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.



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.

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

Some fixes in this update for common issues that have become apparent as the demo has had a wider audience.

• Fix: stored and player-made creatures have their neurological DNA overwritten on birth
  
• Fix: stored and player-made creatures pass the wrong DNA on to their children, resulting in extreme maladaption over time
  
• Fix: when you spawn a stored creature, it immediately splits into multiple 'species' even though they all descend from the same originator
  
• Allow modified creatures to mutate physiologically after enough generations have passed
  
• Fix: bug that could result in player-made creatures being culled upon maturation
  
• Fix: some issues with removing plants
  
• Allow changing brush size when removing plants
  
• Fix: plankton don't reproduce correctly if it's the first thing placed
  
• Fix: eggs, seeds and plankton sometimes phase through cave walls and ceilings

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.


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.

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• 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

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

• 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

• 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

• 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

• Finished score
  
• Added several sound effects

• 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.


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.


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.


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!


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.



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

This time we will concentrate on the dynamic plant and coral systems that will adorn the ocean bed in the finished game. It’s important to note that plants and corals are far more than just decoration – they are the keystones of the entire Ecosystem that evolves around them.


A deep-sea creature swimming near the ocean bed


Over the past couple of months Tom has been working mainly on the plant / coral life of the game. Whilst they are not the main focus of the game and do not go through the evolutionary processes that creatures do, they are still the foundation of pretty much all the other life systems that the game simulates – and adding depth to their systems adds so much more to the emergent ways in which creatures behave and interact.


As things stand in the demo, creatures tend to learn to travel between food sources, nurseries and mating grounds, which are all fixed positions set by the player. We mentioned in the previous newsletter that a fluid simulation to represent the ocean currents will be a part of the finished game, and this will actively spread plant seeds and coral eggs to more distant locations.


A visual representation of the ocean currents

This means that plants and corals will, depending on their particular preferences for their immediate environment, die off in certain places and spring up again in distant ones as their seeds settle in suitable spots, carried there by the ocean currents.

https://giphy.com/gifs/kIFdFpCF5ofNNZLCKo
Above link: A diverse coral reef

This means that plant and coral eaters will need to learn to follow the food as it were, leaving behind barren or depleted areas and seeking out fresh growths whilst using nurseries and mating grounds along the way. Predators will then need to follow them in turn, so you can see how these more complex systems will lead to all the evolving life being more migratory and interacting in new and perhaps surprising ways.


Coral eggs drift to a location and begin to grow, just like in nature


A lot of research has been put into the various plants and corals that will appear in Ecosystem. Tom has scoured academic sources and even guides designed for aquarium owners to be as close to reality as possible! Each species has an accurate representation of its tolerances for nitrogen and phosphorus as well as sunlight and floor substrate. There’s also been work put into how these plants and corals interact with each other – for instance, in nature corals often try to attack their neighbours for space by sending out ‘sweeper’ tentacles! With the more recent changes things like kelp forests are now a possibility (kelp is a much larger plant than can exist in the current demo – in real-world nature kelp can get very long indeed!).

Coral reefs will now build upon the bony foundations left by previous generations, much like they do in real life. This should lead to some spectacular, natural-feeling landscaping happening without needing any additional player input.


Plenty of work has also gone into the interface – in the below example, the player is placing seagrass on the ocean bed. Game play information is given in the UI whilst this is being done – the nutrients that the plant will provide, as well as its preferred and tolerated substrates. There’s also some information relating to the real-world counterparts of the particular species that is being worked on – Ecosystem strives to be educational as well as everything else!

https://giphy.com/gifs/gJtFycKUwYhOCNxbQr
Above link: Adding seagrass to the map

As we’re sure you can see the game is taking significant strides towards its goals, and it is currently in a state of significant difference to the existing demo. That means that an update to the demo is likely on the cards at some point to more closely represent how the finished product will be – more news on this coming at a later date. For now, thank you so much for reading, and we’ll have more to share soon.