How alien plant colors & alien seasons will work (evolution sim devlog 2-2)
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- Опубліковано 9 чер 2024
- I'm working on evolution simulation game The Sapling, my solo indie game project. It's a game where you can basically do two types of things: on the one hand, there are a number of scenarios tasking you to design an ecosystem that meets specific requirements, on the other there is a sandbox where you can build your own plants and animals, turn on 'random mutations', and see how they evolve.
In this video I explain how alien plant colors, the planet soil statistics, the planet soil color, and seasons in the sandbox will work.
Website: thesaplinggame.com/
Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/99...
Itch: woseseltops.itch.io/thesapling
Twitter: / thesaplinggame
Fan initiatives:
* Discord / discord
* Reddit / thesapling
Biblaridion fan art by:
* Sketchydood: / sk3tchym3
* Joschua Knüppe: / joschuaknuppe
0:00 Success at r/worldbuilding
2:04 Alien plant colors
4:50 Soil sliders and soil color
6:32 Seasons
8:05 Outro - Ігри
6:08 aspiring ecologist here, this is actually realistic (albeit highly exaggerated). Mountains often do have a sun-side and shade-side. While you won't see a desert on one side and a glacier on the other, you will see distinct communities of plants as one side has to be more light-tolerant and the other more shade-tolerant. This is especially true as you get more polar where those effects are stronger.
However, you see it a bit more often with rain (if you ever plan on adding climate to the game). Winds don't randomly switch directions in the world, certain areas have certain prevailing winds i.e. the winds most often come from the West in Area A. This means that if there is a mountain range in Area A and winds are commonly blowing in storms from West to East, the West side will get much more rain than the East. This means you can have more ruderal or competitive plants on the Western slopes, while the Eastern have to be more stress tolerant/drought resistant. Combine both water and light effects, and you can get very diverse and fluid communities on even a single mountain.
* takes notes *
I know this from map making! :D
The term for that phenomenon, "rain shadow", is so good. Nice and evocative so you immediately think "oh there's something blocking the rain from getting to a place", and also it's kinda cute in a way. I like it.
you can do something like the equators and life zones and the rotation of the planet or it will rotate at all, thanks to which you can make the planet with a life strip something like one side still Fine by the sun and the other still covered in the dark and life-giving Stef in the middle
SO TRUE!!!!
My favorite example of this is my local standalone hills, like Mount Diablo. The north slope is generally more lush.
Why do you get ruderal stuff in the West side if stuff can last for longer?
I love this! I couldn't help myself from getting some ideas myself!
1. A simple way of naming seasons (in case you haven't implemented that yet)
2. Showing season in a corner (in case you haven't implemented that yet)
3. Add chances to seasons so there could be a hotter or colder summer or famine instead of winter
4. Weather like rain or snow giving effects like slowness to flying creatures
Thank you for making these videos and thank you for taking the time to read this!
I don't know how complex these suggestions might be but I think they won't be too hard to add, but I'm not an experienced programmer
Hey LavaWolf, thanks a lot for your suggestions, only 2 will be part of the initial release of the update! About 4: never realized this interaction between rain and birds, but I looked it up and you are right.
A new devlog ALREADY? You're spoiling us Wessel!
Haha yeah I intend this to be a weekly series of 6 videos, leading up to the (beta) release of the ? & sandbox update ;)
@@TheSapling just a suggestion but I think it would be cool if you could toggle the part snapping in the creatures and plant editors so if it's on it would snap parts like it does now and if it's off you can place parts freely like in spore.
@@UntoppableTopHat That would be interesting but I think that would have to wait for another major update. Sounds like a lot of work for him to do right now.
Hey Elowehi, thanks for your suggestion! Limiting where you can put parts greatly simplifies underlying mechanisms (like procedural animation), so it was one of the decisions I made in the beginning to make sure I would be able to ship something within my lifetime. I get the requests more often, so I might reconsider later.
For the problem of how season shift, you could add a toggle that determines wether seasons change instantly or gradually
and the seasons should shift quickly but take like 30 seconds even on imediate so it isnt just instant as that is more stressful
Hey DemolisherMan, thanks for your suggestion! Without making promises, I like this idea.
Exactly what I thought
I think the biggest weakness of the game, despite all its grandeur, is the monotony of the flora, of the shape and size of the different plants. From a distance, those forests look more like pegboards, with bare ground and a lot of space between them.
Dense ground cover hiding animals, intricate bushes and tall trees reaching into the sky and providing homes for all kinds of creatures would be incredible.
But even now the game is excellent!
This could easily be fixed by letting smaller plants grow between the larger ones. :)
@@jarizitvast5944 Adding a thinner base that has a height limit could work even better!
The building system of plant bodies would have to be completely renewed.
Plants would have to be divided into different areas, such as root system, stem and branches with foliage. Of course, not every plant would have all these areas, in some they could also atrophy, resulting in short bushes with long leaves or even tall trees with large trunks and enormous crowns.
Furthermore, the game would have to distinguish here between fixed anatomy, as we currently have in all animals, and proliferating body parts in plants, such as tree branches.
It should also be possible for them to be radially symmetrical, so that one always grows a whole ring of leaves or fruits at the same time (just as with animals the limbs are automatically grown in pairs, only circular).
Hey O, thanks a lot for your insightful feedback! Filling up bare ground between the flora is indeed a (to me) surprisingly frequent request. It's not something that will be addressed in this update, but it's definitely on my mind to fix it one way or the other, as it would make players happier AND videos prettier at the same time ;)
@@TheSapling Maybe, to reduce cpu load, you could make the smaller groundcover semi-3D like the grasses and flowers in Minecraft. You know those crossed 2d sprites.
I love the concept of seasons. COLOURED PLANTS? Love it. This update is propably the largest and most complex yet, but I love it. :)
Players love customisable sandboxes - just make an option with fast/realistic season switching. Everybody will like that (except you I think because its more work and a bit more cluttered UI. However, since players love customisation a normal and advanced ui view might work too...) Good luck on the project!
Hey Saival, thanks for your suggestion! Without making promises, I like this idea!
Now for the fauna:
It would be great if small animals or insects were added. Of course, they wouldn't evolve or go through any elaborate subtleties, and the code would be kept very simple. But they would serve huge purposes:
1. food and carrion for the main creatures.
- so more interesting food chains would be possible and also smaller predators could emerge
2. pollinators of the flora
- quasi like bees
I imagine some kind of tiny, cute little animals that you can watch crawling around somewhere and being eaten, or looking for nectar as bee-like dots.
Yeah insects would have to be something simple so they don’t effect performance, maybe they don’t evolve visually in their models but they can adapt to gain like poison or heat resistance, etc.
@@TheRandomWolf I think they should remain entirely without evolution, not only to save performance, but also to simplify everything.
The player should not have to try to understand such mini-processes.
@@user-qw4se4dh6h I disagree I think all creatures start desintly small and evolve to become bigger or smaller but you do you
Hey O, thanks a lot for your suggestion! Just for my understanding, if (no promises) the game would get more insect body parts and much smaller body sizes, you would have what you want, right?
@@TheSapling Idea add digestion
Your game is so sick!! Keep going, cant wait to see where this all goes and what features are to come
I really love this!!! This adds a lot of what I thought the game was missing :P
Suggestion: maybe add a change amount slider? Like the players could choose how fast seasons change.
Also, maybe add a slider for variability by day? Days are rarely exactly the same temperature/weather for very long, making making an option for more unstable daily weather would be cool. Just an idea :P
They Qui-Gon Tim, thanks a lot for your suggestions! Without making promises, I like the season amount slider in particular :)
In dev log 4 you adde the instinct to respond to heat and coldness. For the seasons, you can make them grow thicker fur, get fatter , or migrate. Different parts of the mal should experience different seasons , too. I also think that you should update plants so trees can get really big and have a lot of leaves. Also, it would be awsome to have ocean animals that can evolve into land animals. Also, when you think the time is right, maybe , can you try to get it on Xbox? I really hope this game gets super good in the future and gets a lot of attention. Maybe you can also have a center of mass system as an addition to the weight system, and they could use tails to balance and even out the weight. I have a lot of ideas.
Hey Dodo farmer, thanks a lot for writing all of these ideas down, much appreciated! Without making promises, I like a lot of what say, up to the point that some of it will be discussed in future episodes :)
Good to know seasons are being implemented!!
Let’s go!!! Can’t wait!
I started brainstorming my own simulator in senior year of highschool because I wanted to see a simulator with plants of different colors, so I'm happy to see you add something like that to this incredible simulator!
So many cool additions! this update is going to be awesome
Ooh! Good to see development is ongoing.
It would be good for plants and animals to improve the amount of nutrients in the soil when they die, possibly making it unsuitable for the current organisms. Also, animal poop should do the same ;)
Hey Microdoser, thanks for writing down your idea! Plants and animals influencing the soil stats themselves (instead of the other way around) is an idea I have been playing with for some time, but I haven't figured it out yet. Thanks for some extra inspiration!
WHAT POGGGERS
OwO yes
Ohh man I really wish I had a good PC and graphics rn, I've been following the progress and Im dying to just hop in the game and mess around, when I do best believe Im spending hours on it. Continue to do the hard work, youre an inspiration!
But it doesen‘t need such a good PC? Or am i wrong?
@@Saymonix-Games oh Im sorry I didnt clear it up.... I dont have a PC....
@@rassivoro9416 ohh, thats a problem, but head up. I hope your getting a PC to have so much fun, because fun is the most important thing to have.
@@Saymonix-Games thanks man, still new to the whole world of PC building and stuff, but hopefully a get a suitable PC to play this game
Thanks Ras! Most of the game runs fine also on old budget laptops... it will just struggle when you cover a large area in plants and animals and then turn on random mutations
very epic
This just makes me happy
this video alone has made me love this game 10 times more
Can't wait 😁😁
aw man sorry i missed the premier, at least im watching it rn B)
Haha no need to say sorry, I'm just happy you are watching the video :)
Game looks great :D
Another excellent video
Extremely pogchamp
Goed doorgedacht allemaal!
Dankjewel Phrenotopia :)
You absolutely have mountains that have their southern slope (in the northern hemisphear) less snowy. This is especially appearent in spring.
I hope the sizing for plants or animals becomes way more customizable so you can have tiny plants that act as grass or even massive trees.
Thanks for the suggestion Floating Eye!
Idea: in the middle of season a and season b should be a tiny square that specifies how many months the gradual change is.
So the player can decide if they want instant change or if they want a fall/spring season
Hey Trollster, thanks for your suggestion; without making promises, it's a solution I really like! As for fall/spring: you can of course always define that as a separate season :)
A skybox color change depending on what light is set to reach the ground level would be a nice touch.
Hey Yurism, agreed, although I'm not sure how make green/white/black sky colors look good ;)
The ability to determine how fast season switch would be nice, especially if there was a random option
Hey Trash Newt, without making promises, it's a solution I really like :).
OMG WE CAN GO BACK NOW!
So nice! :)
I think it could be good if you added that if plants die without being eaten they leave something behind so that animals can eat it.
Also, an update only dedicated to optimization could be really helpful down the line. For some reason my computer really struggles with the game and crashes often (it's not a weak computer, idk what's happening exactly).
Fantastic game. Keep up the good work.
Hi Carginfer, thanks for your feedback, much appreciated! Nearly every patch and big update contains optimizations of some kind, so this situation should gradually improve.
@@TheSapling ok, thank you very much for your work.
Can you make plants be able to get HUGE?
There are four sizes to pick from, but not sure if the largest size matches your definition of HUGE :)
i cant wait :)
Random heads-up I noticed that your first chapter has a typo in the title: "Succes at r/worldbuilding"
I've owned the game and have been following progress for quite a while now. Very excited about the new update!
Thanks, will fix that!
Maybe you could add a part to plants that make it look like a bunch of leaves grouped together, like the top of a tree. And fruit variety would be cool.
Hey Bread, thanks for your ideas! Both things won't be in this update, but without making promises, I agree something like that would be cool for a future update :)
Can’t wait!
Two ideas that I'm not sure if you're already implementing or not:
1) Let players start a Stable Weather world and change it mid-play to a Season world (and viceversa), just for more freedom and creativity.
2) Give a slider to determine Season duration.
Looking lovely so far, cheers!
Hey Ivo, both excellent ideas, thanks for writing them down! Without making promises, I plan to have idea 1 in the game before the full release.
@@TheSapling Thanks for the response! Can't wait.
Wow I have the game and I am a world building I have been working on a planet a and this looks amazing!!!
thanos plant
bottom text
In addition to standard rotating planets, it would be awesome if there is an option to have a tidally locked planet. Perhaps a new scenario could be set on such a planet.
Features of Tidally Locked Planets:
1. The night side is, unsurprisingly, frozen in a perpetual night.
1a. There can be some light reflected from the planet's moon(s)
2. The side facing the star is an unending day with a sun that never moves in the sky.
3. The temperature difference between the day and night sides results in continuous strong winds.
3a. At the point closest to star, the sun pole, there will be a perpetual hurricane.
4. Biome Rings
4a. Sun pole hurricane
4b. Surrounding the hurricane zone is a much drier or full on desert biome.
4c. The next ring is more temperate region.
4d. Unsurprisingly, subsequent rings become colder & receive less sunlight.
4e. Twilight Band: on the equator seperating the day and night sides the World is in perminate sunset. There will be many rivers fed by the melting of glaciers melting as they grow beyond the nightside.
5. Possible Recurring Mass Extinction Mechanic: Tidally locked planets orbit red dwarf stars which often have a lot of solar flares. Given how close to a red dwarfs star a planet needs to be to be in the habitable zone, such flares could periodically irradiated the planet.
Hey Undefind, thanks for writing all of this down, agreed that creating life on a tidally locked planet would be super cool. At the moment the day night cycle, unrealistically, acts on the map as a whole, though, so that's something that would need to be solved first.
I'm looking forward to a mass extincion every season
Probably what will happen to newcomer's creatures indeed ;)
ADD AQUATIC CREATURES AND SOCIAL SYSTEMS LIKE HAREMS AND PACKS
Bruh harems?
@@Reeemonster2000 and? those exist in earth
@@lourdthebluefoxie yeah but that wouldn’t actually be fun gameplay plus harems would just be weird. Aquatic would be cool though
Im a bit late, but i actually found this dev log cuz i was looking to use a simulator for worldbuilding. So yeah, catering to it might be useful. But it already is a great tool. Not sure if i will actually use a simulator and if so this one, but it def has a place in worldbuilding
I hope there will be a randomize button for all the settings for the world!
Hey Yurup, wow, this idea never occurred to me! Without making promises, I really like it.
yooooo spore on the desk
It would be really cool if the animals could grow fur in the winter and then drop it during the summer. Or plants being able to drop their leaves during the winter.
Agreed ;)
😍
Will you plan on adding an aquatic ecosystem in the future?
wow a idea i told wessel about grass colors :)
cool, but continuing my questions about stars, will there be timezones? since you set the entire map as a flat projection of a globe, would different areas of the map have different times, instead of the entire planet being in a uniform day/night cycle. would be cool to see nocturnal animals develop, sleep cycles and plant responses to low light conditions.
Hey Pine Torch, the whole thing is in one time zone. I did play a bit with a more realistic day night cycle, but felt that even maps much larger than my hardware could handle where to small for it to really work... perhaps one day when all have much stronger PCs :). Although they won't be in this update, the lack of time zones does not rule out the development of nocturnal life, though!
@@TheSapling Cool, I really wanted to see animals exploit niches in the night as it could open up more opportunities for different animals to rise to the top of a different setting whilst co existing with the main diurnal animals
Okay time for my real comment
Keep on going man your incredible I would have never thought of customizing the seasons I want to see where this goes but now that alien plants are in game what about an Easter egg event where after some in game years a UFO appears and checks out your planet maybe even landing and establishing a research center of shorts because honestly that seems like something they would do anyway keep on going!
Maybe the aliens are actually humans too just a random thought of mine ya know to further hint at the fact that this isn't earth
Haha Dogelord, I love the suggestion ;). Keeping this in mind for if I ever get to easter eggs.
I cant wait
Good!
Aliens are here Bois!
Oh damn yes! Amazing. Great ideas. I really ❤️ the development of your game.
Seasons, in your case, are climate changes. Cause, if I have a look at the timer... We have 1000+ years of years Summer ^^ just saying 😉🤷🏽😅
To Change it immediately is perfect imo. You know what's the Situation is. Clever and easy solved.
Aaand damn is the plant colour Part exciting! Well done! 🤓👍🏽
Don't forget, to hide and Environment is a close thing. Maybe it's important that you have to think about camouflage of vertebrates in combination to plant colour scheme. 👻
I hope my thoughts are helpful as Brainstorm ideas.
You are really on the way to create one of the best Evolution simulations (plus) game.
Thanks for this Video!
Ex astris, scientia! 🚀🦖
Thanks Bencake! You are absolutely right about the timing being nonsense; there also multiple 'years' in a day... but the same is true for many other simulation games (like guests staying in your park for multiple years in RollerCoaster Tycoon). Camouflage won't be part of this update, but (without making promises) is indeed an idea I really like.
If you haven't done it, and if it isn't too much, maybe there could be more gene related things, like albinism.
Yeeeeeessssssss
2:24
the
*WHAT*
CreatureSim and Elysian Eclipse. The latter has frequent dev updates on Reddit!
You should let us be able to change how fast seasons alternate.
Hey Dodo farmer, thanks for your suggestion! Without making promises, I like this idea.
With season come Fur or scale or cold blooded and hot blooded animal. Will be cool to see animal evolve with fur or skin or scale to see difference in habitat.
I think you might want to check out a channel called bibits that might help since you are working on similar simulations. Also great episode!!
I know and study The Bibites very well! I sometimes talk to Léo on Twitter.
You need to let players alter terrain so you can make earth and stuff not just randomly generate terrain or at least add a earth option
Hey Sunscreen, I indeed considered fully customizable terrain; I chose this option in the end because I thought I would be able to do it in a few months (as opposed to years).
One thing that really needs more diversity is the fruit shapes and color. Currently, all fruits seem to be a pear shape. I think you can easily fix that one. Maybe also make it possibl that some fruits could also harder, spinier, etc than others so that only specialist species with unique mouth shapes/ apparatuses can access or most benefit from them. Also the colour: ripe fruits tend to be the exact opposite colour of what the leaves are, to advertise and attract frugivores. Aside from the obvious aesthetic benefit of diverse and beautiful fruit shapes and colors, it would be nice to have another specialist small frugivorous species, like bats on earth that subsist on fruits alone, and plants co-evolving not only with the instincts of their pollinators but also seed-dispersers.
The same is true of the flowers I think; they need more variation, same as their pollinators, maybe the pollinators could have different mouthparts to each different kind of flower, or hair like filaments on their faces like bees.
I 100% agree with all of this ;). Very open to any ideas for more flower types.
I plan on making 8 season extreme heat and extreme cold and seeing how life adapts before slowly taking away water
Shouldn't leafs also change color to the same as plant?
They do, but flowers don't ;)
Yessirrr
Do you have any plans for allowing mutualistic, commensal, and parasitisitc relationships to develop between different species, or is will it be limited strictly to predation?
Hey Gamefreak, definitely; the more of these relations there are, the more interesting the simulation. An interesting challenge would be to figure out how to make it really clear and intuitive for the player to understand what is going on.
This game looks amazing, I hope one day it will be compatible with mac so I can play it
Hey Karine, I have no concrete plans to expand to other platforms, but if I ever do: Mac is both the most requested platform and the easiest to realize :)
@@TheSapling Thank you for the reply, keep up the good work : )
lesgooo
with you amazing job, I can make a life form the size of a pixel and a tiny little algae that will grow really big
A problem I have with the various plant colours is that the most basic eyes can only see green, so they can't find food. Ever since I watched your recap of the 7-day livestream, I've liked putting the most basic parts on organisms and seeing how they evolve through random mutations. Also, the new-beta sandbox mode usually becomes laggy and unresponsive by the second millennium.
Also, there are non-green plants in real life! In colder places such as the UK, there are trees with purple leaves.
Hey Nitro Indog, correct: other plant colors currently don't match well with primitive eyes, and there definitely still is more optimization to do! About the purple real life plants: you know the species name? I suspect it will still be a variant of 'green photosynthesis', instead of a different kind of photosynthesis.
@@TheSapling The pigment is called anthocyanin.
I know what I'll spend my money on next payday.
So I have had an idea of a a world with purple plants. The plant color can from anthocyanins. The green one is perfect for my worlds, which I have procrastinated making for a while.
Hey Nicolas, do you mean you would suggest making the chemistry of plant coloring explicit?
You need to add sea life to
I think you should make a plant type or just a new organism type that is like grass, that would be good for more detail
Without making promises, agreed!
You should add fertility of soil
Thanks a lot for your suggestion, golden gamer! Without making promises, it's a cool concept indeed.
"Ocean Depth"
"Ocean Current Speed"
Hmmmmmmmmm, wonder what that'll be for..
drowning animals?
@@pinetorch7876 I mean they can't actually go into the water so.. not quite what I'm assuming.
@@FireTurkey jokes aside, would be cool to see how an entire biosphere develops from a little worm thing in the ocean
rather than some random walking, underdeveloped foetus walking on a planet dropped by some god.
It would be really cool to see transitional animals and oceanic animals.
@@pinetorch7876 100% going through the evolutionary tree and seeing things transition to an aquatic life, or out of one sounds so fascinating!
@@FireTurkey agreed, what I’m especially excited for is the prospect of animals in the ocean exploiting niches unavailable on land, such as filter feeders or deep sea creatures.
Along with that I’m also wondering about how the transitional organisms will cope on land in the game. The dev has to think about dehydrating, being able to actually support itself and walk on land and new breathing mechanisms. Overall, I just really want a waddling boi to evolve that flops on land
Can't remember if this was answered elsewhere, but do creatures have a concept of camouflage and colour blindness?
Not at the moment, but (without making promises) it's a cool idea!
Will you continue to update the game after the full release in September?
Definitely! After September my focus will be patches (bug fixes) and some more videos for some time... but of course I have lots of plans for more big updates like this one!
@@TheSapling phew that’s good to hear
@7:48 Why not have the gradual change happen before the date, not after?
Hey Pole, thanks for this suggestion, it's also something I experimented with. What happened in practice is that suddenly, all kinds of creatures died for reasons unclear, and much later, a new season arrived ;)
Now add continental drift
Well the thing is people interested in world building are interested in evolution
Make the visuals appear gradually, but the actual season switch instant
Hey Thomas, thanks for your suggestion! I played with a similar idea for some time, but it created some confusion of its own: think of a plant species suddenly dying of the cold... and only a few days later the snow appeared. Any ideas on how to solve that?
@@TheSaplingHey I know this is outdated but you can just add a button for seasons to slowly be shifted into or a slider for the amount of time between them
#PUSHWITHCOMMENT
earth doesnt have plants of only one colour. There is fairly common red, purple and orange flora coloration.
Nshorts
0 seconds ago
I love the sapling so I would like to suggest that you add aquatic anmilas you can evolve since of that sea and make so animals need to drink water and you can make plants have liquid in the so they do not need to drink water and eat the plant
Hey Nshorts, thanks for writing down your ideas! Without making promises, some of these I indeed plan to add :).
I wonder if you could add parasites or diseases into the game
Hey yes, without making promises, it's an idea I like! An interesting challenge would how to visualize all this so it's super intuitive to the player; diseases in particular are often invisible, and from playtesting I know that invisible systems are usually considered frustrating.
@@TheSapling maybe add particles to diseased animals, plants and airborne disease to visualise the disease?w
He mentioned Biblaridion?
Yes, and I will do it again next episode ;)
@@TheSapling 😯
Plant
#PUSHWITHCOMMENTAGAINAFTERWATCHEDIT
93rd
Hi
M
Bruh slow down with the devlogs i cant keep up
Will slow down again after episode 6 :)
Make this game on mobile too pls
Sounds like a good idea to turn your device into a pocket bomb
bruh
Hey 287k, at the moment I have no plants to expand to other platforms! If I even expand to mobile, I think only very small areas would be possible, because the simulation can be quite heavy.
@@TheSapling even if the map is very tiny thr game could still be fun if u would implement a feuture to lower thr graphics
93rd