Well I'm a programmer. If you or someone started designing a game based around this theme and these assets, I might be interested in doing some coding for it.
I could imagine a life simulation kind of game where you explore a crayon environment and watch these creatures interact with eachother. Maybe you could even play as one of the animals, and hunt others down for survival. OR, here's an idea: What if each level was you playing as a different animal trying to survive the apocalypse through different means? Whether it be running into a cave, diving into water, running from lava, etc. I think there are limitless possibilities for something like this.
Lancer and I were talking about a bunch of ideas but I think I scared him off, haha. I think he sees things more your way, whereas I wanted something more in line with doodleordie, or draw something where people's drawings are built off of one another and only then do they come alive in some way.
I think you all are only seeing the project as the 'end result' (the pictures/animation) but its primary purpose is to educate, and the actual drawing/evolving of the pictures is by far the most interesting part. The animation is just a byproduct of the drawings produced, and the group dynamics that play out in the actual act of creating are fascinating to watch.
Most of this would be lost in a game, but games like doodle or die and draw something come very close anyway and work on the same basic level.
This Richard Dawkins documentary and the programmable creatures withing was part of my direct inspiration for the project. You can see how something like the "biomorphs" could translate into some kind of iterative game.
That video was really interesting. I see your point though, education is the purpose, and a very good one at that. Also I just checked out that doodleordie game, it's awesome. XD
I have several ideas floating around in my head. I'm starting to form something really cool but it's so loose right now.
I'll just brainstorm here in case you see anything cool you would wanna go off of.
I'm thinking of an open environment, but can't determine what would be cooler, 2D or 3D. I myself am leaning more towards 3D, I feel like it'd be more fun to work with but of coarse all of this is your call.
It definitely needs to incorporate gameplay elements that would be fun and entertaining, but would also place strong emphasis on creative freedom. I can't decide if it'd be more fun having a game set up with AI or multiplayer, most likely multiplayer.
I'm also tossed up on whether or not there should be an in-game system for creating creatures, like spore, or if all of the content is community based, like Garry'smod. I think spore was kind of a failure, yet gmod is still around, yet not everyone can texture and model, so I think that there should be a hybrid.
The gameplay should be somewhat strategic, keeping your species alive and having them adapt to their surroundings, adding and removing aspects of your creature. I feel like it can stray from realism, I think it deserves more of a wacky atmosphere, almost like a childs mind. Say everything floods during a storm and you can choose to adapt your creature to an aquatic environment, flight, skimming on the surface of water, or even just give the animal long legs so they can walk above the water.
OR what if instead of basing the game off of the actual concept of biological evolution like spore, it instead focuses on artistic evolution, using evolution as its theme. For example, what if this vast world is a patchwork of different art styles created by the community. I feel like it'd be based heavily on exploration and adventure. Environments would have an array of different colors, with high poly creatures mixed in with low poly ones, some may even be sprites, and some animated drawings. I dunno, I feel like it's something to go off of.
Also I've just wasted the past few hours on doodleordie, thanks...
My idea was to have something like doodle or die where you evolve the creatures and then afterwards have them "live" in some kind of 3-d world, but have the creatures be goofy 2-d animals, just like the animation. So something like this http://www.pintgames.com/free-games/20248/Draw-Your-Cartoon-Character.html
I was pointing out a lot of games that have fun creative/evolution elements Ive liked, such as Amazing Island http://youtu.be/AxGFGrM4Kn8 the Discovery game Evolution, SimLife, and my favorite, Googrid. Googrid was the first MMOE, a massive multiplayer online ecosystem. I had some screenshots from about a decade ago that explains how that game worked...
I cant believe I took/saved pictures of this considering how old it is, but here were some of the menus from Googrid to give you an idea of how it worked.
You could customize the pictures in Googrid with anything you wanted, and otherwise you changed colors etc from default bug parts. You would start with a set number of points based off your creature size and then had to allocate them as you saw fit. Brain speed meant your creature could think faster (Ive been bitten! What should I do next? etc. If you had low brain your creature would be too dumb to move. Higher brain meant you could flock, coordinate attacks etc, but at the cost of something else of course.) You also had to time when you wanted your creature to sleep to conserve energy.
The food web worked by having goo(plants) that herbivores would eat. There was blue goo and green goo to have some basic plant competition(you could specialize in blue goo but if seed eaters ate all the seeds and green goo could grow you'd be dead, eventually) Seed eaters eat the seeds flying off from the goos, and meat eaters could actively hunt, or scavenge dead bodies. There were also more advanced things like poison (you could have poison as an herb to make your body indegestible, or my favorite, neurotoxin that slows down the brain so much they can't react to anything).
Something like this could be interesting if the stats were more or less hidden at not as harsh. Googrid had an easy mode that did most of the work for you, but you couldnt fine tune all the cool things.
Here was my world at some point, the little guys are seed eaters, the giant beetles are neurotoxic predators with enough teeth to pierce any defense, but spend most of their time sleeping to conserve energy, only waking up to gorge themselves then sleep again. I also made tiny size 1 creatures with little else but brains and teeth, but complex behaviors like swarming so if one gets attacked all of them attack like bees. They would then gorge themselves on the carcass of the much bigger animal and reproduce like crazy.
That sounds totally awesome, I'd love to play something like that. I especially like the idea of having a 3d world inhabited by 2d creatures, very much like your videos. I also like the idea of hiding most of the functions for the sake of simplicity, but there should obviously be an option to visit those features for more advanced players.
I could picture a cool gamemode where you continue designing creatures to fit into your ecosystem and see how long you could maintain a balance without your ecosystem collapsing. It'd probably get players to realize just how intricate and delicate our ecosystems really are. mmo would be awesome as well.
Yeah thats pretty much exactly how googrid functioned. If you weren't careful you could devour your entire food supply and wipe out everything on your tile. If you weren't connected to another plot, you'd have a void continent.
A local radio station interviewed me about the project, so if you wanted to know a little more about it detail (and listen to my monotone voice for 30 mins) click here! https://soundcloud.com/thecreativehabit/tylerrhodes
Aw cool! Also I listened to the whole radio thing, you brought up some really interesting points. I understand what you mean now about the whole misconception of evolution and the final product, and I think that's extremely important to teach kids. I feel like it'd give a less egocentric view. Like: "We're all essentially the same, we're just variations." as opposed to: "God made us in his image and we're the final product, so all other living things are inferior to us".
Anyway, I haven't had as much time as I'd like to for making these plants, but it's been pretty fun. I made this one a few weeks ago, maybe even a month ago:
I'm working on a few others but I'll wait until I'm done before posting them. I'm definately learning alot about modelling and evenly distributing polygons, I'm learning a lot of really cool techniques about painting and beveling, and how colors interact with eachother to portray certain textures. For example, this plant I'm working on now has trichomes which were really fun to learn how to paint. I'm also learning some really cool techniques for UV mapping and saving texture space, and most of all efficient workflow. Practice makes perfect. Anyway when I finish all of the models I'll smash them all together into a mini ecosystem and upload a pic.
I like it! Looks like my starter 'moss' if I'm not mistaken.
I'm trying to get some plant evolution drawings from a local botanical garden, and in the meantime I agreed to do my 'evolution' game but specifically with orchids/flowers. I'll do a dry run tomorrow to see how it goes.
And yeah I was trying to teach myself UV mapping, and although I'm no expert I got it to work somewhat. I eventually began to shift into trying to figure out weird visual techniques to emphasize the 'crayon' look(toon shaders/outlines/sprite clouds), but I sort of hit a dead end considering I didn't really know what I was doing!
I'm really curious how you'll make the stranger plants. Keep up the good work!
Yeah, as far as sprites, I was trying something where I had individual hairs as sprites attached to points, so that they would always face the camera when you moved around it.
Here was a separate version of my evolution animation I just finished where I said I would do a 'seminar' at the Science Museum of Virginia, but instead we did my evolution simulation and I got some new drawings and sound effects from the mostly 60+ year-old people in attendance. They also have a new ending; the rainforest.
Replies
I think you all are only seeing the project as the 'end result' (the pictures/animation) but its primary purpose is to educate, and the actual drawing/evolving of the pictures is by far the most interesting part. The animation is just a byproduct of the drawings produced, and the group dynamics that play out in the actual act of creating are fascinating to watch.
Most of this would be lost in a game, but games like doodle or die and draw something come very close anyway and work on the same basic level.
http://youtu.be/Ok_tcAEbHHw?t=26m19s
This Richard Dawkins documentary and the programmable creatures withing was part of my direct inspiration for the project. You can see how something like the "biomorphs" could translate into some kind of iterative game.
I have several ideas floating around in my head. I'm starting to form something really cool but it's so loose right now.
I'll just brainstorm here in case you see anything cool you would wanna go off of.
I'm thinking of an open environment, but can't determine what would be cooler, 2D or 3D. I myself am leaning more towards 3D, I feel like it'd be more fun to work with but of coarse all of this is your call.
It definitely needs to incorporate gameplay elements that would be fun and entertaining, but would also place strong emphasis on creative freedom. I can't decide if it'd be more fun having a game set up with AI or multiplayer, most likely multiplayer.
I'm also tossed up on whether or not there should be an in-game system for creating creatures, like spore, or if all of the content is community based, like Garry'smod. I think spore was kind of a failure, yet gmod is still around, yet not everyone can texture and model, so I think that there should be a hybrid.
The gameplay should be somewhat strategic, keeping your species alive and having them adapt to their surroundings, adding and removing aspects of your creature. I feel like it can stray from realism, I think it deserves more of a wacky atmosphere, almost like a childs mind. Say everything floods during a storm and you can choose to adapt your creature to an aquatic environment, flight, skimming on the surface of water, or even just give the animal long legs so they can walk above the water.
OR what if instead of basing the game off of the actual concept of biological evolution like spore, it instead focuses on artistic evolution, using evolution as its theme. For example, what if this vast world is a patchwork of different art styles created by the community. I feel like it'd be based heavily on exploration and adventure. Environments would have an array of different colors, with high poly creatures mixed in with low poly ones, some may even be sprites, and some animated drawings. I dunno, I feel like it's something to go off of.
Also I've just wasted the past few hours on doodleordie, thanks...
or this http://epic.drawastickman.com/
I was pointing out a lot of games that have fun creative/evolution elements Ive liked, such as Amazing Island http://youtu.be/AxGFGrM4Kn8 the Discovery game Evolution, SimLife, and my favorite, Googrid. Googrid was the first MMOE, a massive multiplayer online ecosystem. I had some screenshots from about a decade ago that explains how that game worked...
I cant believe I took/saved pictures of this considering how old it is, but here were some of the menus from Googrid to give you an idea of how it worked.
You could customize the pictures in Googrid with anything you wanted, and otherwise you changed colors etc from default bug parts. You would start with a set number of points based off your creature size and then had to allocate them as you saw fit. Brain speed meant your creature could think faster (Ive been bitten! What should I do next? etc. If you had low brain your creature would be too dumb to move. Higher brain meant you could flock, coordinate attacks etc, but at the cost of something else of course.) You also had to time when you wanted your creature to sleep to conserve energy.
The food web worked by having goo(plants) that herbivores would eat. There was blue goo and green goo to have some basic plant competition(you could specialize in blue goo but if seed eaters ate all the seeds and green goo could grow you'd be dead, eventually) Seed eaters eat the seeds flying off from the goos, and meat eaters could actively hunt, or scavenge dead bodies. There were also more advanced things like poison (you could have poison as an herb to make your body indegestible, or my favorite, neurotoxin that slows down the brain so much they can't react to anything).
Something like this could be interesting if the stats were more or less hidden at not as harsh. Googrid had an easy mode that did most of the work for you, but you couldnt fine tune all the cool things.
Here was my world at some point, the little guys are seed eaters, the giant beetles are neurotoxic predators with enough teeth to pierce any defense, but spend most of their time sleeping to conserve energy, only waking up to gorge themselves then sleep again. I also made tiny size 1 creatures with little else but brains and teeth, but complex behaviors like swarming so if one gets attacked all of them attack like bees. They would then gorge themselves on the carcass of the much bigger animal and reproduce like crazy.
I could picture a cool gamemode where you continue designing creatures to fit into your ecosystem and see how long you could maintain a balance without your ecosystem collapsing. It'd probably get players to realize just how intricate and delicate our ecosystems really are. mmo would be awesome as well.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woEw03xlJnU
Anyway, I haven't had as much time as I'd like to for making these plants, but it's been pretty fun. I made this one a few weeks ago, maybe even a month ago:
I'm working on a few others but I'll wait until I'm done before posting them. I'm definately learning alot about modelling and evenly distributing polygons, I'm learning a lot of really cool techniques about painting and beveling, and how colors interact with eachother to portray certain textures. For example, this plant I'm working on now has trichomes which were really fun to learn how to paint. I'm also learning some really cool techniques for UV mapping and saving texture space, and most of all efficient workflow. Practice makes perfect. Anyway when I finish all of the models I'll smash them all together into a mini ecosystem and upload a pic.
I'm trying to get some plant evolution drawings from a local botanical garden, and in the meantime I agreed to do my 'evolution' game but specifically with orchids/flowers. I'll do a dry run tomorrow to see how it goes.
And yeah I was trying to teach myself UV mapping, and although I'm no expert I got it to work somewhat. I eventually began to shift into trying to figure out weird visual techniques to emphasize the 'crayon' look(toon shaders/outlines/sprite clouds), but I sort of hit a dead end considering I didn't really know what I was doing!
I'm really curious how you'll make the stranger plants. Keep up the good work!
Here was a separate version of my evolution animation I just finished where I said I would do a 'seminar' at the Science Museum of Virginia, but instead we did my evolution simulation and I got some new drawings and sound effects from the mostly 60+ year-old people in attendance. They also have a new ending; the rainforest.
http://youtu.be/Nuua_9Y1hHo
edit: I also made a new thread in Pimping and Previews to try and get some more eyes on this http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=116846
I also have an utterly huge version of the tree here, with every creature easily visible. https://dl.dropbox.com/u/59922961/tyler%20rhodes%20evolution%20phylogenetic%20tree%20full%20size%202011.jpg