April was a big month for Ecosystem, so we thought we'd share a monthly round-up of everything we got up to in case you missed anything.
The Big Behaviour Update
After an extended open beta, the Behaviour Update launched for all players last month, and was jam-packed with new features for your ecosystem. From building nests, swimming in schools, and even singing, this update introduced a range of new behavioural features for your creatures to fulfill their individual needs. Plus, we added bioluminescence! If you haven't updated your game yet, you know what to do... Read the full patch notes here.
Earth Appreciation Festival and WASD London
Ecosystem also took part in two events in April: Earth Appreciation Festival 2024, where we donated a portion of our profits to Ocean Conservation Trust, and WASD in London, where the latest version of the game was available to play.
That's everything we have for you this month, but as always, be sure to join our Discord to chat all things Ecosystem, and follow us on Twitter or Facebook for the latest news!
Ecosystem is taking part in Earth Appreciation Festival 2024!
Today marks World Earth Day, an occassion where we mark the importance of our planet and the factors that are impacting it. But with human-made issues such as climate change, pollution, overpopulation, lack of sustainability, and conflicts, it's a stark reminder not to take our planet for granted.
That's why we're taking part in Earth Appreciation Fest 2024, which contains both post-apocalyptic games that remind us of what we stand to lose, and nature-based games to help celebrate the incredible bio-diversity of the planet we call home.
You can check out the full range of games taking part in Earth Appreciation Festival here.
Psst! Don't forget Ecosystem is also exhibiting at WASD 2024, where you'll be able to try out the latest build of the game from 25th - 27th April!
The Behavior Update - Out Now!
Hello everyone!
After an extended open beta we're pleased to announce that the Behavior Update is out now for everyone!
There are a lot of changes and fixes in the update, full patch notes below, but lets take a look at the new changes in the latest trailer.
PATCH NOTES
FEATURES Increased creature autonomy: after learning first to swim and then to seek out targets, creatures enter a life stage in which they are more autonomous in their decision-making, attempting to fulfill their individual needs.
The following new behaviors are now available to creatures:
Finding shelter and resting
Building nests
Feeding on insects on the water surface
Gathering food to bring to their offspring
Playing and socializing, chasing each other or knocking stones around
Swimming in schools
Bioluminescence
Song
Pitch and volume envelopes for each note in a song are specified in the genetic code, so songs will evolve as the species does.
Reworked creature fertility and energy so that the odds of survival and number of offspring is less influenced by random factors.
Creatures now remember the locations of food seen while exploring.
FIXES
Update translations for the new text added in the update.
Improved line-of-sight checks before creatures resort to pathfinding to prevent cases where creatures swim far up because their target is behind a small bump.
Fixed some errors with line of sight checks that could result in creatures not seeing food/mates that actually should have been visible.
Fixed error where color comparisons could be incorrect when checking how well a creature blends in with its environment.
Fixed error where bilateria spawn preset had incorrect 4x lifecycle count by default.
Fix: On rare occasions, creature models can freeze and end up floating permanently in the water.
Fix: On rare occasions, plant models can freeze and be unremovable by the player.
Fix: messages about species maturation and nonviability remain on the screen while the game closes down after exiting
Fix minor errors that could occur when the plankton cursor was outside of the game region and when displaying traits for certain creatures, which could impact performance.
Fix error that could cause some saves to fail to load.
Fix: boosting a creature creates offspring that are not initialized properly.
Fix error causing degraded performace and incorrect behavior when creatures who are playing with a rock knock it out of the ecosystem boundary.
Fix: creatures forget what they were doing upon loading a savegame.
Fix: all gifts turn into mushrooms upon loading a savegame.
Fix: when mushrooms are picked up to use as a gift, they are not held in the mouth but seem to float outside of the head.
Fix error where the games by friends panel would not disappear when it was supposed to.
Fix error that can occur when a creature is recovering from a staggered state and actively targeted by another predator.
Fix minor errors with bioluminescence and the creature editor.
The Behaviour Update - Open Beta Out Now!
Hey everyone!
We're happy to announce that the beta for the Behaviour Update is now live on the OpenBeta branch on Steam. As always, if you'd like to participate, be sure to back up your saves!
BACK UP YOUR SAVES - Before taking part in the beta, if you have some ecosystems you love and want to test out the combat, please back them up. You can find the save files in your "My Documents/Ecosystem" folder.
ACCESSING THE BETA - Right-click the game in your library, choose "Properties", choose "Betas", and select openbeta from the list.
WHAT'S CHANGED - Check out the patch notes below:
PATCH NOTES
FEATURES Increased creature autonomy: after learning first to swim and then to seek out targets, creatures enter a life stage in which they are more autonomous in their decision-making, attempting to fulfill their individual needs.
The following new behaviors are now available to creatures:
Finding shelter and resting
Building nests
Feeding on insects on the water surface
Gathering food to bring to their offspring
Playing and socializing, chasing each other or knocking stones around
Swimming in schools
Bioluminescence
Song
Pitch and volume envelopes for each note in a song are specified in the genetic code, so songs will evolve as the species does.
Reworked creature fertility and energy so that the odds of survival and number of offspring is less influenced by random factors.
Creatures now remember the locations of food seen while exploring.
FIXES
Improved line-of-sight checks before creatures resort to pathfinding to prevent cases where creatures swim far up because their target is behind a small bump.
Fixed some errors with line of sight checks that could result in creatures not seeing food/mates that actually should have been visible.
Fixed error where color comparisons could be incorrect when checking how well a creature blends in with its environment.
Fixed error where bilateria spawn preset had incorrect 4x lifecycle count by default.
The Behaviour Update - Coming Soon!
Hello Everyone,
Welcome to the March development update! My work on the next major update, the Behavior Update, is coming to a close and should be ready for a March release date. With the new batch of features, I hope to give creatures more autonomy, more to do with their lives, and more ways to differentiate themselves from other species.
Creatures now need to find shelter and rest, can build nests to lay eggs in, can feed on insects on the water surface, can gather food to bring to their offspring, and can play and socialize.
They can also adapt to swim in schools or communicate with bioluminescence:
Bioluminescence
Schooling
They can also evolve vocalizations, the development of which involved making a simplified 'fish synthesizer' and specifying pitch and volume envelopes in each creature's genetic code, subject to mutation along with everything else:
Vocalisation 1 - Best heard between 10-50s
Vocalisation 2
I'm hoping that all of this will add further depth and variety to the gameplay and make your species and ecosystems feel even more unique. Thank you for reading!
Tom Johnson
IndieCade & What's Next For Ecosystem
Hello! Dan here, community manager for Ecosystem, with a couple of updates to share about Ecosystem. We'll hear from Tom further down about what he's been working on and what he will work on next, but first we have some big news!
As well as being eligible for the following general awards:
Grand Jury Award
Jury Prix Award
Innovation in Interaction Design Award
Innovation in Experience Design Award
Developers Choice Award
We've also been nominated specifically in the "Mike Sellers Systemic Design Spotlight Award".
The full list of nominees for the award as follows (some amazing company here!)
Against the Storm
Ecosystem
Price of Flight
The Signal State
Unknown Number: A First Person Talker
Viewfinder
You can watch the awards right here on Steam on Saturday November 4 from 10am PDT.
Tom will also be taking part in a Show and Tell session, again hosted here on Steam, tonight (Friday 3 November) between 10am and 12pm PDT!
To celebrate our inclusion in IndieCade we are currently on sale for 20% off!
With all that said let's hear from developer Tom as to what he's been up to recently - take it away!
Next Steps for Ecosystem
Hello Everyone,
Welcome to the November development update!
I just finished work on a minor update aimed at improving performance, mostly via reworking the level-of-detail meshes for Coral and some Misc food sources, as well as changing the minimap to be more efficient when there are large numbers of plants in an environment. Many thanks to volunteer community / mod-development liaison Stobz for noticing this latter issue and isolating its cause. Whether or not you see an improvement will depend on what kind of environment you have created and whether, in your specific scenario, your computer is bottlenecked by rendering foliage rather than processing creature physics. However, in stress-tests featuring very dense coral reefs, performance improved by 6ms per frame (the difference between 45 frames-per-second and 60) and in those with dense plankton growth, it improved even more, by 8ms, so hopefully this will make for a notable improvement for some.
With that complete, I'm now moving on to the next major update, which I think of as the Behavior Update. The goal with this next batch of features is to give the creatures a little more to do with their lives and more ways to differentiate themselves from other species. Since Ecosystem doesn't fit into a standard game genre, new features require experimentation and may not always work, so I can't promise any specific behaviors just yet, but I am looking at things like swimming in a school, communicating via biolumenescence, or building nests to lay eggs in. Ideally, many of these behaviors will not be a simple on/off switch, a single trait that a species simply has or doesn't, but instead will include room for variation, such as the specific colorations and patterns a species uses in biolumenescence, as well as what they are most inclined to actually communicate about. I hope to have a few more details soon as the update progresses.
Thank you for reading!
Tom Johnson
Open Beta - Performance Improvements
Hey folks!
We've just released a small Open Beta which brings some performance improvements to the game. As always. please be sure to back up your saves before swapping to the beta!
Patch Notes
Performance improvements due to reworking all Coral and some Misc food source level-of-detail meshes.
Performance improvements due to reworking the minimap to be more efficient when there are large numbers of plants in an environment.
Fix: Changing the diet on the evolutionary parameters menu prior to spawning a stored or online creature does not actually change the diet.
Fix: Editor-made creatures could display an incorrect diet in the evolutionary parameters panel if their food type was changed in the editor.
Fix: Some text overlaps in graphics menu in English and German.
Ecosystem Demo Now Supports Japanese Localisation
Just a very small post to let you know that the games demo now supports our newly added Japanese language following it's addition when we took the game to Tokyo Game Show.
The new update for the demo should be ready to download now :)
Ecosystem Chosen As Finalist for SOWN2023 at Tokyo Game Show!
From the 81 game titles participating in the Selected Indie 80, TGS2023 nominated and announced the eight finalists who will compete at SOWN2023, a pitch event for indie game developers.
The finalist presentations will take place at the TGS studio of Makuhari Messe on Sep. 22 (Fri.), Day 2 of TGS2023. The event will also be live-streamed as a TGS official program. The winners of the seven awards, including the Audience Award Grand Prix, will be announced following the final judge.
The whole thing will be livestreamed from 16:00 JST on Friday 22nd September:
Combat Update Out Now!
Hello!
After an extended open beta we're now ready to release the Combat Update onto the main branch of the game!
You can see the new update in action in the trailer above!
This update adds a whole new combat layer to the simulation which should change how the game plays in some interesting ways.
Previously the main strategy for success in a creature was speed, if it could swim fast, then it was likely to succeed and flourish in the ecosystem. But now all creatures will develop a range of combat statistics, and will need to adapt to survive attacks from predators and apex predators.
Some of these are under the hood stats, such as bite strength and poison resistance, but others are visual too such as a puffing up in a threatening behaviour, using electrical attacks to stun enemies, or growing poisonous spikes on their body.
Patch Notes: FEATURES
Combat Simulation: Combat is heavily physics-based and includes new traits (and new uses of existing ones) that can be factors in a species' evolutionary future.
Biting does piercing damage, based on bite force quotient, size, and total creature momentum.
Striking with limbs does slashing or blunt damage based on the momentum of the strike.
If an attack throws a target's joint out of position, this can cause the limb to become nonfunctional, dizzy the creature, impair its vision, cause bleeding, and several other types of statuses.
Creatures can also evolve different types of venoms, which impart different negative effects, as well as resistances to these effects.
Creatures can evolve thicker skin in places and thicker skulls, as well as spikes and carapaces, which defend against certain types of attacks.
All new combat stats are subject to mutation and mating, and can be changed in the editor.
Multiple creatures can all participate in the same fight, allowing for predators to engage in group tactics.
Combat can be induced between any two creatures in the game by selecting a creature, clicking the 'Force Combat' button in the Interaction menu, and then clicking a target.
