Posted May 21, 2025 by weskay
#generative systems #game development #procedural content #simulation design #node-based architecture #asset pipeline #emergent behavior #modular design #interactive storytelling #systemic gameplay
Before you can bake an apple pie, you have to plant the tree, grow the apples, mill the flour, and mine the ore to forge the pan.
Systems have prerequisites, and in Genetica, that principle is foundational. Want drug synthesis? You need the evolution of plants. Want ore smelting? First you need asteroid formation. In a simulation where everything is interconnected, building from the bottom up isn’t optional, it’s the only way to make the universe feel alive. That’s why we couldn’t settle for traditional content pipelines. We needed something that could express those chains of dependency dynamically, across biology, industry, and narrative.
Creating a game like Genetica where scale, complexity, and interactivity are pushed to their limits, demanded more than just a traditional asset pipeline. We created a Node-Based Asset Engine tailored for large-scale, interconnected simulations like Genetica. It allows content to be authored as modular, reactive graphs rather than static data. This system enables real-time evaluation, composability, and hot-swappable logic, making it possible to simulate complex systems, from ecosystems and AI behavior to socio-political dynamics at scale. By decoupling logic and data into reusable nodes, we empower designers to create evolving, emergent content without engineering bottlenecks. It's not just an asset system it's a living pipeline for a close to life universe.
We needed a way to handle the growing web of interconnected systems: ecosystems that evolve, thousands of entities and their components, and dynamic changes to player choices and actions. With current tools it becomes a chaotic mess. We needed something dynamic, intelligent, and scalable.
That’s why we built our own Node-Based Asset Engine https://asset.engin.app, that acts as a core part of our custom pipeline. This engine leverages component based architecture to turn Asset creation into something programmable, composable, and runtime-ready.
Instead of relying on rigid authoring flows, every asset whether it's a behavior tree for alien fauna, a derelict space station event chain, or the internal economy of a fringe colony; is structured as a network of nodes. Each node is an Object that is modular and reactive, allowing designers to construct components around: logic, state, and data flows visually, without hardcoding systems.
Our Asset Engine turns every asset into a graph of systems, components, logic, and properties. Instead of hardcoding content, designers create assets by wiring up everything it needs to function, and the engine handles the rest in real time.
Let’s say you’re building an asteroid. Start with a mesh node, add a noise-driven ore distribution component, set parameters for depth, concentration, and rarity. Then hook up mining interaction logic, damage thresholds, and resource outputs. The system treats it as a game object with runtime logic and behavior.
Because it’s a node graph, all components are evaluated in real time. That means changes ripple instantly—adjusting noise variance reshapes ore deposits immediately.
Assets are built from composable fragments. You don’t author an asteroid from scratch you assemble it from reusable systems: geometry, materials, mining rules, scan responses. Those same systems can be reused on planets, debris fields, or even living creatures.
Everything is data-driven. That allows live iteration: tweak noise parameters, adjust yield curves, or drop in new behavior nodes
We’ve built an in-house visual editor on top of this engine, letting designers wire up logic like they’re scripting modular synths. Need to require a rare plant enzyme before players can search for specific bio-signatures on derelict planets? Drop in a few enzyme dependency nodes, link them to the scanner logic, and the system takes care of the rest.
This means narrative designers aren’t bottlenecked by programmers. If they want a planet’s scavenger economy to shift based on enzyme scarcity and off-world black market routes, they can wire that up themselves. The nodes do the work.
We aren’t building static content. We’re building templates for behavior, systems that evolve as players interact with them. The Node-Based Asset Engine is our way of ensuring every decision—biological, strategic, or narrative—ripples outward in emergent ways.
From the shape of a cell to the collapse of a faction, everything in Genetica is driven by systems that think, adapt, and evolve. Our Asset engine doesn’t just create assets. It evolves them.
We’re expanding this engine with AI-driven node generation, predictive system modeling, and simulation-aware testing environments. Our goal is to allow one node graph to generate a thousand unique outcomes each one shaped by the player, the world, and the systems they collide with.
What we’re building isn’t just a pipeline. It’s a living framework for intelligent content.