Ecosystem News

Hi all

Thanks again for the wonderful reception to Ecosystem so far! As a one man dev team Tom is hard at work filtering through all the feedback from everyone.

As a priority we are pushing out a small patch which includes the following features and changes.

Features

• UI is now adaptive and should be easier to read on 1440p and 4K monitors.
  

Changes

• Rename 'Refraction' to 'Water Effect' - this should allow players to more easily identify the setting that turns off the water effect.
  
• Defaulted water effect value to 0.5 instead of 1.0 for new players - hitting reset still defaults to 100, this will be changed in the next patch.
  
• Improve visibility of plant buttons.
  

Thank you everyone who has been waiting patiently for this - this hotfix brings the game to version 0.14, and it fixes the spawning issue that was appearing intermittently on launch. Formal patch notes are as follows:

• Fixed an issue where it sometimes became impossible to place new creatures despite having met the preconditions & having enough life points
  

We've tested this internally but please let us know if there are still issues. You can do so on our Steam forum, official forum or Discord.

Well, what can I say?

Thanks for all the excellent response Ecosystem has had for launch day! We think it went swimmingly if you'll pardon the pun; plenty of feedback to chew through and lots of fantastic suggestions and thoughtful points have already been posted by you lovely people.

Tom is aware of the forager placement issue that sometimes appears early in the game - that bug is number 1 priority and he hopes to get the first patch out to fix that specific problem very soon. After that, there's always a ways to go with early access with regards to optimisation and features, and these things will be constantly improved upon as the development continues.

Once the chaos of the game launch is over with and the initial feedback and issues have been worked through, we'll be publishing our first post-release newsletter which will include the first road map for the game going ahead. It's important to note that everything is subject to change during the early access period, and the game may evolve as much as its creatures do!

One of the points responding to initial feedback that needs to be reiterated, I feel, is that it's important to note that the simulation does not have any preordained animation in it, so creatures will usually only become very efficient swimmers, foragers and hunters after many generations. They start with entirely random brains and body sizes, go through an initial few generations of brain organisation to try to get some limbs moving, and then only after that does the evolution begin properly. They will naturally respond to pressures by process of natural selection, and an Ecosystem in which very little creature change occurs over a long time is probably stable one with few evolutionary pressures. Of course as development continues, new pressures will be introduced and existing ones will change.

It is likely that one of the major focuses of early updates will be better informational displays and allowing the player to put more constraints on the evolution of creatures, and it is possible that both of those may help if people feel like nothing is happening.

That's all for now - once again, thanks so much for your kind enthusiasm and with helping us get the word out about Ecosystem. Keep a weather eye out for that newsletter in a few weeks, and Tom expects to start getting updates out very shortly.

Thanks to Dreadwolff for the vivacious screenshot used in the artwork for this post!

We did it! Ecosystem is ready to be released and will be doing so Tuesday March 16th around 14:30 GMT.

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

To celebrate the release of Ecosystem the developer, Tom Johnson, will be live for an hour or so, taking a break from developing and spending some time playing and taking your questions!

After Tom has finished members of the Slug Disco team, the publishers of Ecosystem, will be diving into the waters and seeing what Ecosystems they can evolve!

Not quite sure what Ecosystem is all about?

Ecosystem is a god-game/simulation hybrid in which players design aspects of their underwater ecosystem - from the terrain composition and where the currents run to the placement of individual species of plant and fish within the world. Once the player has made these choices, the simulation takes over to help the plants and fish grow and evolve over time.

The underlying technology of Ecosystem means that it isn't just a video game version of the laws of ecology with pre-made fish models. The simulation actually determines the creatures in the game: their bodies, how they swim, and how they think and behave. All the creatures in the trailer evolved on their own in the game; none were hand-edited!

Other key features of Ecosystem are:

• Virtual creatures evolve on their own to adapt to an environment you create - At Ecosystem's heart are evolving virtual lifeforms, who grow from synthetic DNA and live in a physically-simulated ocean. This synthetic DNA encodes everything about a creature, from skeletal structure to skin, from joint-types to mental processes. The genetic code of a creature can mutate, combine, be spliced with other species, and be directly modified by the player.
  
• Movement is bound by the laws of physics - To swim, the creatures don’t just play an animation, they move like real sea-life, their limbs actually controlling their success in movement. The strongest swimmers pass their genes onto the next generation.
  
• Massive Replayability - The procedural nature of the game means that you will never have the same fish or environment twice, each new Ecosystem will be different from the last.
  

[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Ecosystem is a god-game/simulation hybrid in which players design aspects of their underwater ecosystem - from the terrain composition and where the currents run to the placement of individual species of plant and fish within the world. Once the player has made these choices, the simulation takes over to help the plants and fish grow and evolve over time.

The underlying technology of Ecosystem means that it isn't just a video game version of the laws of ecology with pre-made fish models. The simulation actually determines the creatures in the game: their bodies, how they swim, and how they think and behave. All the creatures in the trailer evolved on their own in the game; none were hand-edited!

Other key features of Ecosystem are:

• Virtual creatures evolve on their own to adapt to an environment you create - At Ecosystem's heart are evolving virtual lifeforms, who grow from synthetic DNA and live in a physically-simulated ocean. This synthetic DNA encodes everything about a creature, from skeletal structure to skin, from joint-types to mental processes. The genetic code of a creature can mutate, combine, be spliced with other species, and be directly modified by the player.
  
• Movement is bound by the laws of physics - To swim, the creatures don’t just play an animation, they move like real sea-life, their limbs actually controlling their success in movement. The strongest swimmers pass their genes onto the next generation.
  
• Massive Replayability - The procedural nature of the game means that you will never have the same fish or environment twice, each new Ecosystem will be different from the last.
  

If you would like to sign-up for beta access you can do so by filling in this form: https://forms.gle/LWqX7uT6F8ko1zTV6