Breeders - artificial life simulation game

I've recently posted the first preview builds of my Unity 3D project called Breeders.

Play it here

It's a simulation of artificial life that's driven by physics and simple rules. I'm using it to explore emergent behaviours, tinker with ecosystems, and explore the stress relieving benefits of tossing around large numbers of bouncing boxes. I'm not much of a coder, but Unity has made it easy enough for me to get in there and try out all sorts of ideas that I've wanted to explore for years.

Here's one of the developer diary videos I've made as I work on the project.

I've also posted the full Unity 3D project files for folks to download and tinker with. That'll eventually be like a Breeders Construction Kit that people can use to make their own custom ecosystems.

If this sounds like your kinda thing, please give the current sandbox version of the game a try and let me know what you think. I've been getting some great ideas from players and it's helping me decide how to proceed with the project.

Breeders is now hosted at my BrainBlinks.com website.

 

I grabbed the source and make myself a runtime to watch then went to bed, After awhile there were many tree things that spawned at some point in the demonstation the player had ended up elsewhere perhaps from the blast, and eventually the demo crashed still enjoyed watching and interacting and spawning more of things to interact with the outcome interactions..

At some stage in my development would like to replicate these entity's in my game mechanic modeled life simulations perhaps with state machine mechanism such as [eat/seek/sleep] states. anyway very cool project and thanks for sharing.

 

Thanks for giving it a try, runner. It's not really balanced to run unattended at the moment, although I do occasionally run ir overnight and there are critters still around in the mornin. Those Stacker tree-like things are basically weeds and can easily take over if they get a foothold.

As the project evolves I am leaning more towards some state-based behaviours. Actually the newest predator critter, the Cheat-a, basically has two states - rest and attack. I've plans for limited evolution of skills and creature preferences, too.

 

I'm loving this, saw it on reddit, I'm really excited for the final build

 

That's very cool - I love the movement and 'eating motion' of the leopard-slug thingy, great work, very interesting.

For inspiration, you might be interested to read "The Lifecycle of Software Objects", a very short story by award winning science fiction writer Ted Chiang; you can buy the print edition, or now, Read it online. (i e-mailed a copy to myself and read it on my iPhone on holiday.)

Food for thought?

 

Can't believe I missed this, really great dev diary and project in general. Can't wait to see where this thing goes

 

Reminds me of Populous.

 

Thanks for the comments and the encouragement. I'm having a blast with the project and can only hope that my coding skills will expand to encompass all these ideas. (^_^)

RobbieDingo: I grabbed that story and will give it a read. I'm soaking up all the ideas I can before proceeding to the next stage of the project.

 

Hi Kitchendon
Looks really intriguing.
Tried to download the package but the zip file won't open. Is it still up?
Thanks

 

glebski: I let the custom domain lapse - I had too dang many websites. You can find it at my BrainBlinks site. http://brainblinks.com/?p=545

 

also...For any who have been hoping for updates and new work on Breeders...

Right now I am working on simulated plants and a simple farming simulation. after that I can combine the two into a more complete ecosystem.

Best place for updates about these projects is at my G+ page. DonWhitaker.com