, and mushrooms can only be placed on land. After that, there are only a few things that require specific land (the winter flower requires snow, and a few magic things require the crystal biome.) I actually left out the magic resonance feature (as mentioned in the game page) for the Jam because I thought it would make it too complicated for a Jam game, and this way players would still have the chance to try out the allele system by selectively breeding the visual traits of various lifeforms. It was a last-minute decision, so unfortunately I didn't have time to change the info page to reflect that.

Sorry about the crashes, I've been making a lot of major changes to my engine in the last few weeks, so I still don't have it in a condition where I can actually run a new version of the game and debug that.

I like the WASD suggestion, I'll add that when I make a post-jam version. I definitely agree that a tutorial, and some audio would have made a better experience. However, in game jams I always run into the problem of spending all my time writing the basic code to get it running and the content ends up being a last-minute thing. For example, in this game almost all of the lifeforms were modeled and implemented in the last 3 hours of the Jam, and I only ended up with less than an hour to make some sort of tutorial.

I was a little confused with a few of the gameplay elements but I thought this was a really cool concept for an evolution sim! Really enjoyed this one, great job!