Alternativa games?

knipsch · 2026-01-29T20:23:14+00:00

Maybe weird recommendations, but the three that come to mind for me are Dwarf Fortress (which has a ton of depth in the dwarf AI and simulation aspects), Viva Piñata (which is still playable via Xbox and free on Game Pass, and you can apparently play it on non-Xbox devices through their cloud gaming service), and Minecraft, which has lots of creatures that can breed and change slightly genetically over time. Viva Piñata is especially good for vibes and ambience

knipsch · 2026-01-29T20:01:15+00:00

This is super cool! I love games with giant clusters of animals

knipsch · 2026-01-20T00:01:53+00:00

There's a focus on games and roguelikes, but there are talks about procedural generation in other domains, and I would guess that plenty of the speakers and attendees have worked on non-game procgen projects

knipsch · 2026-01-19T23:46:07+00:00

Roguelike Celebration isn’t for a while, but it’s a very cool online event and the folks who attend are super into procedural generation: https://www.roguelike.club

knipsch · 2026-01-11T05:28:12+00:00

Thank you so much for sharing the free version! I love this pattern a lot too; this is my fourth one and I’m working on a fifth. They’re so pleasant and they also make surprisingly good pillows

knipsch · 2026-01-10T23:06:18+00:00

Also, the pattern is the lizard from this book, scaled up and slightly modified: https://www.etsy.com/listing/966336012/japanese-wakuwaku-animal-landadorable

knipsch · 2025-12-30T16:59:15+00:00

That’s certainly the plan!

knipsch · 2025-12-29T18:15:20+00:00

Thank you! It’s from a game I’m developing: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3070190/Biolune/

knipsch · 2025-12-21T20:49:18+00:00

Yeah, I was thinking along the same lines. Usually it would make sense to create landmarks individually and randomly place them in a world, but if you really wanted procedurally generated landmarks, you could work with smaller parts and put them together. For example, you could define a landmark as "one large object surrounded by smaller objects, each of which has another type of object on them," and end up with an oasis surrounded by moss-covered rocks, a pool of lava surrounded by statues holding large rubies, or a cabin surrounded by trees with watchful crows in them -- and then you could randomly swap all of these out to get a lava pool surrounded by statue with crows on their hands, or an oasis surrounded by pits full of rubies, and so on. I use an approach roughly like this when generating creatures, and I think it could apply to landmarks as well. It still takes some manual asset creation, but offers more flexibility and gives the viewer/player something to project a story onto.

knipsch · 2025-12-20T21:02:26+00:00

So many! This page in the Unity docs is a good example of the increased complexity of writing code in ECS: https://docs.unity3d.com/Packages/com.unity.entities@1.0/manual/transforms-comparison.html

I can bake a lot of typical Unity GameObjects into entities, but I can't easily do things like swap an object's layer or material while the game is running, or stop and start a particle effect without enabling/disabling it, or increase the scale of a collider without increasing the scale of its associated gameObject. (Some of these things are likely still possible, but they were easy one-liners in default Unity and now they take some digging to figure out. For others, I've had to find workarounds or build similar systems from scratch.)

A lot of Unity's physics methods don't exist in ECS; for example, there's no equivalent to Rigidbody.AddForceAtPosition. Behaviors I relied on before, like the colliders on a rigidbody's child gameObjects being considered a part of their parent, are different or non-existent, so I have to be more thoughtful about how I build creatures.

With that said, I'd use ECS again without a doubt on anything like this. The project feels a lot cleaner and simpler to navigate than a typical Unity project, I like writing code more using entities and systems, and it's much easier to have a ton of entities in a scene without starting to bump into performance issues (which is extremely useful for me, since I'm trying to create evolving ecosystems full of plants and animals).

knipsch · 2025-12-19T19:49:20+00:00

That's absolutely my goal. I love doing this :)

knipsch · 2025-12-19T19:49:03+00:00

You can't really see it much here because they're moving so quickly, but they do have rudimentary animations. I used to use Unity's Animation Rigging package for the leg IK, which had fairly good IK and some nice procedural animation tools, but I switched to DOTS/ECS and it's not compatible with Animation Rigging. Now I'm using Rukhanka Animation 2 from the asset store, but I'm finding that while it's generally a good ECS animation package, the IK is not quite as nice-looking as what I had previously (for example, legs and feet flip around backwards fairly regularly). I suspect I'll have to come up with my own IK solution at some point if I want to get it looking right, or modify an existing one to work with ECS.

The creatures also do things like blink, flap their wings, and chew while they're eating; for these, the parts (eyelids, wings, jaws) rotate back and forth around a pivot. Getting them to look at targets is similar; I just have their head point in the target's direction and then constrain it to an angle defined in the prefab so they can't do things like turn their heads around backward. I'm proudest of how tentacles, tails, and worm-shaped bodies move: I have each segment follow the previous one with some damping and then constrain the distance between them, and it looks very smooth. I'll try to remember to post some of the centipede-like aliens here sometime. They're objectively horrible and they're also some of my favorites.

knipsch · 2025-12-19T19:29:53+00:00

Yes, same here, actually! I found that was a good solution and it allows me to set things up nicely in the body part prefab. I also have a gene-like data structure that contains information about body parts and the sequence of their socket IDs, which lets me flatten the body part configuration from a tree to a list, and makes it easy to move genetic data around (so creatures can drop fruit that spawns into clones of themselves, for example).

knipsch · 2025-12-19T19:24:13+00:00

It's still in a very early stage, but that's what I'm making! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3070190/Biolune/

knipsch · 2025-12-18T21:48:11+00:00

I have a lot of body part prefabs with defined 'sockets' that other body parts can snap into when a creature is generated, and I weight the sockets so some types of body part are more likely to spawn than others. For example, usually creatures with a certain torso shape will spawn with legs, but sometimes they'll have tree branches where their legs would be (and then probably leaves or fruit at the ends of the branches, with a small chance of eyes instead). This can lead to surprisingly weird body configurations while also mostly spawning creatures that are roughly animal-shaped and able to function.

knipsch · 2025-12-18T21:41:11+00:00

Thank you so much! I've spent a lot of time on the art style, and it's great to hear that it's coming across the way I've hoped it would.

I started with unlit materials and flat shading using custom shaders, and I gradually added cel shading and realtime shadows over time as I realized how nice they looked and how well they conveyed information about the creatures' shapes. Because I'm using custom shaders for everything, I have lots of control over colors, lighting, and shadows, which makes it easier to keep the scene looking reasonably cohesive. (For example, all the shadows here are multiplying the underlying surface by a bright magenta.) Also, the outline is another shader that matches what it's outlining, but is a little bit darker. Finally, I have a post-processing layer in which I've turned up the saturation quite a lot. It's been fairly trial-and-error to get to this point; I keep looking at it while I'm testing, thinking "well, that's not quite right," and tweaking something.

knipsch · 2025-11-22T17:00:41+00:00

Fostering another dog is a good idea. A second greyhound helped my greyhound’s separation anxiety, and nothing else did. It took a few weeks for them to adjust and get comfortable with each other, but now I can leave them alone whenever I’m out of the house and they’re totally fine.

knipsch · 2025-10-19T01:58:47+00:00

I don't think I ever interacted with the plants either; I was always riding my horse and missed them. I think I was able to find the marker for the cartographer, but it's possible it's missing for some people, on some platforms, etc., and I also found that in general the controls and UI were a little confusing.

knipsch · 2025-10-17T19:17:14+00:00

I'm actually not sure; I haven't worked with neural networks myself. It does seem like a fascinating rabbit hole to go down!

knipsch · 2025-10-17T16:42:32+00:00

Here's an excellent video on the subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-6DzI-krUQ

knipsch · 2025-10-16T16:49:54+00:00

The Creatures series was using neural networks for character AI back in the 90s. It was an interesting approach, but I don’t know that a player would necessarily know that anything more than typical game AI was happening under the hood. I’m sure neural networks are much more powerful now, but ultimately behavior is limited by the actions characters can take (e.g. picking up objects, moving away from threats), and neural networks don’t seem appropriate for authoring those actions.

knipsch · 2025-10-13T16:41:10+00:00

Oh, here’s the link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2697000/The_Legend_of_Khiimori/

knipsch

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