The Project

(Originally published December 10, 2009)

So my latest idea for a game came to me in the shower like all good ideas. I was trying to be less similar to the last few and was trying to do something in the same vein but exactly contrary. Mostly our idea is to use artificial evolution against the player and watch him struggle and die in varying degrees of difficulty. So my thought led me to attempt to think of a way for the player to be the one evolving.
I’ve seen plenty of games that fake evolution. You can buy Evolution Upgrades that either improve you caprice shell or sharpen your pincers with evolution points. I want a game where the engine for evolution is your play-style.

Let’s say there are 10,000 in your herd of The DeathDinkles. They all do what you do in 10,000 similar situations. The only variable is individual strengths and weakness. You avatar only has the strengths; the best of everyone.

You see a bear. Do you fight it, jump over it, climb a tree, outrun it, hide form it, …etc? What you do determines which of your species lives or dies. Half of them have the strength to fight the bear and survive and only a half of them have the fortitude to stave of infection from the wounds inflicted. You could quarter your herd in one simple choice but the resulting herd would carry the traits needed to survive similar situations. The offspring of this herd would have children and a higher likelihood of producing mutations of increased strength, stamina, fortitude and disease tolerance. Pretty soon bears become your easy prey and staple food as was naturally selected (by you). The bears undergo the same evolutionary changes and maybe become faster and stronger, or maybe become lithe, agile and harder to see. Or maybe the fail as a species and go extinct.

So your herd of tough brutes is having increasing trouble with the new agile b’ougars (bear-cougars) and have started to lose population. There are some mountain goats in the west mountain range that seem like easy prey. The high jumps of the mountains split your herd between those that have good balance, equilibrium and jumping strength. The split doesn’t kill the other half, simple divides them into another species variant, The PrairieDinkles, while you become the MountainDinkles. The PrairieDinkles will continue to survive unassisted with an emulation of your behavior prior to the split. They may someday target you as a prey but completely unrecognizable as having a common ancestor.

The mountain goat high rate of reproduction makes them a good sustainable resource. The cold mountain winds and winters weeded out those with thin pelts and make your herd more hardy to the cold weather. Layers of fat to protect against the cold have made your herd a bit slower and not as agile. You, the player, continue to force your herd to areas of increasing agility and cold; contradictory elements usually. You herd thins dramatically and is split many times. The few that can survive your demanding play-style become smaller and wiry; almost rodent like. No longer can you feed on goats unless skeletonized via an en mass assault where many are crushed or hurled off into the abyss. It’s a grim choice but a better one than the losses expected in changing the diet to the local poisonous fauna (perhaps 100%). The massive regular losses from both the climate and behavior engage an high birth rate as being your only saving grace. Birthing twins leads to triplets leads to litters of pups with higher and higher numbers.

I could just go on forever writing this. I think the same could be said for playing it. I can see some cool 2D models for this. There would be different segments for each moving part that would be randomized and passed down each generation. Say like you grew one arm larger than the other giving it greater mass, strength and therefore hitting power. And it became so favorable that it almost became exacerbated into one giant club arm and another small arm on the side for delicate work. Maybe backjointed legs? Longer necks? Nothing would be default except perhaps the parameters. Things would be designed to mailable through chaos and natural selections.

You can’t say, “I want a tiger with a unicorn horn,” and expect it to happen. You’ve got no choice in the way you herd looks, just acts.

There could be a farmer option where favorable traits and looks are grown purposefully with genetic engineering. But that would be an easy little side addon to the main quest part of the game.

It’d be cool if it was a persistent world. Say you got tired of the RodentDinkles and started a new one. You’d be going along and learn of the PrairieDinkles and make them your new prey to your poisonous venom snakes or whatever.