Updated OP with some pics. A quick status update:
Spider AI incoming!
Something I’ve been really anxious about pulling off is spider AI. DoN’s tiny AI need to navigate slender plant stalks, crawl through the underside of flower petals and expertly jump from one foliage to another enroute to a promising meal.
To make things hard, navigable surfaces like plants germinate and grow procedurally at run-time; is such AI even possible to implement?
To make things harder, Unreal’s native NavMesh won’t work here:
- It doesn’t work past 90 degrees, which is a no-go for spider AI (or indeed, any of DoN’s agile invertebrates!)
- Even the smallest cell-size in Nav mesh cannot handle plant stalks, leaves, flowers, etc. They’re simply too small and too tiny for the NavMesh to be anywhere near accurate for my game.
So yet another coding mini-project was underway 
The good news is that it’s almost ready! Video of spider AI hunting bees is coming up soon.
Change in gameplay direction
To improve my chances of releasing the first major version soon, I’ve decided to shake things up vis-a-vis gameplay a bit.
A pure Nature Sim will take time to implement, there’s no way around it. Lifecycle, metamorphosis, mating, etc need robust sub-systems, loads of art work, non-trivial gameplay and AI logic, etc.
So I’m thinking of a simple combat game mode (prey vs/ predator, predator v/s predator, etc) which players can immediately dive into while the simulation mode continues to grow over time. This will allow me to add new species to the game in a fraction of the time that it would take to add a new species to the full-blown simulation.
Multiplayer also becomes a possibility with the combat focused mode, something that I wouldn’t dare to even think about in the full-scale simulation.
To be clear, combat doesn’t mean military spiders training high-tech bazookas on kevlar-wearing flies or anything silly like that It’s intended to be true to nature - i.e. visceral, limb-to-limb, silk-spinning and reflex heavy combat. There’s a lot of fancy options on the table when it comes to invertebrates (they’ve got so much more style than mammals!) so I’ll see which ones are easy to implement and which ones are best left for financially greener times 