Make Life

The lectures gave us a short and simple 'make life'. Open to interpretation this allowed me to take any style or direction.

As more of a designer at the time I naturally wanted to pair up with a strong programmer so we could play to each-others strengths, fate bought me Andy of evolvingthought together, he's a flash at Actionscript, perfect to get this projects going.

Conception

During the first week, we began discussing what would be a most suitable organism for this project. Naturally we looked at previous examples including the game Lemmings. In lemmings, the actual creatures only know how to go forward, turn around and fall, its the surroundings and the user that make up everything else. We loved the idea of giving an organism these basic trates, and having many of them bouncing around.

However the brief wasn't to make a game but to make life, we decided to make a 2D Lemmings (pic above) style ecosystem that users could throw tiny organisms in and watch them grow and interact with each other.

Myself and Andy made a list of all the characteristics organisms have and then cut it down to 5 basic principles that we need for out ecosystem to work.

• Movement
• Reproduction
• Sensitivity - Creatures would choose to turn left or right and to chase prey.
• Growth - Creatures would grow over time or dependent on how much they ate.
• Nutrition - A food chain.

Food Chain

This very basic food chain was constructed to illustrate which organism got there nutrition from where.

The style

Locoroco and the defined edges with bright colors were the flavor of the month in gaming styles so the ecosystem was fashioned after this (but darker):

The Result

The result was Ecometrics, named by merging the words Ecosystem and Geometric (after the basic shaped creatures).

Our lecturers were impressed with the final product and awarded us a 68 (a first is 70).