evoquatic

How it works

In Evoquatic, everything is either a node or a vector. You can think of nodes as fleshy little spheres - they can have almost any function, from digesting food to poking other creatures. Vectors are like tendons, or muscles. Each one connects two nodes together, and if both nodes are of the same type, it mimics their properties. Creatures are just large collections of nodes and vectors. My hope is that with this in mind, creatures will eventually evolve to look almost like real fish - vectors have drag on them, so fin-like structures, made of armored tissue and muscles, would look surprisingly like real fins. Creatures would need some sort of system for finding and eating food - antennae for finding it, muscular structures for drawing it in and stomach membranes to digest it. With this system, creatures would eventually develop realistic organs - including sensory, locomotive, defensive and digestive systems.

The evolution part

In every simulation, several creatures spawn per minute. They are randomly generated, and will almost always be random blobs of flesh that convulse and twitch erratically. Each one starts as an egg, which grows until it hatches, revealing a tiny baby version of the creature. Over time, the creature then grows to full size.

Eventually, a creature will spawn that can eat and reproduce. My prediction is that these “proto-fish” will be simple drifters - nothing more than simple living sacks that drift around and hope for food to fall into their constantly open mouths. Using a special “ovary” node, the creatures then lay eggs that grow and hatch into more versions of themselves. But each child is slightly different than its parent - a series of mutations happen during the hatching process that give each creature’s offspring a small but noticeable difference. Maybe it’s an extra fin, or a spike, or something completely useless like a trailing tentacle. Either way, the creatures with useful mutations start to take over the gene pool, outnumbering their ancestors and competing with them for food. In this way, the creatures slowly improve and adapt to their situation, eventually evolving new traits to overcome any challenge.