ALife Creatures

ALife Creatures is an artificial life simulation with evolving creatures. It lets you change the evolution parameters, for instance what creatures are attracted to, so that you can indirectly design them.

Instructions

You can move the camera using WASD, zoom in with X and zoom out with Y. The menu on the left has a lot of sliders to change the evolution, world and creature parameters. It is also possible to place blue tiles to separate creatures or just to create obstacles. Unfortunately this doesn't work with sexual reproduction right now, so turn the mating probability to 0 when adding tiles.

In the attraction tab you can specify what the creatures are attracted to, this will affect the fitness function they use to find a suitable organism to mate with. For instance, increasing the brain size slider will make brains more attractive. Creatures with larger brains will have more offspring, slowly increasing the brain size of the population which sometimes* leads to smarter creatures.

Saving and loading creatures is also possible. Try to add creatures from different simulation to breed a new species.

*sometimes because Dr. Egh's brain is huge and he is still an idiot. (Dr. Egh is included in the savedCreatures folder with the download)

How it works

Creatures all have a genome that contains information on how to build their brain and body. Just like evolution in nature, small errors are made when copying their genome, producing a child that is slightly different from the parent(s). From there on, evolution takes over. This simulation doesn't use evolutionary algorithms, but simple survival of the fittest. I'm still actively working on this project so suggestions are appreciated.