Species ALRE (Realistic Evolution Simulator/Indie Game Alpha)

[Quasar]

Hello, fellow KSP fans! Thought I'd take another moment to re-plug my own indie game, since my original plug got purged with the forum. Also, the game's now on it's third alpha release (0.6.0).

Species: Artificial Life, Real Evolution is an attempt to create a scientifically-realistic evolution simulator, and then wrap a game around it. The creatures in the game evolve, adapt and speciate strictly through the first-principles of modern evolutionary theory: random mutation and natural selection.

The player can change and influence the environment to see how this affects evolution, feed, kill and irradiate creatures to apply artificial selection pressures, or they can just turn up the time accelleration and let evolution happen in real time in front of their eyes.

- 0.5.0 introduced changeable biomes, temperature, a dynamic forest/tree simulation and a water plane (not shown in

, which is woefully out of date).

- 0.6.0 includes programmable rovers to make applying artificial selection pressures easier, an in-game fossil record, a satellite map, and alternative world types.

Taking a leaf from KSP's book, the alpha releases are all available for free download. You can find them at http://www.speciesgame.com.

Edited June 20, 2013 by Quasar

[TheZofDeath]

This looks really cool, downloading now

[Canopus]

Do you have Plans for an Mac OS X version?

[The Jedi Master]

The the difference with Spore? (besides no DRM, of course)

[rkman]

The the difference with Spore? (besides no DRM, of course)

"scientifically-realistic evolution simulator"

Definitely going to keep an eye on this.

[Quasar]

The the difference with Spore? (besides no DRM, of course)

Species is actually a completely different genre of game. Where Spore was, in Will Wrights terms, a "third person eater" where you play as one of the creatures, Species is a simulator game where you play as an external force. You can influence the in-game evolution, but you never completely control it. A more analogous example might be SimCity or Dwarf Fortress. (although Species won't be a god game. The player avatar in future versions will operate on a more naturalistic/scientific level)

[The Destroyer]

It's changed eh?

[ROFLCopter64bit]

Cool. What was this made in?

[Quasar]

Cool. What was this made in?

XNA Game Studio. I was very tempted to switch to Unity when I discovered it (via KSP, actually), but the fact that Unity is a game engine (ie. it pre-implements higher order features like collision detection and physics) compared to a framework like XNA (where you have to do them yourself), would put some things like multithreading out of my hands.

With that said, Microsoft makes cross-platform programming and allowing for modding with XNA something of a nightmare, and their latest focus seems to be more about compatability with phones than actually improving the framework for PC developers, so I'm not going to pretend XNA is better than Unity. Mainly I'm using it because it' seemed like I good idea when I first started making the game.

[ZingidyZongxxx]

Looks very cool! I'll definitely try it out.

Edited April 21, 2013 by ZingidyZongxxx

[Itsdavyjones]

I'll have to try it out once I get back on my computer.

[Quasar]

Weeee're back!

After a month offline due to tech issues on the part of our hosting provider, the website is back just in time for the Species ALRE 0.6.0 release. It features programmable rovers! Plus a Clade Diagram and Satellite Map and different World Types and many many bug fixes.

Oh, and here's a snippet from the bug fix section of the changelog:

– Newborn creatures are no longer possessed by the souls of their previous lives and forced to attempt to complete the dead creatures final action. (even though it was awesome)

I'm going to miss that bug.

[Rage097]

this is cool

[Canopus]

Mac version would be so awesome

[Rage097]

Mac version would be so awesome

Ah! Another one!

Welcome to thy brotherhood of Macintosh. BoM for short.

[ShachonianX]

Do you have Plans for an Mac OS X version?

That will be good because I have a Mac OS X.

[jwenting]

oooh, used to play SimEarth to pieces, ages and ages ago as a student.

And yes, I'm that old.

[Grove]

Awesome, going to download it.

[alexanderw890i]

Your game looks awesome so far, but I'm sorry to tell you that afaik XNA Framework will die sooner or later, because Microsoft doesn't care about it anymore :/

You should probably switch so something like SharpDX if you still want to code in C# or other .net langauges in future with newer DirectX Versions (XNA is only Dx 9).

[Yuming]

Looks good, I will definitely try this out when/if a mac version comes out.

[The Deep Space Kraken]

Wow I no longer feel alone using a Mac.