Ecosystem News

From the 81 game titles participating in the Selected Indie 80, TGS2023 nominated and announced the eight finalists who will compete at SOWN2023, a pitch event for indie game developers.

The finalist presentations will take place at the TGS studio of Makuhari Messe on Sep. 22 (Fri.), Day 2 of TGS2023. The event will also be live-streamed as a TGS official program. The winners of the seven awards, including the Audience Award Grand Prix, will be announced following the final judge.

You can see all eight finalists at this link.

The whole thing will be livestreamed from 16:00 JST on Friday 22nd September:

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Hello!

After an extended open beta we're now ready to release the Combat Update onto the main branch of the game!

You can see the new update in action in the trailer above!

This update adds a whole new combat layer to the simulation which should change how the game plays in some interesting ways.

Previously the main strategy for success in a creature was speed, if it could swim fast, then it was likely to succeed and flourish in the ecosystem. But now all creatures will develop a range of combat statistics, and will need to adapt to survive attacks from predators and apex predators.

Some of these are under the hood stats, such as bite strength and poison resistance, but others are visual too such as a puffing up in a threatening behaviour, using electrical attacks to stun enemies, or growing poisonous spikes on their body.

Patch Notes:
FEATURES

Combat Simulation: Combat is heavily physics-based and includes new traits (and new uses of existing ones) that can be factors in a species' evolutionary future.

• Biting does piercing damage, based on bite force quotient, size, and total creature momentum.
  
• Striking with limbs does slashing or blunt damage based on the momentum of the strike.
  
• If an attack throws a target's joint out of position, this can cause the limb to become nonfunctional, dizzy the creature, impair its vision, cause bleeding, and several other types of statuses.
  
• Creatures can also evolve different types of venoms, which impart different negative effects, as well as resistances to these effects.
  
• Creatures can evolve thicker skin in places and thicker skulls, as well as spikes and carapaces, which defend against certain types of attacks.
  
• All new combat stats are subject to mutation and mating, and can be changed in the editor.
  
• Multiple creatures can all participate in the same fight, allowing for predators to engage in group tactics.
  
• Combat can be induced between any two creatures in the game by selecting a creature, clicking the 'Force Combat' button in the Interaction menu, and then clicking a target.
  

Thank you everyone for your continued help testing the combat update! We have one last patch (hopefully!) before we look at launching this onto the main branch.

Changelog:

• Add visualizations for the following traits: thick skin/protective fat, carapaces, and spikes.
  
• Health bars, damage/status text, and particle effects now fade correctly with distance.
  
• Show current status effects on the creature selection display.
  
• Fix: the body part menus in the combat stats display reorder as creatures move the body parts they are pointing at, making it difficult to read.
  
• Fix: offscreen status effects (text and particles) can appear in incorrect places and move erratically.
  
• Fix: damage and statuses can sometimes pop up at the same location and overlap.
  
• Fix: when a currently selected creature is stunned in combat, it can prompt the revive button to appear.
  
• Fix: when a creature is stunned in combat, and it was being viewed with the neurology or follow camera, those camera views end.
  

Hello!

We're excited to announce that the next major update to Ecosystem, the "Combat Update", is now in Open Beta for all owners of the game (and if you don't own the game yet you can save 20% during SimFest which is on right now!)



This is one of the largest updates we've released for the game so far, with the new systems interacting with all the other systems that already existed in the game.

Because of this, instead of a small closed beta we wanted to open it up to all owners of the game to gather as much as feedback as possible (which you can feel free to leave in the community tab here on Steam!).

*BACK UP YOUR SAVES* - Before taking part in the beta, if you have some ecosystems you love and want to test out the combat, please back them up. You can find the save files in your "My Documents/Ecosystem" folder.

*ACCESSING THE BETA* - Right-click the game in your library, choose "Properties", choose "Betas", and select CombatOpenBeta from the list.

*WHAT'S CHANGED?* - Please find the patch notes below!

FEATURES

Combat Simulation: Combat is heavily physics-based and includes new traits (and new uses of existing ones) that can be factors in a species' evolutionary future.

• Biting does piercing damage, based on bite force quotient, size, and total creature momentum.
  
• Striking with limbs does slashing or blunt damage based on the momentum of the strike.
  
• If an attack throws a target's joint out of position, this can cause the limb to become nonfunctional, dizzy the creature, impair its vision, cause bleeding, and several other types of statuses.
  
• Creatures can also evolve different types of venoms, which impart different negative effects, as well as resistances to these effects.
  
• Creatures can evolve thicker skin in places and thicker skulls, as well as spikes and carapaces, which defend against certain types of attacks.
  
• All new combat stats are subject to mutation and mating, and can be changed in the editor.
  
• Multiple creatures can all participate in the same fight, allowing for predators to engage in group tactics.
  
• Combat can be induced between any two creatures in the game by selecting a creature, clicking the 'Force Combat' button in the Interaction menu, and then clicking a target.
  

FIXES

• Fix: When a creature causes instability in the physics system, it can now be put back into its last valid state instead of simply dying.
  
• Fix: When a creature causes instability in the physics system, no longer show elongated glitched limbs.
  
• Fix: Creatures sometimes still appear in the stored list briefly after you delete them.
  
• Fix: Creature steering ability to steer frequently has trouble with height differences.
  
• Fix: The species preview sometimes doesn't update when loading a saved species.
  
• Fix: An error can occur if the player loads a stored creature and then adjusts the evolutionary parameters to conditions that the loaded creature doesn't satisfy.
  

Hello Everyone,

Welcome to the May development update. I'm currently midway through work on the next major update, which is the update I've been most excited about out of all of them so far, and also the one which I think will have the most substantial impact on gameplay. Currently, creatures spend a lot of time racing to their food supply or mates, or away from things that want to eat them, so there is heavy evolutionary pressure on speed. That complements the game's focus on locomotion and how the mechanics of swimming drives the form of lifeforms in the ocean, but coming soon is a combat simulation, creating a new dimension on which creatures can evolve, and new potential niches in the environment.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

The combat is tightly integrated with the rest of the game's design principles, being heavily physics-based and including many new properties (and new uses of existing ones) that can be factors in a species' evolutionary future. Like real fish, every creature has a bite force potential that correlates with its overall mass, but also a bite force quotient that can allow it to 'punch above its weight' (traits like this that have no downsides are balanced by requiring more energy and thus greater food consumption to maintain). In addition to biting, creatures can do slashing or bludgeoning damage by striking others with their appendages, with damage based on the momentum of the strike. Further, if an attack throws a target's joint out of position, the simulation detects this and treats its specially: such attacks can cause the limb to become nonfunctional, dizzy the creature, impair its vision, cause bleeding, and several other types of statuses.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Additionally, creatures can evolve thicker skin in places and thicker skulls, even spikes and carapaces, which defend against certain types of attacks. In fact, targeting weak points is a central part of the combat simulation. This also helps keep the fights interesting to watch, so that instead of ramming into each other head-on repeatedly, creatures circle around each other like planes in a dogfight, aiming for exposed necks and underbellies. There's a lot more to talk about with combat but I don't want to get too far ahead of what I've actually implemented. Hopefully this will nonetheless give a helpful idea of what's coming next. Thanks for reading!

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Tom Johnson