What is Ecosystem?

MikeSlugDisco

Community Manager
Staff member
Community Manager
Here's the information from our August - September 2019 Newsletter of what Ecosystem is all about. Read this, go and download the demo, then come here to help shape the game!

"It’s time for us to talk about a partnership we’ve forged with our friend Tom Johnson. Tom has been working on a unique evolution-based sandbox game called Ecosystem for some time now – and it’s a game that really deserves to see the light of day. We’ve been advising Tom in the context of the wisdom we’ve gained from EotU, and will be acting as Ecosystem’s publisher to bring it to the world!


An infinite variety of creatures can evolve in Ecosystem

In Ecosystem, you have control over an ocean environment where a huge variety of marine animals can evolve and thrive, or falter and perish. The pressures of natural selection, guided by your hand, will determine which lifeforms are fit for purpose and which will be confined to evolutionary history.


Reefs and plant beds, placed by the player, support the evolving Ecosystem

Your creatures can take on an infinite variety of physical and behavioural forms, all driven by genetic and neural algorithms. It’s a game with incredible depth and, we hope, a bright future."
 

Tom Johnson

Queen
Developer of Ecosystem
Ecosystem Beta Tester
Is it like Spore?
Kind of! I think a lot of people imagined Spore would be more of an evolution simulator, and that is definitely what Ecosystem is (in contrast to how Spore was more a chain of sub-games stretching across different genres). The creatures really have DNA, when they mate, it mutates and combines with that of their partner, so they should adapt to niches in the environment over time.
 

Tom Johnson

Queen
Developer of Ecosystem
Ecosystem Beta Tester
That's interesting! Is it possible to save creatures?
Thank you! Yes, it is possible to save creatures. If you don't have any of the interaction menus up (the ones for digging, planting, spawning, or interacting), then if you click on a creature you can select it. On the bottom right there is button to save the selected creature. You can then spawn it using the load button in the spawning menu (even in a different game). There isn't an editor yet for creatures, so you are just saving creatures that natural selection has created, but I'm actually working on adding an editor right now.
 

Tom Johnson

Queen
Developer of Ecosystem
Ecosystem Beta Tester
Sounds a bit like the old SimLife!

A little bit! In fact I recently returned to both SimLife and SimEarth to look for inspiration and feel like they held up amazingly well.

I'd say it looks more like Species ALRE (or a way more complex version of Swimbots).

If it's running more stable than that one you've already won me over =)
Thank you. :) I hope to keep it stable. It's still got some kinks to work out but at least few people have tried leaving it running for long periods as a kind of experiment to see what will pop up. When I first started, the pace of creature evolution was much slower so I often had to run it for awhile to get results at all
 
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