Haha no it's not you it's me ;) I've made progress, at least. I'd be interested to hear if it helps in your case.

THICC THIGH MAN 😍

I made a BOO

Cuuuuute, I love it. <3

Harpoons are still in development; I haven't been able to release an update with them yet since I injured my wrist and have had to take it easy re: computers. If you have CL installed using the Itch client, it should update the game & preserve your creatures seamlessly. Otherwise you'll have to transfer the saved creature files over manually to the new version you download; they're in internal\creatures

Whoa, I'm surprised that you've managed to do almost any ecosystem interactions! I've done almost no work on those systems. In particular, I want the basic follow-hunt-eat loop for a creature to work, and it's still pretty far off using the out-of-the-box pieces.
I like the healing idea. Work on that is going to be a ways off because I'm currently aimed more at use-in-neurobiology-classrooms than the fishtank aspect due to increased interest for remote neurobiology activities in the wake of the pandemic. But I'll get there someday! 🤞

I love voronoi diagrams! Toggling it on seems to also make the buildings smaller / more dense, especially on the larger maps. But they look great!

Ah, I see, more of an AI evolution-assistant... not a bad idea, but I think it's outside of my ability to pull off. 😅

Amazing art! Mind if I share this on CL's twitter?

I'm glad you like the game! Thanks for spending so much time playing & putting it through its paces.

I try very hard to not have to clear out the creature servers (it's only happened twice over the last four years) but sometimes there's no avoiding it. Best I can do is to post a warning to the wicklog before it happens

Adding computer-led evolution has been suggested before but is definitely out-of-scope. I'm more interested in seeing what humans build than what computers build, and the game is already dangerously close to being a fancy fishbowl screensaver. Removing the creature-building wouldn't leave people with much to do, would it? :p

I agree that having a more zoomed-out view of seeing creatures interact (maybe in some kind of map editor?) would be a lot of fun. Same for race & battle modes. Someday, someday...

🌺

Uploaded to the server as "LEVI". What an absolute beauty. 😍

It reminds me of the ghost leviathan from subnautica.

I'm still not sure why the server was telling you that the name was taken — it happened for me too. I suspect that it has something to do with the sheer filesize of this sheila. I've added it to the buglist, but as per my last update it might take a while to get around to.

https://beebom.com/how-enable-function-keys-chromebook/

Yeah sounds like it. OK, if you still have it up here's a last-ditch way to save a creature on HTML5: if you press F2 it'll print out the creature's save file  in the text console below the game. If you grab that & then email it to me, I'll manually put it in the database.

Congrats on the monstrosity! Hm. That's the first time I've heard of not being able to save because no names are available. You can't overwrite existing creatures on the server (because then you could delete other people's) — to confirm, you've tried a number of different names?

Anything pro-maga is not allowed and will be removed. You're welcome to name it something else though. :)

Cool, thanks for the report! I think I gotta say that I can't support fixing the iPad (it would require an overhaul of the UI to figure out how to make the controls work without a mouse) but the fact that it's not running well on chromebook is concerning.

I'm adding the slowdown to my to-do list for the next update. It's been a problem for years but has been getting worse..... definitely one of those maddingly-hard-to-track-down bugs. 😅

Oh, also, I don't have an ipad so haven't been able to test it there at all. It really wants a mouse & keyboard though, so I wouldn't count on it working well.

Hi! There's no discord for the game yet; this is the best place to comment. You can also send me emails at contact@wick.works.

The only way I've tested chromebooks is with the html5 version (the "demo" version), which sounds like you've already tried? Buying the game just gets you access to PC/Mac/Linux downloads, so it won't help with chromebooks.

I really do want to make sure the html5 version works on chromebooks... could you describe the lag a little more? Does it start fine and get slower? If you hold down the comma key, you can see the framerate in the lower-left. What rates are you getting?

Aww, that was a lot of fun! I don't usually get drawn into games like this, but it hit a great balance of simplicity and challenge. Good work!

On purpose — there used to be & with the intention that you'd have to snap them closed with muscles to do damage, but in the interest of swinging the pendulum away from oversimulation and towards "things are functional & just work without additional setup" I removed the muscle and made them just generally dangerous to touch.

I'm open to suggestions for how to find a balances between complexity/usuable for it.

It's not a secret! I got an email a few weeks ago with some requests that I liked, including harpoons a la cone snails. Motion-eyes is an interesting idea... my science-brain says to make it be the relative motion between it and the prey, but that might end up being really hard to use. It's always hard to strike a balance between simulation-accuracy and gameplay usability.

Setting up the tools to be able to make a predator-prey ecosystem is my ultimate goal as well. Someday. There's a lot of work to do in the engine beyond just adding new body parts.

I should probably convert the comment section on the game page to a forum to make it clearer for where to put suggestions/bugs, but I've been putting it off because it clears all the comments.

Deffo a bug. I've added a warning for the next update. Sorry if you lost some data!

"I'm disappointed in you."

Whoa. Wowowow. I'd never thought of those words as abusive. I thought it was my fault, for years. Thank you for making this.

Thanks Andaeus! It's great to hear you made something that could navigate -- it's no mean feat.

The online functionality has always been pretty moody, but I thought it was working for this set of desktop builds. Hm. I'll take a look & fix it if I can for the next release (it's going to be a little while though -- I'm currently dealing with a wrist injury).

I'd love to see what you've made. More motivation to get it working again, I guess. ;)

Thanks. I'm trying to resist the "oh, it feels a little better today, guess I'll launch into an 8-hour coding session" urge that'll land me right back where I started. 😅

Seemed beautiful but made me motion sick after just a few minutes, which doesn't normally happen to me for games. :(

Yesss, I am very glad to hear that. Now to figure out, y'know, why windowed/shaders were making it crash. 😅

+1 for the feedback on the manuals. Like I said in the newsletter, I'm pretty optimistic about this approach. Yay field testing!

Ah, that's a good idea! I'll try it.

Good to know, thanks for the report! It seems to be having trouble with crashing on a lot of people's machines, it's probably not anything you did. This is the worst kind of bug because it's random & nearly impossible for me to reproduce, especially because I'm not seeing on my computer. x_x

 I'll keep trying to track it down. I've heard that it tends to be a little more stable in fullscreen & with shaders off (which is the default), if that helps?

^_^

Replied! Let's chat. ;)

Aww, that's a nice comment. ^_^

Ya turns out you need more than like a dozen neurons to make a human brain, and our body type doesn't do great underwater. Good info to hear that that's a first instinct for people to try though. 🤔 Was there anything in particular he tried that really should have worked, do you think?

(one of my goals is to make things that people want to do naturally be things that end up being interesting, at the very least)

Thanks for the feedback, hmm... the smallest font size in the game is 14pt which makes me think we might be seeing different things. Do you have a particularly high-resolution display?

UI scaling added to the to-do list.

Yessss, I am very glad to hear that. And quivering piles of twitching flesh is how I see most people get started :p

Hey, thanks! It's good to hear that. 🌺 I really really love the logic-gate-esque aspects of neurobiology and am glad I get to share it like this.

Re: not agreeing with your laptop, how so exactly? I'm still ironing out a lot of technical problems. Crashes or running slow or...?

Cool, thanks for the suggestions!

I've wrestled with the problem of how to teach the game a LOT. I've tried the voiced intro tutorial, a series of zachtronics-style levels, in-game contextual help menus, real-world manuals, and now the lego-style guides. Did you see those guides? They're very new, and I'd love to hear what does and doesn't work about them.

✔️ re: sensors that react to different objects. I also want to give people more control over tuning things like range and sensitivity.

You're the first to mention wanting to pivot pieces after placing them..... what do you think would be a good UI for that? People are already holding the mouse down when they're modifying a limb. Maybe if they drag an existing limb while holding down shift or something?

Thanks, and agree! Both those things are on my list. I talked about the design for connecting different brain sections in the last wicklog.

Goooood question. Libraries and dependencies aren't my strength. I'm currently compiling linux on a mint distro.

The Cerberus X forums imply there might've been an update to how curl is used in the most recent compiler — I'll try updating to see if that changes anything & let you know when I've uploaded that version, but I don't think I can commit to supporting all flavors of linux.

Huh, I hadn't tried downloading any games from the bundle through the site yet either. This is the only path I could find that worked for me via the site (you should have also gotten an email with the link to it).

My Library > My Purchases > Bundles > Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality > Search by title

Glad to hear it! Ya, changing the icon was the thing that made the first build not work. I'll figure out how to get it back... someday.

New mac build is up. It should work (I had to move it out of the downloads folder because of some mac security thing). Let me know if you run into any more problems! ^_^

Build 0.7.1 is up. I double-checked the mac build by re-downloading from itch.io and it looked like it worked (though I had to drag it out of the downloads folder).

Bedtime for me. Let me know if you have any problems!