I like the idea and it's definitely fun to play around with. I feel there could've been additional features, like being able to change the background, or customize each dot in size, color, etc. Sound effects are missing, and the "witness" feature seems to work kind of weirdly at least to me. The visuals in general are perfectly fine and the UI's great but again the customizability would've benifitted them a lot in my opinion. I think you could create some really beautiful things with this program if there was more customizability. Either way, very good idea and well executed. The music is gorgeous, and the presets are also a nice touch for sure.
Viewing post in ABIOGENESIS jam comments
Hey Median, thanks for the review. I agree that more customisation would better. I did have plans to allow customisation of the colour pallet, but as I'm sure you're aware, Bevy UI is very much not batteries included and to implement colour customisation would require the development of a colour picking component which felt too daunting to implement well as a solo developer within the timeframe of the jam. Implementing the dropdown, slider, and tooltip components was already a daunting task.
The witness feature makes the camera follow the clicked on particle. It allows you to follow organisms as they move around, but toggling the follow state is a bit hard to communicate. Panning the camera at any point disables the following mechanic, clicking the tool also toggles it off.
I'm currently in the process post Jam of moving the simulation to the GPU which gives me a lot more control on how the particles are rendered instead of just being sprites and I'm excited to juice up their effects a little bit.