Tend

Tend is a proof of concept for a sea slug aquarium. It is a tribute to the Creatures line of games of the '90s that I played as I grew up. It is a virtual environment for artificial life to evolve in. It uses fancy stuff like procedural generation, noise, cellular automata and L-systems to generate infinite worlds inhabited by infinite slugs. No two are alike. The same will be true eventually for the plants that grow in your world and the slugs need to eat in order to grow and have babies. The slugs themselves have a rudimentary digital genome that mutates and recombines when they give birth to their slug babies, so with patience and some tending, you will keep getting new patterns on your slugs.

Eventually, I want to grow this idea even further. Make fully procedurally generated ecosystems in which slugs can survive and evolve. This is also an experimental platform for me. At some point I think I want to give them little artificial brains too so they can start evolving behaviours that I can't predict.

For the time being, this is an artistic experiment and a high-level desktop virtual pet.

Controls:

-Camera: W/A/S/D to pan, Mousewheel to Zoom In/Out

-GUI (left to right): Buttons for Generating a new world, Generating a new world palette, Toggling sound effects on/off, Adding more plants, Removing all plants, Adding a new slug, Removing all slugs, Display total amount of plants and slugs in the world.

Known issues:

The plants will grow too big if the slugs don't eat them and this might cause memory leaks, the slugs getting stuck and eventually the slug body-sprites to not display. All of these can be handled using the GUI. If your plants overtake the world you can remove them all and replant them. Eventually I'll redesign the plants so these issues will be resolved.

For now, download and grow infinite slug jelly beans in infinite pretty worlds and let me know if you had fun.

Bosses hang