This game has great potential, here is my wishlist for Crescent Loom / 2 if you intend on working on it. Note: I am not a neurologist, but I am a person who likes designing things - in particular I have 800 hours in From the Depths which is a vehicular building game.
- Optimisation. Half of the game's selling point is being able to program your creature using neurons, however trying to do more than animate your ragdoll creature (i.e. collision avoidance / hunting) severely bogs down performance for seemingly no good reason, even with performance boosts from running the game natively. I read that Crescent Loom 2 would be made in a tailored engine, probably to handle this simulation better, but a performance update would be nice.
- - I assume that every neuron / axon's signal is being updated at frame time, which would be extremely bad for performance. Compiling signal strengths as functions over time, and using calculus to calculate when conditions are met (e.g. delay neuron) would greatly reduce iterations.
- - I feel like the signal graphs of every neuron / axon updates even when I'm not looking (haven't tested fully), which would be a needless calculation.
- - Every neuron's state change gets rendered on the brain even when you zoom out, LoD could be implemented here.
- - If there's troubleshooting steps to be done on my end to improve performance, I haven't done anything so I would love to know. The game also just seems to be... running poorly, without having a high CPU load.
- Physics joints / fixtures.
- - I feel that this is easier described with an example. I wanted to make a creature with a jaw that could open and close. I was able to animate it with muscles just fine, however both jaws could independently swivel left and right. If you imagine how gears rotate in opposite directions, that is the kind of stiffness I would prefer for opening and closing jaws
- - All parts will always have a single point of failure because every part is extruded from the brain, being able to brace together parts (thinking Besiege) would be excellent. This mostly relates to using bones / structural parts as armour.
- Proper combat. Jaws instantly kill parts belonging to other creatures, including other jaws, which makes predator vs predator confrontations disappointing. It would be cool to see either physics based destruction (using f=ma for damage and perhaps using cross section to differentiate between part severing / blunt damage?). Either that or standardised parts that deal fixed damage would be fine too (thinking Spore / Sipho).
- Improved axon controls. I wish you could select an axon (edge) and edit its vertices. The controls are fine for really simple brains since you can simply paint the path, but the moment axons cross you need to rely on the pathfinding which doesn't always give you a nice tesselation. Do axons even need to take up space?
- Sandbox tools. Described in a comment below, but some sort of level editor or at the bare minimum the ability to load in creatures onto the cursor would make it easier to slam monsters against each other.
Footnote: I love Lancer Tactics. I haven't been able to get a party to play Lancer with, but already having limited build customisation is pretty awesome, and now I'm fixated on Lancer content :)
