Breaking Ground – #2

A month ago, we weren’t even sure what our project would look like. Now, there’s a plan in place and a program in the being written. It’s not much, granted, but you gotta start somewhere.

For our capstone project, Jolene, Deanna, and I did get the A-Life Simulation we were eyeing earlier. I’m very pleased that it was the case, since it’s a great opportunity to design and build a complex system working together. In case you are unfamiliar, the point of an A-Life simulation is to show evolution taking place. We decided that there were enough simulations of a handful of sprites bouncing across a screen, and went for a bigger scale with our project.

Evolution is something that takes place on the scale of billions of specimens across millions of years. Within that context, the life of a single organism is merely a blip, and might not even register on the grand scale of things. The thing that really changes is genetic makeup and dominance of certain species. In our project, we are making entire species the building blocks of the simulation. Our project will simulate genetic makeup and populations across many years, in different environments across the world.

While ambitious, it’s certainly doable. We spent days coming up with appropriate mechanics that could feasibly mimic the factors that go into evolution – resource availability, competition, mutation, etc. At its core, the system consists of a bunch of values chucked into appropriately tuned math formulas, with the final output being the population number (or a new species). This is then displayed to the user though a UI which shows the change over time, for different species across multiple different environments.

The plan is there, what remains is turning it into a program. Over the last week, we finally figured out a method of collaborating in a single Unity project, and so far, we have a basic map in place along with some continent sprites. The plan for the immediate future is to get the structure in place so we can work on multiple separate systems simultaneously. I personally enjoy working in Unity, and I’m looking forward to finally start coding!