Ecosystem News

Hello everyone! Hopefully you've all been enjoying the updated Ecosystem demo. Some bug fixes have been released for it, detailed below:

• Fix: error on underwater shader causes sky to occasionally become visible
  
• Fix: missing texture error that could occur on player-created or stored creatures
  
• Fix: creatures fire out arcs of electricity
  
• Fix: player can rotate camera upwards to the point of turning upside down
  
• Fix: skin type displays incorrectly in creature editor
  

Ecosystem is a simulation game focusing on the astonishing processes of evolution, the intertwining systems that work together to bring life to the oceans and the emergent properties that spring from them.

Some fish-like creatures swim along a vibrant ocean floor

Start by crafting your submarine environment - your artist's palette is loaded with rock, corals and plants. The intricacies of the world you create will have profound effects on the creatures that will inhabit it. The tiniest nook may become a safe haven for eggs that drift on the eddies of the ocean current, or a vibrant kelp forest may provide food for herbivores and hunting grounds for their predators.

Current simulations are based on Lattice Boltzmann methods

Creatures in your Ecosystem run a full evolution simulation modelled after real-world science. Their body shapes and behaviours are subject to the processes of natural selection. Creatures will have a chance to pass on their genes to the next generation if they pass the gauntlet of tests life throws at them. Over time, traits caused by mutations in their genetic code will be passed on if they aid the species and naturally die out if they don't. The end result is life forms uniquely adapted to the environment you create.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]
Predators chasing their prey. Dramatic!

Ecosystem is being developed solely by Tom Johnson, developer of Enemy (2015) and published by Slug Disco Studios. The older demo for the game has been out for some time now and Tom has been collating feedback and adding an abundance of features, many of which are present in the newer demo that has been released as part of the Steam Autumn Game Festival! Ecosystem is planned for release in 2021.

Welcome everyone on this fine Autumn day; a major update to the Ecosystem demo has just been released! This coincides with the Steam Autumn Game Festival kicking off later on but the update is live now, so let's talk about all the changes.

My overall goal with these changes is to make the game feel more like a living system so that every aspect of it is connected to all the others, giving the creatures a lot to work with when it comes to evolving adaptations to their environments. For example, in the previous demo, creating a nursery was artificial in the sense that any 'U' shape was as good as any other, but now a cove really does catch eggs and plant seeds and can be affected by how water is funneled through your landscape; each one is distinct and they are all connected to the overall system. Creatures are both more interesting and a lot faster, and now that plants spread and can be depleted in locations, foragers will need to migrate to follow them with predators following close behind. In this way, populations are more mobile and interact in varied ways, and a lot of work has gone into keeping a large amount of species diversity in the environment.



[h2]Creature Physiology[/h2]

• Creatures are now much more likely to evolve symmetric body shapes
  
• Creatures are able to swim dramatically more quickly
  
• Reworked soft-body simulation on creatures so they are a little less rigid
  

[h2]Vegetation[/h2]

• It is now possible to make large kelp forests, and now corals will build reefs themselves over several generations
  
• Each species of plant or coral has an accurate representation of its tolerances for nitrogen and phosphorus as well as sunlight, floor substrate, and crowding
  
• Healthy plants now release seeds that are carried elsewhere on the current - unhealthy ones die off. Foragers now need to follow the food, leaving behind barren or depleted areas and seeking out fresh growths. In general, this results in much more species intermixing
  

[h2]Species Diversity and Trophic Stability[/h2]

• It is now possible to maintain a variety of different species without them driving each other to extinction
  
• It is now possible to keep predator-prey populations steady, including up multiple trophic levels, ie apex predators who eat smaller predators who eat herbivores
  
• Population counts roughly fit the Lotka–Volterra equations used to model predation in nature
  

[h2]Gameplay[/h2]

• Players no longer build fixed nurseries: creatures can spawn anywhere
  
• Players no longer build fixed mating grounds: creatures decide how to mate themselves
  
• Substantially increased life points and nutrient points
  

[h2]Fluid Simulation[/h2]

• Used a Lattice Boltzmann method to simulate current flows around the terrain as the player shapes it. Currents transport plankton, eggs, nutrients, and seeds around the environment
  

[h2]Creature Vision[/h2]

• Creatures must now explore their environment to learn about it rather than having all information available to them immediately
  
• To detect a mate, prey, or predator, creatures must pass a vision check based on light level, motion and a comparison of the creature’s skin color to whatever is behind it, allowing creatures to evolve to lurk in dark caves or camouflage amongst plants, corals, etc
  

[h2]Creature Behaviour[/h2]

• Alternate mating strategies: pairing up into mutually-compatible couples, promiscuously seeking out the most attractive partner, or gathering en masse at a central mating grounds
  
• Creatures emote when they are happy, sad, or in love
  
• Creatures can lunge at a target in addition to swimming at a steady pace
  

[h2]Pathfinding[/h2]

• Creatures can now make their way through cave systems and around nooks and crannies
  

[h2]Creature Editor[/h2]

• Added a fully-functional editor that allows players to design a creature's body directly and let it loose in the environment; it will evolve a brain
  

[h2]Terrain Editor[/h2]

• Added a fully-functional editor that allows adjusting large scale parameters of the landscape to easily and quickly create beaches, reefs, lakes, cliffs, or various alien-looking oceans
  

[h2]UI[/h2]

• Reskinned menus
  
• Added menus for audio, graphics settings, and key bindings
  
• When the player selects a creature, they also get a small picture-in-picture view of what the creature is seeing
  
• Reworked tutorial to reflect changes to gameplay
  
• Reworked food source menu so that it's clear there are fifty plants and corals and not just twelve
  

[h2]Sound Design[/h2]

• Finished score
  
• Added several sound effects
  

[h2]Bug Fixes[/h2]

• Fix: selecting creatures with a mouse click would get thrown off due to the underwater refraction effect.
  
• Fix: creatures could block the camera from moving.
  
• Fix: blurriness in text that would appear over creatures.
  
• Many more
  

To celebrate our updated Ecosystem demo, we will be playing the latest version of our development build live on stream showing you all the latest features Tom has been working on over the past few months (many of them now accessible in the demo).

Let us know if you like what you see and if you have any suggestions for features you'd like added.

Help naming our fish is always appreciated too!

We hope you've been having a great summer in these strange times. It's time for the July & August newsletter for Ecosystem! Over the past couple of months, lots of attention has been put into solving problems involving creating stable ecosystems with apparent trophic food chains, and there have been some surprising emergent results from testing of these improved systems. Let's start by talking about the relationships between predators and their prey, and how difficult it is to achieve a balanced, sustainable system that can last long term.

[h2]Predators & Prey[/h2]

As things stand in the current demo, it is very difficult to produce a stable system of balanced predators and their prey. In Ecosystem's accelerated evolutionary environment, the best swimmers tend to very quickly outcompete all other similar lifeforms and quickly cause them to go extinct, leading to a lack of diversity and just one or two species that are dominant. After that, a predator-prey relationship is difficult to keep stable without one or both going extinct within a small number of generations.

Some predators chasing their prey

Lots of the recent work has concentrated on addressing this. With the improved balance, having a stable relationship between multiple trophic levels of predator and prey is now quite possible! Apex predators - dominant predators that themselves have no natural predators - can now very much be a thing. Rather satisfyingly, the population counts now fit an approximation of the Lotka-Volterra equations that are useful for modelling predator-prey relationships in the real world.

[h2]Vision Simulation[/h2]

A large recent change to the game is that creatures must now explore their environment to learn about it, rather than just having all of the information available to them from the get-go. There is now a vision simulation for each creature which only gives it limited information about the ocean world that it lives in. Now, if a creature is to detect another (be that a mate, prey, or a predator) there is a check in place that must first be passed - it takes into account things such as light level, motion and a comparison of the creature's skin to the background behind it. The background could be plants, corals, terrain or open water.

A herd of creatures lurking amongst corals in the deep ocean

The pigment of creature skin is already part of the evolution simulation, but you can see how this major change adds real selection pressure for creatures to be camouflaged. It opens the path for creatures to take advantage of caves, lurk amongst plants, and disguise themselves in any number of other ways to keep them hidden.

[h2]Unforeseen Consequences[/h2]

Creature eggs, up until recent changes have been made to the unreleased build, would instantly spawn new creatures in the player-defined nurseries on the ocean bed. With the addition of ocean currents (see the previous newsletter for details on how this fluid simulation works) eggs are now carried off to distant locations and settle wherever they drift to. Nurseries are now more 'natural' in that they emerge from the other game systems working together. However, this caused an unexpected problem: there were now mass die-offs just a few generations in. This was a mystery indeed - what was the cause?

The flow of the ocean visualised

When a new species is spawned, the first few generations do not need to feed as per the simulation's rules, the idea being that they subsist on microscopic organisms in the water. What this means practically is that there's no selection pressure to reach food, they just have to be able to swim. The older nursery system made sure that creatures spawning in them were near the ground, and so had an advantage if they could navigate the terrain well.

A plankton bloom - food for a foraging filter-feeder!

However, in the newer system, the first few generations were adapting to the wider spaces of the open ocean, and when the time came for later generations to swim towards the ocean bed to forage, they were getting stuck on terrain they were not adapted to traverse. Making fertilised eggs sink slightly faster was the solution to this, so that the early generations had a chance to interact with floor structures. It wasn't a bug, but an unforeseen consequence of the evolution simulation working in unexpected ways. It's a rather mind-blowing example of how a seemingly tiny thing can have such wide-ranging implications in an evolutionary system!

[h2]Creature-Eye View & Seeing the Seeds[/h2]

A fun recent addition has been the inclusion of a 'creature-eye view', whereby you can select a creature and see a camera representing what they're looking at. It's not a headline feature but it is rather mesmerising to be able to see precisely what your creatures are focusing on! Another recent change is that plants and corals spread across the terrain more gradually, and there is now a visualisation of seeds being released to give the player a better idea of what is going on.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

That concludes our round-up of recent work on the project. The game is now starting to feel like a true Ecosystem, with complex relationships between many systems producing emergent qualities that are greater than the sum of their parts - many of which are unpredictable (in a good way) even from a game design point of view. Hopefully you've enjoyed this insight; keep an eye on the Ecosystem social media for weekly screenshots, videos and more regular news on the project!

http://www.twitter.com/EcosystemGame
http://www.facebook.com/EcosystemGame