How your creations will survive winter (evolution sim devlog 2-3)
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- Опубліковано 1 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 plants and animals can deal with the seasons.
Website: thesaplinggame.com/
Steam: store.steampowered.com/app/99...
Itch: woseseltops.itch.io/thesapling
Twitter: / thesaplinggame
Fan initiatives:
* Discord / discord
* Reddit / thesapling
0:00 The evolution sim challenge
1:30 Generalist organisms
2:57 Small specialist organisms
4:53 Large specialist organisms
5:24 Nests
8:23 Outro - Ігри
I have an idea for a challenge mission: create an invasive species that displaces the native life forms.
A predator that adapts to most environments, a voracious herbivorous, or even a plant that takes all the space ! This could be a fun mode in my opinion, but I think this should be added after the full release
Hey Moop, without making promises, sounds like a fun mission indeed. What kind of organisms do you imagine would be in the level already?
@@TheSapling I think it could be some with coumpond eyes, since these aren't used that often. You could use the new eyes from alien biosphere as well
@@TheSapling Is this phenomena already existing in the game ? For exemple, can you have an animal that is too effective at eating and reproducing that the plants can't either tank or evolve out of the situation ? Wich would in turn maybe lead the said animal to die.
Biblardion spec evolution eyes aswell.
I think it makes sense that the flying species can build nests on the ground. Just like Albatrosses do
Hey Parker, didn't know that, really happy with this new bit of knowledge :)
@@TheSapling Most waterfowl do this too, almost all seabirds ground nest too if you count 1,000 foot high cliffs and windswept rocks in the middle of the ocean a thousand miles from land ground.
Speed run evolution... Also, can you add natural disasters into the upcoming planet editor, because it would be cool to be able to influence the environment mid game. Many thanks, Abacus
Hey Abacus, it won't be in this update, but (without making promises) natural disasters and extinction events that follow from themare indeed something I'm interested in for the sandbox.
@@TheSapling Do these creatures have a "brain" that would give them certain behaviors when interacting with things they are familiar with? For example being able to recognize color, smell, or other physical traits in order to come to a decision based on the object or animal they have been presented with.
@@JStacksE3 Yes, they have Neural Networks and are able to react to colours. I recommend watching the earlier videos.
@@JStacksE3 they can also react to sounds, lights or tactile inputs like damage
I'm just curious, are you ever planning on adding aquatic creatures? I'm not asking for it in this update, this update is working to achieve a better sandbox and I respect that more creature parts probably aren't within your goal for this one. But it'd be really cool to see amphibious/fully aquatic creatures in the (possibly near) future. After all, life did start in the ocean and then transition onto land, and that would be a very cool process to watch in-game!
Other random note: this game is amazing. It may not be as fancy as some other games similar to it, however it's already going farther than anything out there currently with these new world-building features. You also are the only game I know of to have plant evolution which is the best thing you could have possibly included because it allows proper ecosystems and speciation. I'm loving the direction your taking this in, it's clearly aiming to be HUGE and I love that.
I agree! And It would make sense if aquatic creatures came to the game this update (still speculation of course) idk if you saw the last video where he shows the season option of a lot more water and one for a really dry season. Water is now only decoration and something for the plants the dry and wet season is obviously going to have something to do with the plants and with a lot of water or way less of it, it could be a good idea to finally add the ability to drink! And now islands, so how are animals going to come to the island? He maybe can add instincts for flying animals to migrate to other places or when the seasons get to extreme move to a better place. This is some speculation I did, I hope it makes kinda sense….
Thanks a lot, ToBeNamed, comments like your second paragraph are a huge inspiration for me
@@TheSapling that makes sense and it’s definitely working! It’s also better to keep concrete plans away from the public in case you want to do something but it doesn’t work and then the community labels it as a broken promise so I complete understand.
@@tobenamed610 Thats happened to much for Minecraft and look what that has caused
@@aidanwhite5631 well it requires a certain amount of stupidity to screw up the way Minecraft has. This dev knows what he’s doing and he knows a lot about what he’s creating here and what not to do so I don’t think we’ll have the same problems
I absolutely love games like these and I think I have a pretty good idea. Tastes.
Different animals would have different tastes they like, and everything that can be eaten has a different taste.
Parameters like sweetness, sourness, saltiness etc... would be really cool, maybe plants would evolve to make different fruit that animals won't like, but they would spend more energy making fruit with more distinct tastes.
I'm also planning on making a mod for a square game with this mechanic, and I think it could be pretty interesting to see what alien fruits would taste like, and which ones you'd eat.
You could make taste even make fruit have a chance to die. If a fruit has all parameters on 0, it'd have a very high chance to die, because it wouldn't have enough provisions to spend growing.
who knows, this is just a small ideas i had recently lol
Hey Kai, thanks a lot for your suggestion! With taste, I guess animals would also need some kind of memory to remember what they ate before, and learn to avoid that in the future... right?
@@TheSapling i guess so
I think social animals would be cool, like communal nests, herding herbivores and pack hunting predators, though I think the communal nests would be the easiest to implement
Communal nests? Like nests that connect?
it could also evolve to become intelligent life
@@TheRandomWolf more like nests that have multiple creatures coexisting there
@@moo8866 good idea!
Hey Samuel Lima, thanks a lot for your suggestion! Without making promises, fully agreed these are cool ideas.
Creating grass and moss may be difficult in a game that seems to be fully 3d, but has there been any consideration for both of these things? Moss could be done by using a texture, but I imagine that with the height differences that grass would provide the only viable option would be blocks of grass that wouldn't necessarily look all that good.
Well if your gonna add grass and moss then the easiest way to do that would be some colonial plant that can grow straight through others of its kind, like irl moss and grass. Itd also have to be really small, so I wouldn’t expect it any time soon
Hey Jai, thanks for your suggestion! Grass or something to make it look less barren is indeed often requested. Not sure yet how to approach it without roasting everyone's machine ;)
@The Sapling Right now the game simulates individual animals and the players enjoy looking at the anatomical variety of organisms large enough to be visible from a zoomed out perspective, so it makes sense that you aren't simulating micro-scale lifeforms like grass and bugs at the moment.
Ground cover and insect swarms have difficulty because you don't want your implementation to break down or bypass the food chain of the larger, more interesting organisms. You probably don't want grazers who can survive without eating actual plant organisms, and you probably don't want carnivores who can survive entirely on eating insect swarms. And if swarms can do pollination you really don't want them to make macro-pollinators non-viable.
I like the term "ground creep" for grass/moss/mycelium because it sounds like a cool alien thing and it doesn't borrow its name from Earth organisms. Using 3D models to represent the ground creep would be too demanding for computers, so recoloring "fertile" polygons on the map's surface to the optimal photosynthetic color of your planet is a solid option if you want it to be simple and not a lifeform that reproduces its genetics.
Perhaps creep is placed by the player instead of spontaneously generating? Maybe it won't survive on sunlight and groundwater alone, and instead it also requires plants dying, fruit spoiling, animals defecating, and carcasses decaying to survive and spread? That would mean that ecosystems require both macro-plants and the herbivores who eat them to supply energy to the creep and by extension the grazers, because you could balance it so the creep and the grazers could never create a 100% efficient feedback loop of nutrition.
If you give the creep genetics, mutations, and reproductive capabilities, its traits could include color, texture, environmental tolerance, how much shade it expects from larger plants, or the amount of nutrition it gets from sunlight versus decaying things. But the problem there is that players wouldn't be able to SEE any of those quirks visually other than via the ground's color and texture.
Bug swarms would be more complicated and would probably only make sense to consider at a much later stage of development, so I won't get into that here lol. I do love the ideas of flytraps and social grooming and such, but that's all a long ways off.
I will say that if you ever decide to implement pathogens (whether fungal, insect, or some other kind), it might make sense for the pathogen to have one or two favored body part and spread easily to other organisms who share those favored body parts (or an evolutionarily-adjacent body part at reduced transmission), because it would promote anatomical diversity for the entire ecosystem.
what about simulating all the organisms in a subset of the map, and then having multiple identical instances of them? most likely there wouldn't be a huge variance in conditions over each. and so there isn't a hard cutoff, the creatures in each could be spread over a larger area, so there's some blending. animals would of course have to move further apart, which you could have as different size grid cells. plants won't move so they could have a smaller grid size, and there's probably going to be more of them than animals. animals that roam far would also be affected by the average conditions over the area they cover, eating from any plants they come across that they can eat, and probably able to survive small excursions thru temperatures they can't handle long term, so a large grid size with averaged conditions would fit well.
@@morgan0 wouldn’t that make every area more or less the same, making biome diversity impossible? I don’t think the nearly inevitable aquatic update would appreciate this.
This is shaping up to be a very monumental update for the game! Your attention to detail is unreal and I can't wait to try everything out :)
amazing work on this so far! really excited for this update to drop. if you're still open to suggestions or ideas, it would be really cool to see a gradual "durability" mechanic to nests so that they can be taken over and possibly maintained by less building adapted species, since this is seen often in real life, and would prevent total evolutionary centralization on nest building. also, applying this sort of code to food decay could allow for you to set food as "rotten" after a certain point in time, where only specially adapted scavenger mouths could be able to gather any nutrients from them, but as a tradeoff would also recieve less nutrients from food that isnt rotten, likely introducing a totally new scavenger niche to the ecosystem.
Hey Nmk, without making promises, these are indeed very cool ideas :)
@@TheSapling thanks for the reply, very excited for your future work!
Hey just wanna say that I really like this game! As someone who is very interested in the history of earths live and a collector of fossils I must say that it is really well put together! However fossils indicate that live started in the seas, so I have a suggestion maybe you could also add aquatic live. You’re expanding to the scale of a planet on this point I personally think that it would be smart to think about what can be logic to the start of live. You don’t need to add a meteor intro like in spore but just think about the idea because in this way it creates more depth if you ask me. Anyway whatever you add I am very exited and I really like this game love the plans you have for it and keep going I think it will come far!
Thanks a lot for your input Renz, much appreciated! Aquatic life is indeed the most request feature by far :)
@@TheSapling as a nod to spore, you could add a little animation of the starter animal crawling out the water when first you make one
agree :) but its life*, not live
@@danisob3633 Thanks didn’t mention that I wrote it wrong.
itd be nice to get different types of fruit, like maybe cones, drifting seeds like dandelions, etc
you know those seeds that latch onto you like velcro, that would be cool
Hey Nuip, it won't be in this update, but (without making promises) fully agreed this would fit the game really well.
You should make dead trees continue standing for a while and just have a random chance that slowly gets greater as it ages to fall down
Hey Caedmon, thanks a lot for your suggestion! Any ideas for cool phenomena that could emerge from that?
@@TheSapling basically my thoughts were that the nests could continue existing on dead trees
@@TheSapling or so some animals can still eat during a season where the trees die
Other then my ideas I think the sapling and it’s Community is great and I love the sapling so much keep working hard
Woah!!! I did not realize you had three other dev logs other than the sound one!! This is going to be one HUGE update. I love the map of world at generation. Keep it up!
What a great update. I love the nests and burrows! Just a suggestion which you don't have to do: wouldn't it be nicer if the seeds of plants were visible on the ground? That way, a specialist seed-eater niche may evolve. Also, have you considered tripling up the function of nests, aside from estivation/hibernation and egg-laying to a food cache or larder? Animals that collect and then store or hoard food for future consumption are really widespread (woodpeckers, squirrels, etc), and would make a fantastic game mechanic. To avoid future food insecurity, animals could hide fruits, seeds or even nectar when they are still plentiful in their season, and then subsist on them in harsher periods. Maybe the animal can also lay only one egg and store food for her young when it hatches.
A bit more complicated: nest raiding, larder pilfering, broodiness or nest guarding, and basic territoriality. Again, just suggestions, but considering how far you've come I'm pretty sure you can go much, much further.
Hey Erlina, thanks a lot, these are indeed excellent suggestions. Without making promises, I indeed plan to add a few of the things you mentioned in future updates :)
One interesting measure of "progress" could be the species diversity in an ecosystem. Eventually after a long time you'll get climax communities which are hyper-optimized to their place, but before that you'd get a lot of interesting diversity and stuff which form and stuff which get extinct.
Maybe a long-term climate-change cycle or something could be interesting to make it more dynamic.
This is absolutely amazing ! I can't wait to have it on my own computer for hours !
As a former biology student, I think your game is needed. I was so thrilled when I first heard of it, I share your videos with my friends and classmates... And now I'm delighted to see that you're still adding more and more to it.
You are doing an amazing job, my only request would be another time lapse for the release of the new beta. Because I know you have a lot of wonderful ideas and suggestions for future updates, but taking the time to fully appreciate your hard work and share it's beauty with the rest of the world is important too. (Plus, there is a community that awaits such content. I know for a fact that I wasn't the only one who jumps seeing Biblaridion eyes, before you introduce them to us. We're here, ready to watch and share this new evolution simulation)
I wish you the best, sincerely.
Hey man got another idea mostly an cosmetic one but I noticed that your world's looked rather empty which of course is particularly the point but still wouldn't hurt to add such as caves or geysers which have a chance to appear every time you make a world but not guaranteed so that every world feels different and unique however there's a twist some randomly created structures if you want to call them that can be dangerous such as volcanoes or sinkholes but if you don't want dangerous structures you can disable them on the main menu also some structures don't appear until some time passes in game such as a dead plant that was struck by lightning or a massive skeleton resembling a much bigger version of one the creatures that are in the players game preferably extinct ones
Keep on going man your incredible although I may never play this game myself as I don't have a PC being a part of development is good enough even if it is just a UA-cam comment brainstorming ideas
Hey Dogelord, thanks a lot for your suggestion! I'm brainstorming about this idea a bit... volcanos would add smoke and fire, but what effects would geysers and caves have on the ecosystems? Or would these two be mostly cosmetic?
@@TheSapling it's up to you but I think that creatures with lizard like skin would fair pretty well next to geysers and maybe caves would be used in order to better protect from the winter cold or simply hiding from predators
You are spoiling us with devlogs
yes
Yup
It's not exactly story-based...
Spoiling will stop after video 2-6 ;)
@@RustyhairedAlp9575 No like as a good thing as in your giving us so much.
Damn this game is getting amazing!!! i honestly love the new features coming round and i really believe theyll help make the ecosystems more dynamic! the only request that id ask is the ability to customly size the planet, lets say in theory you got like the best computer money can buy on the market (basically a modern day super gaming computer) and youd like to run a much larger scale simulation itd be cool atleast to add a functionality for that.
or perhaps a slow mo ability which makes things run all slower perhaps allows ppl to simulate better on slower devices? not sure how that could work but just an idea
Hey Obioma, thanks alot! This update does not work exactly as you suggest, but it allows for it more or less because it gives you the option to for example create only a single small island, and only play there.
@@TheSapling ooo that sounds amazing i cant wait to try this out in the new update and thank you for all this work youve done honestly its so inspiring and its great to find someone who loves alien biosphere
What if you added bones as a food source, many animals like scavengers eat bones as they contain a lot of nutrients and don't decay like flesh. I think it would be more interesting and let carnivorous creatures have another way to thrive. Also, what if there were underground nests or nests like termites build that could only be built in certain soil types
I love the work you do and I hope this game grows to become something to rival what Spore did. Have a great day!
Hey Salmon, thanks a lot for your ideas. Without making promises, I think both the scavengers and termite ideas are really interesting!
I hope for more narrated evolution-runs on your Channel
And I plan to make them :)
I would love to some day see parasitism and even mimicry at some point!
Second this. I was just thinking about how parasitism would be cool to see and wondered if anyone else suggested it.
Hey Sally and RandomMcSomethin, without making promises, agreed these would be cool. In theory, mimicry should already happen sometimes (animal x evolves to go towards color y because this is the color of their food source, so predators with color y have an advantage), but I've never seen it in practice.
You should add swimming and under water plants
Hey have you thought of trying out things like poison, venom, intimidating and courtship displays and calls, camouflage, different legs for fast movement, jumping, and swimming, carnivores plant parts, or maybe you could also add organs that produce electricity, mouth parts for feeding on sap or blood, having behaviors like herding, pack hunting, flocking, schooling, nesting grounds, territory and nest defense, or maybe even tool use? But I know all of what I said could take a long time to put into the game. But one thing is for certain is that whenever these things come out that they will make the game better.
Hey Zack, without making promises, I'm indeed constantly thinking about things like that, fully agreed these would be cool additions
I think with the new maps with a lot of water you should make aquatic animals which feed of the plankton level witch is like the ground water and stuff and a piskovar niche and if not make animals be able to drink water and plants can evolve to have liquid in the so animals can live in dry place
Hey Nshorts! Thanks for your ideas; without making promises, I think indeed a lot of that would fit game quite well. Out of curiosity, what is a piskovar niche?
@@TheSapling means a land animal who eats aquatic animals
it was comfirmed 😎
The job of making this game I learned so much about evolution
your game that you are making is amazing and I hope you don't stop and continue until a full release, or even continuing making updates after the full release
It would be interesting if some animals could steal nests, like they cannot build them, but co exist with another animal that makes nests, and just uses the nests it finds around to conserve it's own energy
Hey Kevin, indeed an interesting idea. Right now animals only build nests when (1) they are nest builders and (2) there is no appropriate nest around, meaning they could steal from another species that builds nests of the same type. What you are suggesting is to basically remove the condition to be a nest builder yourself.
For plants, you should add a dormancy/hibernation setting based on ground water as well as temperature to simulate plant behavior in places dominated by a wet/dry cycle like in the tropics and monsoon areas where temperature doesn't change much but precipitation fluctuation determines ecosystem behavior
Hi Farizki, thanks a lot for this suggestion! It never occurred to me, but given that you can specify your own seasons this makes perfect sense... do you know any examples of real life plants that do something special to survive extreme wetness or drought?
@@TheSapling plants in monsoon climates get a flush of heavy rain in the wet/monsson season. This rain can happen over only several days and may only last a couple of months but the ammount of water allows the flora to grow into dense forests. After the monsoon rain, there can be almost no rain for the rest of the year, turning the land into barren semi-arid shrubland. The plants then need to find ways to survive the long dry
In this bipolar situation, the flora evolve to quickly grow into a tropical rainforest for a couple of months then either die out after the rain stops (to germinate after the rains return) or evolve desert-like adaptations which include deep roots to access deep groundwater, thin leaves to minimize evapotranspiration, and/or thick bark that help protect from heat & drying. These longer lived plants effectively go into hibernation like temperate deciduous plants and even shed their leaves too to minimize evapotranspiration
So in essence the situation is similar to temperate climates but replace spring with wet/monsoon season and the rest with a hot and dry "winter"
Excellent explanation. Really useful information for me!
There should be forelimbs tbh, using the same model for the limbs is kind of strange and forelimbs could give more reallistic options for traits
Hey JF, without making promises, agreed that different limb models for different positions on the body would look better!
This is one fascinating game! Very unique too. Really like the evolution part of the game. Also the customization looks really kool. The complexity of the game shows so much hard work have been put into the project and I am really amazed how well the features work together. You have piqued my interest and I have just subbed to follow your project. Keep it up! :)
Some ideas:eusociality, marine ecosystems (if they arent on the game already)
Extinction events
Fossoriality(maybe a subterranean system)
Hey Vault Dude, without making promises, indeed all cool ideas that would fit the game well :)
@@TheSapling your consideration is more than enough, congrats on the nw kid!
With these two updates coming out tomorrow, this and the water update, I am really excited. I think that both these updates more than double and almost triple what you can do in this game. I'm excited to see the future of this game.
Also, the addition of things like eggs in trees, nests, and burrowing is very exciting. It will add more purpose to tall things and other stuff. Please keep going.
I really like how it's shaping up!
Absolutely loving the new additions!
I had a question on the colour variations, will those colours affect temperature regulation? (ie animals get warmer with darker skin/fur) and/or predator visibility? (ie camouflage by matching the environment colour)
Hey Long lost pal, to both suggestions: no, but (without making promises) I like these ideas ;)
@@TheSapling Good move on not making promises, I read the other thread discussing that, and I think they're right. Plus, as you say, it keeps mystery and conversation bubbling!
I think it would be cool to make the planet have tectonic plates that slowly move over time allowing some pretty cool adaptations
natural disasters that have differing levels of severity the more severe the more rare would be a very good introduction! ^^ perhaps having it be adjustable for how rare each is. that would force diversity and even extinction events!
Without making promises, agreed! :)
Hm, when I watched the video, one thing I thought about the whole was how animals deal with different seasons besides hibernating. Migration. Many kinds of animals tend to migrate to other areas when the local area becomes unsuitable for them during a season, ranging from various types of birds to ungulates like caribou or wildebeest. I was surprised it did not appear in the video, so it makes me wonder if it’s appearing in a later devlog or if it’s just not part of this update?…
From what I understand, seasons cover the entirety of a map as of now so migration wouldn’t be any good. Even if they could migrate, that’d be better off as an emergent behavior rather than a hard coded feature.
Hey Oviraptor Fan, I indeed realized I don't mention migration anywhere right after I uploaded the video ;). Migration is not in this update explicitly, but the instincts 'go away from cold' and 'go away from heat' more or less have this effect, assuming there's a bit of temperature variation on your map and the seasons are not so extreme that all animals die out immediately.
add missions and like scenarios mission example: try to make a creature ideal for most conditions
Hey Ruud, thanks for your suggestion! The games indeed has missions, like one where it has to survive a world where temperatures rise.
@@TheSapling i mean so a creature can survive different seasons/conditions
Add a first person mode where you can walk around the scenario like a safari
Hey Quinn, thanks for your suggestion! Any ideas for cool extra things you could do with such a mode that aren't possible when you just bring the camera low to the ground?
@@TheSapling it’s one thing to fly around with a camera and observe, it’s another to actually be IN that place, looking around and seeing it and being immersed. Watching the animals interact to each other and their environment on their level. It’d also allow a sense of scale to walk through a forest or watch a huge animal pass you by when your actually grounded instead of free flying.
I know I’m commenting here in a lot of places, don’t mind me lol
@@TheSapling I know it might be beyond the scope of the project or maybe just not fit for the game, but this comment thread made me imagine the player being in the world- maybe controlling an animal in first person- competing with the other animals, surviving random environmental disasters (I know that’s not part of the game but I think I’ve seen you entertain the idea,) and I think interacting with the game in that way would be fascinating.
Sort of a personal way of influencing the environment. Driving a species to extinction or being the reason they adapt to be the apex predator just from repeatedly fending them off. Or becoming the apex yourself and causing ecological collapse. Again, I’m not a game maker, so I don’t know how feasible this all is. I love your project already and im very excited to see what becomes of it!
I think it would be cool to walk around the scenario like you're a little dude exploring, maybe being able to interact with your creatures to kind of make a stronger feeling of connection too?
Just wanted to let you guys know I love these kinds of discussions and I'm taking a lot of inspiration from them!
could you implement silk production as an adaptation?
initially it would be used as an attack, being a method of slowing down predators or prey alike at the cost of some energy, but with further adaptations it could be used to build cobweb like traps which catch insects, construct stronger nests, or to create protective egg sacs.
I think your name is incorrect; without making promises, this is an interesting idea. Cobwebs as trap might lead to some timing challenges (you need to catch something before you die, but also before the tree you attached it to dies), so this needs some thinking still ;). How would slowing down other creatures work? Any silk producing animals you have in mind there?
@@TheSapling mainly spiders of the genus scytodes, as well as velvet worms and bolas spiders.
Squirting silk onto other creatures seems like the simplest behaviour involving silk that could adapt from silk production.
It would hinder the movement of another creature, perhaps displaying silk threads wrapped around the target's body.
This could be a beneficial adaptation for predators, as it would help them to stop prey from escaping when they attack, but could also be a beneficial adaptation for herbivores, as it would help them to move away from predators without being followed.
Producing silk would have the drawback of using up a portion of the creature's energy.
I have an idea for stingers, stingers would be able to poison the creature that gets stung and slowly kill it
Without making promises, poison is an idea I like indeed!
You should add ages after, things like the ice age or natural disasters that radically change the environment after a couple hundreds or thousands of generations, a mass extinction event or something of the sort
Hey Bunny, without making promises, totally agreed that natural disasters would fit this game well. Ice ages you can already more or less do in the sandbox by lowering the temperature :)
Are the seasons influenced by the area of the planet for example is Winter on equator diffrent then winter on the poles? And i dont mean that on one side of the planet is sommer and the other side winter i know that would be to complicated, i think. Also do seasons have a random factor some summers are hotter some are colder?
Hey LPKlette, temperature differences on the map can be specified by the player, and temperature differences as specified by the season are relative. So if you have 30 degrees around the equator, and -10 at the poles, in a season that's 20 degrees colder, these will be 20 degrees and -30 degrees respectively. So far, it will be the same every season, because I was thinking randomness here might confuse the players.
@@TheSapling Can the animals migrate or will they only be able to specialize in one environment or generalize for all?
Hey ACS, good question! The existing instincts 'go away from cold' and 'go away from heat' more or less have this effect, assuming there's a bit of temperature variation on your map and the seasons are not so extreme that all animals die out immediately.
@@TheSapling you could also always make "season differation" an option in the menu
Thank you for making this game :)
Lovely work! I can't imagine how much fun it must be to be coding this (even though I'm sure it gets frustrating sometimes).
I think a good idea would be to add some new campaign missions to explain things like nests and seasons.
Hey Ivo, won't be in this update, but agreed! So far, these will be features the players will have to figure out themselves.
@@TheSapling That makes sense, can't wait!
This is beautiful; I just downloaded it to play around with. Is there any chance we could get ground cover plants? They might have to work differently than the other ones, but I bet they'd make these lush ecosystems look more... lush! Plus it might open the door to insect swarms and stuff.
Hey Rextenomous, thanks for your suggestion! Ground cover is indeed often requested and it would indeed look beautiful. Not fully figured out how I would do it without roasting everyone's pc, though ;).
Will you ever add aquatic creatures? Also i think it would be cool if animals actually layed their eggs in the nests. Oh and uh, can animals still lay eggs on the ground?
Hey Dodo farmer, yeah eggs without nests is still the default. About aquatic creatures: I try to be a bit vague about my concrete plans so the community has something to speculate about (often includes ideas that I use in later updates) and generate a bit of buzz while I gradually reveal the new information.
It's a little out there, but what if, you added a mode where an escape pod lands on your creations and u set a goal like survive three days/10/30/90 until rescue comes. Or reach a point in the map where a ruin with a distress beacon is. Only reason I bring this up is because I took on a simulation of different outter worlds and see what life comes from it, then at some point created a drop pod experiment where certain parts are broken and have certain food stores or cryo sleep pods.
Hey Fayt, thanks for writing down your ideas! Just to be sure I understand you correctly: you are assuming the game will have sentient life at some point, right?
@@TheSapling I've only recently started watching your videos like four months ago and the amount of progress for a single person is rather astounding. This was actually the first time I decided to connect. I don't think it would be possible to over estimate your potential. Btw congrats on your new baby girl 😊
Going through a rough patch in my life beg without my computer for a year but as soon as I get it back in downloading the sapling.i don't think a high ducting ai would be necessary to carry out basic functions just something basic like I need food or I need to repair my broken solar panel to get my comms running again. They would be indirectly controlled by the player such as you might give them a goal but that doesn't mean they won't squander their resources or venture where they shouldn't or binge the onboard entertainment when there are more pressing survival matters at hand.
It's just a thought. What you have created already is already so complex it's mind boggling.
itd be cool if there was a water drinking mechanic where animals and plants need water. maybe organisms can have a water preservation meter and you can add things like camel humps to make an animal preserve more water.
Hey Grady, thanks a lot for your suggestion! What I'm currently struggling with: there should be some kind of downside to being really good a preserving water (otherwise all creatures would have it)... any ideas there?
@@TheSapling could it be a weight/movement speed thing? The more water an animal can retain, the more it is slowed. Now it has to worry about being caught by predators and finding food when food is scarce. And then maybe- similar to energy- if it has to, say, escape a predator it’s capacity to retain water is diminished because that’s a resource it is carrying and using.
@@TheSaplinghmmmm maybe for animals it could make them extremely heavy and for plants maybe it could be extremely devastating if they're eaten necessitating things like spikes sort of like cactuses? If you ever expand upon instincts animals could evolve to understand the benefits of eating plants with good water preservation and prioritize looking for plants with parts that preserve water. Super excited for this game and it's future!
Thanks a lot for these ideas both of you :). As always, not making promises, but these are interesting thoughts.
@@TheSapling yeah ofc, do what you feel will be best for the game. Love where it's going so far and can't wait for the future.
Hi, quick question, if I buy the sapling on steam when it's early access, when the full release happens, will I still own it? (Sorry it's unrelated to the dev log)
Yes
Yes
Yes :)
@@TheSapling yayy thanks
I hope to play this soon
Got it =>
Can i add some idea?
If yes then can you add natural events like aurora boreal, vulcanos etc ?
Hey, thanks for your idea! Any suggestion on how aurora borealis would affect ecosystems?
@@TheSapling idk, a good natural event like irl
Cant wait 😃
Could you add a terrain editor not just a generator I like to experiment with earth creatures and it could be useful so I could recreate earth
Hey Sunscreen! I indeed played with this idea for some time, but I opted for this because of how much extra time a full terrain editor would cost to build.
@@TheSapling wow first time the youtuber has replied to my comment the hives and borrows are like buildings so a species with them is like a advanced species I have actually been working on a alien biospheres project
hi sunscreen man
6:24 that’s really cool
Flying or very large animals should have the option to move away from harsh conditions
Yeah migration, like what zebras and wildebeest do in Africa
But the whole world gets effected by seasons so that can’t really be implemented right now
@@TheRandomWolf yeah… if larger worlds are added (and season delay with em) then itd be a practical strategy. A new set of wings and legs focused on long distance travel (low in mobility, moderate speed, extreme efficiency) would also likely be added
The instincts 'go away from cold' and 'go away from heat' more or less have this effect, assuming there's a bit of temperature variation on your map and the seasons are not so extreme that all animals die out immediately.
I understand you have a lot on your plate but I think that being able to change the weather during the simulation to make climate change happen if we want to spice up some evolution. I also think a slider that controls how abruptly seasons change is a simple solution but you may have considered that
Hey, you can actually change the temperature already! More about weather in tomorrow's devlog :)
@@TheSaplingI got the game two nights ago and saw that. It’s a ton of fun as well!
I really like seeing this game. I have bought it a few days ago to give it a try. Unfortunately, both in a scenario and in free play, I encountered the same gamebreaking bug where simulation just stopped and I was left with a bunch of unchanging "ghost" animals and plants. Might give it another shot once this update is out but for now I clicked refund.
Same thing happens to me, I just enter creature editor then come back out then the animals work for some time again
Hey Exonaut, sorry to read you had problems with the game (and good that you were still able to get your money back!). If you have any theories on how I can reproduce your problem, let me know.
@@TheSapling it’s kinda hard to replicate, it just happens when playing the game
After a certain amount of time everything just freezes, you can go and make a plant or creature from scratch then exit to make them unfreeze again, after some time they will freeze again tho
This was with mutations turned on so idk if it’s something to do with that
Doesn’t seem like the type of creature either this happened on two ecosystems I made
Maybe it’s some sort of memory thing or the speed up time thing, I switched back and forth between fast and normal
Okay thanks for the detail RandomWolf! In case you have an ecosystem where this happens relatively quickly/often, I would be very interested in the save file! You can find them at C:\Users\YOURUSERNAME\AppData\LocalLow\Wessel Stoop\The Sapling; if you send those to thesaplinggame@gmail.com I would be grateful :)
@@TheSapling I’ll definitely try to send a save
Make more instincts
Everyone always asks for more instead of acknowledging or appreciating anything he reveals here. :/
can this not be enough for us? I’m personally more than satisfied
Haha @ToBeNamed, in the beginning nobody was asking for anything, so I'm just really happy people are thinking and talking about the game at all :)
Hey Lourd, without making promises, I feel the instinct UI needs an overhaul in general. Won't be in this update though.
Are you going to add non egg laying species or anphibian like creatures
Hey great Lumberjack, there are 4 stages in the game, going from completely egg laying to life birth! As for amphibian creatures: aquatic life is indeed the most requested feature by far ;)
@@TheSapling oh ok
Eyyyy! Biblaridion!
My suggestion for the game is to have Mac support, so that people on a Mac can play the game too.
Hey Dinoboy, I have no plans to expand platforms at the moment, but if I do, Mac is indeed the most requested platform (and easiest for me to realize).
Yes yes and more yes
😲 woah
I'm confuss about Below and Above in Eggs
What if there was like, giant venus flytraps or pitcher plants. They could maybe trap small animals if they got too close. I think that this could be a good addition to the game, but just an idea.
Hey BeAst Blakester, without making promises, agreed this would be cool!
Have you thought about adding neural networks?
Hey Firefox, definitely thought of it (and there is a really cool video called 'I programmed some creatures, they evolved' here on UA-cam), but in my experience it's quite hard to understand what is going on for the average player... so that's why I opted for a rule based system instead.
@@TheSapling Thanks for the reply :)
Could there be a way where a creature starts with a rule based system and neurons appear randomly the same way body parts appear? Maybe this way the creatures wouldn't run in circles in the beginning (which i guess you mean by "quite hard to understand what is going on"?) and they still could develop interesting behaviours. But i'm far from being as knowledgeable as you so maybe that's a stupid idea and would never work. I'm not a developer :D
why would a nest protect eggs from predation? shouldnt some predators be able to be nesthunters?
Hey Flemmi, good question. Before, all eggs where laying on the ground and could be seen be all egg eating creatures from a large distance. Nest predators are still possible, but the animals would have to come much closer to see what is inside the nest.
@@TheSapling it’d be cool if there was an instinct where a creature reacts to a nest. Like if it sees a certain type of nest it’ll go towards it to find food
@@TheSapling On the same note of animals behaviors toward nests (and I think this could fit with the nest “hiding” the egg up until a close proximity) an animals could have a trait I protect its nest. I can think of advantages and disadvantages related to the extremity of this trait. Also, a nest hunter trait could develop over time and the species gets better at spotting nests from further away.
If the egg laying animal is very protective, this is a defense against animals with the nest hunter trait developing. But the downside is they stay closer to their nests and won’t be able to travel so far for food when it’s scarce.
Yes exactly, that last point is important! Right now I notice that herbivores that do some other than eating for some reason have a tendency to quickly starve ;).
This is spore on even more drugs
Make another 'Letting the sim run for 7 days video' but make it 30 days
Hey Angad, I indeed plan to make more of these videos and cover a longer period of time!
@@TheSapling Nice! Also could you make the game free... I mean I know you gotta earn money but hey it doesn't hurt to ask
Love the game and I want to play the beta but the beta tab doesnt even show up for me
does anyone know why?
it isnt out yet. next month he will relase a beta
@@LPkletten oh ok I missed that
ive played spore... alot. but it was always missing something... sandbox!
i’m glad i make an appearance
He stole your eyes
@@TheRandomWolf ow
@5:47 I mean.... fair enough reason lol
Why don’t you do voice recordings explaining what to do in the tutorials
Hey Gabriel, because I hope the tutorial will one day be so clear and intuitive that they are not needed ;)
Since you are quite reluctant on making grass as ground cover (and I could imagine the progamming difficulty,) why not shrubs? Maybe you should ditch grass and just opt for shrubs. Shrubs are small plants but dont spread through rhizomes, making them probably less taxing for the pc. Its basically just a very small thin tree with many branches. Inside the game each one can occupy the same space like any other plant now, but they should not grow under the shade of say, a "tree" or any sufficiently large plant since they wouldbe easily be outcompeted for light. Maybe your game should have a rule however, say: IF a square/space(im not sure what its called in programming) is empty, BUT surrounded on all sides by mature shrubs, THEN a tree should not be able to sprout there, since plants are able to put quite a defence, even poisoning saplings at young stage. Having a rule like that also makes a relatively contigous space like a brush or scrubland possible. Although that would need for the game to identify and make distinctions which is "shrub" and which is "tree" in the first place. It would be interesting from an ecological point of view, since shrubs are notoriously hardy and can put up a fight with trees: they basically attract fire to make sure any trees in their vicinity will die, but since their seeds survive easily burning, they are able to monopolize their habitat.
Hey Erlina, (as always, without making promises) love these ideas for interaction between 'low' plants, trees, and possibly fire! As for grass, the only thing I'm reluctant to add is green soil indicating life; I want all life to be simulated, and be able to evolve. Given the overwhelming amount of players interested in grass (and I think they are correct that it would make the game a lot prettier), I guess I will need to figure out a solution that is super cheap computationally.
@@TheSapling If you are serious about grass, then you should consider that the bestfriend of grass is the herbivore: grasses need the presence of herbivores, as paradoxical as it may sound. Currently, your simulation seems to have a very low mortality rate for young trees, even under predation. Because trees in real life (the grass' greatest competitor for light) are easily killed at a young stage by herbivores, while grasses can withstand them easily by a speedy growth. If anything, grasses (as in savannahs) are heavily dependent on herds spreading their seed, being fertilized and being protected. Places which are abandoned by large herbivores are quickly colonized by shrubs, and then trees, except in dry habitats which they can stalemate shrubs. Adding grasses in your simulation would really showcase the role of ecology in evolution. Grasses of course, as a scientific clade are extremely diverse, and some do not look like grass at all. Grasses also have superior photosynthetic process than trees which allows them to harness more energy (though this aspect is difficult to show on a sim) But as everyone knows, their key trait is that they are very hard to kill. Like shrubs, they can also trigger fires in the dry season, which clears the presence of tree saplings.
Super interesting! Just brainstorming: I'm thinking this effect could be achieved, in simple form, by (1) not allowing grass to grow in place with full grown trees, (2) making it so 'normal' plants get a lot of damage from being eaten while (3) grass is barely damaged from being eaten.
@@TheSapling Agree on all, but on your (3) only young trees or plants that have no tree bark yet. Bark is quite distasteful (sometimes even poisonous) that very few herbivores bother eating from it. Maybe evolving bark should give larger benefits against herbivores in the sim. To have checks and balances on both grass and tree, you can also split the herbivore niches into adding at least two mouthparts that can specialize: 1. Grazers that have perfected eating only grass (wildebeest, antope, sheep) keeping grass in check; 2. Browsers that exclusively specialize in tree foliage and keep trees in check (giraffes, elk, roe deer); and 3. intermediate non-specialized herbivorous species that both browse and graze, but cannot compete with the efficiency of pure grazers and browsers (such as wild goats, reindeer). That way the trees and grasses can check each other and have an interesting interaction to see which dominates the landscape. Also: having a wet or cold climate really gives a large advantage to trees over grasses. In some wet places in Iceland, grasses can be rare. Burrowing animals such as rabbit, pika, and mice can also damage grasses' roots and cause soil erosion and can facilitate either grassland denudation or shrub/tree colonization. Also, almost no flying animal evolved to eat grass because the space for a digestive machinery required to house it is so large few flying animal really evolved eating foliage and even fewer on grass leaves.
How would you make "grass" in the game though? Is it separate category like the algae in the game or from a preexisting plant? Since grasses have flowers, it should probably be from flowering, warm and dry adapted, but small plant. The only problem there is grasses dont have fruits. But Im sure youll figure that one out. I'm very excited for the future of this game and thank you for listening!
Hey, thanks for your usual injection of inspiration :). As for the question at the end: if I ever get to solve the computational challenge, I'm leaning towards implementing it as an 'extra small' body size, which gives you less control over the actual shape of the main body except for length, but shows multiple 'bodies' instead.
I've got an idea:
Make so the player can edit how much time each season takes
Thanks for your suggestion! Any idea of what kind of phenomena would follow from longer or shorter seasons?
Maybe you could edit how much time each season transition takes.
There could be also more parameters to differentiate seasons:
Ice patches on the ocean and change the solar light color.
Your videos always amaze me, good job!
Sorry for taking 11 days to respond you, my UA-cam didn't let me.
I have a idea for optimization for potato computers. Make it a option that all plants and animals have little to no animations.
Hey Ohz999, thanks for the suggestion! Once animations turn out to be the largest performance bottleneck (and I think that might indeed happen some time in the future), I might it indeed 'solve' it as you suggested.
Can you please make this support Mac. Plzzzzz
Hey Guttural Joker, I have no short term plans to add more platform, but if I ever do: Mac is the most requested and the easiest for me to realize, so who knows ;).
I think adding some miscellaneous flora can help make the game less barren. Right now it looks a bit bland on the surface
He Mingebrigtsen, I get this feedback more often indeed! I agree, although I'm not sure yet how to fix it without roasting everyone's pc
why did you censor some limbs?
Because without blurring the upcoming videos would be less of a surprise :)
How do I get this game
store.steampowered.com/app/997380/The_Sapling/ :)
You should make it an option that means animals will or won't put eggs in nests
Edit: I know you can do it.
It is! The default is to not have nests.
@@TheSapling I wrote this comment earlier in the vidio and forgot to edit it
You added fur, why not add grass?
Hey Johnathan, because I'd prefer it as a separate lifeform (not a texture like fur)... but that would need to be superoptimized, otherwise everyone would play at 1 FPS ;). I believe it could be done somehow, though.
add hibernation
I think you should remove the smoothing, and run with the blocky aesthetic
Haha agreed that it looks interesting half of the time, but it also looks (even more) amateurish the other half ;)
cameL
true
Correct
mayhaps the goal is a primitive civilization a la spore?
I haven't decided yet myself, but I often read players debating whether primitive civs should be inside or outside the scope of the game... it's an interesting question :)
M
free game please!