Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox

This is a game for people who like observation over interaction. The game starts off by giving you the option to place randomly generated plants, plant eating animals, and animal eating animals. Each creature has a bunch of genes they are made of. At first those genes are hidden, but as you place research stations near activity, you reveal the hidden stats and are allowed to modify them for future plants and creatures. After you unlock new genes, you can start placing your own plants and creatures. From there you get to observe how they interact with each other. You can make plants invasive, so that they spread fast and take over, or you can make plants that spread slow but are giants, or giants that spread fast! It's really up to you and what you want to see or experiment with. So far I have really enjoyed watching the enviornment grow and change over time. The graphics may be simple, but the game is definitely enjoyable to watch. Personally I have it running on a second monitor to...

I've only spent a few hours on this game so far, but it has me quite intrigued. As of late June, 2017, it is a fairly new game, and the developer has decided to allow the players to do most of the figuring out of how the game's genetics (and other factors) work. This is very much a "Sit down and sink your teeth into the mechanics" kind of game, and it is very, very much focused on genetics, evolution, adaptation, and extinction. You can create plants, herbivores, or carnivores. You 'earn the right' to control some of their genetics over time, but you can create random individuals without controlled features whenever you like. Once something starts to survive, especially if it is a plant, well there you go - good luck getting rid of all life in your place again. I really like the study of genetics. I don't want all the factors explained to me, and I want great depth and complexity. This game offers me this. For example, plant color. Sure, the graphics are simple and representa...

Great concept! Unfortunately this game is far from production ready. Looks more like a school project in progress. Lacks basic UI fundamentals and uses what looks like placeholder modules. I think the developer is on to something but this could use a lot more work.

Good idea, not greatly worked out. First of all, it is a very SIMPLE game mechanic, that will show you basically everything off the first 30 minutes of the game. And that's "ok" for the kind of game it is indeed, but when you start to stack up things in bigger numbers there come the issues. On the technical aspect, it is bad designed and does not take advantage of multithreading and other resources. I'm running on a R7 1700 @3,9Ghz and RX580 8GB, my average FPS after plating a thousand plants and some hundreds of creatures were between 5-20 on average, with rare 30+ peaks. Therefore, in the current state of the build I do not suggest it. It looks more like an early access rather than a finished work.

While I like the idea of this game I’m quite unsatisfied with the presentation. The game gives you not enough information about the results of your experiments. - There are no explanations about the genetic traits you get to modify. - There is no statistic which shows you how any of your creatures fare. There is only a total. - There is no automatic history of your creations so you can not go back and try the same build in another area. Though you can save the current settings to file. I haven't tried loading it though. - There is no clicking on a species in the game window to get ANY information about it. So you can only change the values and stare on your testing grounds in hope to distinguish the different species and see how well they do. With more information this game could be fun, even with this reduced presentation.

Conceptually, this game is interesting; create a balanced ecosystem to terraform worlds, via genetic tinkering. By examining what survival strategies work, and which ones don't, you can create more adapted, survivable organisms more likely to flourish. Unfortunately, the game makes achieving it's own goals difficult ENTIRELY through being opaque about data. Genetic traits are not explained. Some are obvious, some are not. Changing traits and observing differing outcomes between species is difficult, because you can't view an organism's traits after it's created and you can and often will lose them amongst other organisms, making gathering data impossible. Further, you can't track individual populations, so two near-identical looking populations coming into existence instantly means you are unable to observe the success of either group; they could both be flourishing, or one might have gone extinct immediately. The end result is that simply spawning vast numbers of random organisms, ...

This is one of those rare little indy gems that I'm really glad I grabbed. It's an ecological balancing act, and a fairly classic one if you've done your reading. At its most basic, you've got plants, animals that eat plants, and animals that eat animals. The trick is to have enough plants to support a population of herbivores, and enough herbivores to support a population of carnivores. Everything evolves. You can also impact that evolution directly. If your balance is off, then you might have a situation where the herbivores are breeding too fast and eat all the plants, and then die out, leaving the carnivores with nothing.... and the next thing you know you're flying over a barren planet. Or you might be fine, but suddenly your carnivores start breeding too fast, and wipe out your herbivores... then they starve themselves, and you're flying over a planet full of shrubbery and nothing else. Graphically simple, but quite pleasantly charming. Audio is almost non-existant apart f...

This game has a nice idea at it's core. Unfortunately, it is flawed in many key ways that basically make it unenjoyable. First lets talk about bugs:[list] [*] [strike]The collision box for the sky box does not work. Moving up to the top of the map causes you to vibrate against it. On at least one map (I haven't test them all) it is possible to move off the map entirely and see down the side. Not even an invisible wall.[/strike] Fixed by Dev. [*] The UI toggle button doesn't fire once per press. Hold it down and it will flicker, once per frame. To actually toggle the UI you have to either tap the key as lightly as you can, or get lucky that the frame you lift off is a frame where the UI is in the state you want it in. [/list] Now, annoyances (minor):[list] [*] Drop down menus won't close when the player doesn't want to interact with them. To close a drop down menu you have to open one of the other menus that isn't a drop down and then close it again. [*] Annoying controls. On the res...

Intelligent design is an interesting simulation and definitely a fine pickup when on sale. Growing a thriving ecosystem has never been so interesting nor intimate before. Taking place far, far away on a desert planet you pilot your remote drone in a small designated area growing plant life with the intent of creating a pocket thriving ecosystem. This of course takes time and effort to balance out. Have you what it takes? That all depends on whether or not you enjoy simulation games coupled with wanting to simply watch the world unfold before your eyes. Drawbacks include a simple genetics scheme and lack of explanation to what the genetics options actually do. It's definitely a game where you just sit back and watch with minimal input to reach a working balance. Experiment. Sit back. Relax. Intelligent design is your personal creation put to work.

Science! This is a game for people who enjoy patiently solving puzzles. Completing all the game objectives is not the end game, it's where the game starts. Once you know how everything works, you spend time trying to develop genetic recipes for plants, herbivores, and carnivores. You can conduct experiments inside the contained forcefields. You tweak the balance until it stays stable. You observe how random mutations either help or hurt the design. I spent an entire day developing my "stepping stone" plant recipe. Over the next few hours the plants mutated into taller "fat candles" that were better able to stand up to the stresses of wild fires and getting munched on by herbivores. This weekend I've assigned it as a science project for my homeschooled kid. I haven't figured out how to get the herbivores and carnivores into a stable balance yet. I have lots of experiements left to run! The down sides are in the simple graphics and unpolished UI. Framerates do drop when population...