^ thanks! Good to know one more game that’s been there before!
Getting that arcade-style gameplay satisfaction in 3D is going to be hard based on the direction I’ve taken so far but we’ll see; need to strike the right balance between a (semi-)realistic simulation and a fun arcade experience!
It’s been a while since the last update and there’s a reason why!
DoN has been redesigned from ground-up to be an RTS-Third-Person-Action hybrid now. While play-testing the previous incarnation of the game it was clear that this was an RTS game at heart and the third-person action was in some ways holding back the potential for strategy and management. Add in the “Living Flora simulation” which aims to model flowering, reproduction, seed dispersal and decay of plants and the RTS roots were a no-brainer at this point. Third-Person will still play a big role, especially in combat and/or exploration but I’m walking a tightrope with RTS v/s TPP and I’ll have to work out the balance over time.
It took around a month to cook up an RTS mode with an acceptable framework for delegating mouse actions to strategy actors and to support unit actions like breeding, resource harvesting, storage of seeds, planting of seeds from HUD, etc. Now I can finally take a break from coding and start creating art assets again, really looking forward to that! There’s a ton of things in the map for which I’ve used embarrassing looking spheres, cylinders and cones to prototype stuff.
For those interested in the nature simulation - RTS actions like breeding are proving tricky to normalize across different pollinator species. Eg: Honey bees are colony insects that have a single bee hive per colony (unlike the solitary bee species) while for butterflies it’s individual queens that lay eggs on host plants (eg: milkweed plants commonly associated with the famous Monarch butterflies). What’s more, these eggs actually need to metamorphose into caterpillars and beyond as well, so there’s a completely unit lifecylce to model- IF I’m feeling brave enough to widen the scope of DoN further that is!
I’ve been working on extending my floral sim to support “generic events” which trigger in response to seasonal or weather changes and may be configured per species.
While the original sim was pretty limited in what it could do, this one allows orchestration of floral lifecycles on a grand scale. Things like ecology and seasonal considerations, time of the year, time of the day, weather conditions, tropical v/s temperate seasonality, etc can be configured from a “Species Designer” without having to write tedious code for every little species variation.
Hope to have a video up in a few weeks with day and night cycles, seasonal cycles and a timelapse of 2 years (in-game time 
) worth of floral activity. I’m most excited about what autumn and winter will look like once it’s finished!
The event system looks like this now. I really need to learn Slate and write some custom editor widgets that are more pleasant from a designer’s standpoint but I doubt there’s time for that!
Here’s the same old flower bloom I’ve shown often before, but this time it’s driven by the seasonal simulaton code instead of being hard-coded onto the species itself!
Another major redesign has meant I haven’t posted updates in ages; there’s a lot to write about!
The good news though is that DoN is a true nature simulation now! I’ve decided to do away with all the RTS/Strategy gimmicks and rebuild the game from scratch as a nature simulation with focus on Ecology, Prey-Predator interaction, Flora-Fauna dynamics and lifecyle simulation of both plants and fauna such as insects/reptiles/birds. New gameplay modes include a solitary creature mode (prey/predator/etc), eusocial colony mode (honey bee colony/ant colony) and a creator mode where players can design a biome populating it with flora and fauna of their choice.
Here are some screenshots. Most of my time was actually spent on custom character movement code for spider-walk (free walking across walls/ceilings/plant stems/flowers etc), will post a video of that once I finish my spider v/s prey setpiece.
If you’re interested DoN’s Twitter page has some new updates (including fauna GIFs) that haven’t been posted elsewhere.
PS: Vote for DoN below on IndieDB’s 2015 spotlight poll if you like the game!
I’ve built a “precise jump trajectory system” to help our adorable predator ‘Phidippus Regius’ pounce on prey!
Here are some GIFs of the system:
1. Long jump to snag prey in vain!
http://media.indiedb.com/cache/images/games/1/39/38739/thumb_620x2000/Jump_Trajectory_System_1.gif
2. Basic gameplay in just 6 seconds!
3. Successful hunt!
http://media.indiedb.com/cache/images/games/1/39/38739/thumb_620x2000/Jump_Trajectory_System_2.gif
And here are some recent spidery videos!
PS: Does anyone know how to change the title of this thread? This game is no longer in the “Action Strategy” genre so I want to provide a more meaningful title. And maybe if I can tag this thread as [GAME] that’ll be nice too!
This is great, love the way the bugs stick onto the skeletal meshes.
Hope there is insect-sized skeletons in the grass to reference 'Honey I Shrunk the Kids"
Thanks Zenrok! I’m hoping to move from bugs to reptiles and birds, all way up to mammals. It takes a really long time to complete the lifecycle of just one tiny bug species though!
I remember watching “Honey I Shrunk the Kids” as a kid - I can’t seem to remember the insect skeletons though 
My world scale is actually 5-6 times magnified too (the blue unreal mannequin used here is almost 5 times larger than default size) so even a blade of grass in this game is definitely a sizable place to explore!
Neat! The jumping spider seams to be a lot of fun!
This is progressing nicely. Keep it up. =)
Thanks for the encouragement Moss! Playtesting the spider has been a lot of fun for me too and gives me hope that this kind of unconventional game can actually work and be fun for people to play.
I’m hoping to get a free demo out soon so people can try climbing plants and leaping through flowers for themselves!
Hey , great to hear from you again and glad to see you’re keeping an eye on this!
I love when devs create unconventional stuff, it involves far more creativity then just creating a clone or a game that is based on know stuff, experimental games are the funniest ^^
Absolutely man! I pretty much echo Moss’ sentiments above. Keep up the great work. =)
Massive updates for DoN in the past month, here are some highlights:
1) DoN’s Voxel/3D AI Navigation for Unreal (as free plugin soon!)
Huge optimization work for DoN’s custom AI navigation system! It now supports semi-large maps with high voxel accuracy, fast map load times and blazing fast path finding with dynamic obstacle support! I need to create a plugin for this system by separating my own game’s classes from it so it can be used by anyone.
I plan to release this plugin for free soon!
2) Species Deisgner!
An ASCII diagram:
**3) Writing AI for a creature you don’t know at compile-time **
The creators of Spore wrote an interesting paper entitled How to animate a character you’ve never seen before. I haven’t decided if I want to tackle that problem yet, but I do face a similar quandary myself - How do you write AI for a character designed by the player after the game is released?
To solve this I came up with a “Species planner” system. Each species (plant or animal) has a “Roles Plan”, “Lifecycle Plan” and “Locomotion Plan”. “Actionable roles” operate in a dual subject v/s doer modality. Players will assign appropriate roles to each species and enjoy full control through exposed metadata. A role itself is implemented fully in code.
Some examples: [TABLE=“class: grid, width: 500”]
Role Type
Role
Subject
Doer
Constraint
Consumption
Browsing
Browser (caterpillar)
Browsable (leaves)
Monarch Caterpillar consumes ONLY Milkweed leaves)
Consumption
LiquifyingPrey
Liquifier (spiders)
Liquifiable (a prey insect)
Taxonomical, Food chain match
Self-Defence
Stinging
Stinger (eg: bee)
Stingable (eg: spiders)
Venom tolerance of Stingable v/s Venom of Stinger
Special Roles
SilkTentConstruction
SilkTentBuilder (eg: Jumping Spider)
SilkTentSurface (eg: any leaf, grass or wood)
Fauna has silk glands (**SilkSpinner **role)
There’s more to it obviously, but this post is already getting long so just let me know if there’s interest and I’ll do a video on it when the system is ready for show time.
4) Camouflage System
A basic camouflage system is now ready! Both players and AI are governed by “Visual Trails” which react to the kind of surface a creature is sitting on, the speed at which it moves, etc. Bonus points for creatures with naturally disruptive patterns or pre-camouflaged morphological features (eg: Lichen Huntsman Spiders, Spiny Leaf Insects/etc).
Can you spot the butterflies in this pic? Jumping Spiders have superb vision though, so they sure can 
**5) IKinema IK for foot, biting, etc **
I purchased IKinema recently and have started using it for Foot IK, biting etc. I’m going to do a complete video on it when I get some spare time (lol :)) but here’s a screenshot for now. This was setup very quickly using their Foot Placement node.
You’ll also notice DoN’s custom Spider-Walk solution here. It works past 90 degrees, handles gimbal lock and every other complication that others who’ve gone down the same road will immediately recognize.
IK UPDATE:- For the sake of completeness, Drunk On Nectar switched to using FABRIK IK before releasing on Steam, for more details see this post.
**6) DoN’s Procedural Generation **
Just a reminder that every single thing you see in these images has been procedurally generated at run-time from a totally empty map! Every single leaf, stem, flower and blade of grass is procedurally grown (trees aren’t fully procedural yet, but they are fully dynamic and affected by seasons). I’m not sure if I’ve emphasized this point strongly enough before.
Here’s anther image below of a proceduraly generated floral paradise on a rainy night!
7) Alpha/Demo download
tl;dr - there’s a jaw dropping amount of work to be done but I’m getting there.
The good news is the the floral simulation (seasonal changes, seed dispersal, germination, pollination, etc) is in a very strong place already.
–
I’m absolutely convinced that a proper nature game is the only unexploited genre in gaming - it’s the only source that hasn’t been fully (or even partially) tapped - not as a game where animals are anthropomorphized as part of some larger human story but as a game where Nature is the storyteller and every single creature be it insect, reptile, bird or mammal is the protagonist and their lives are the stories being told.
I will not rest until I make this game come alive!
Great work VSZ! Congrats
Thanks , much appreciated 
I still haven’t done the video on IKinema that I wanted to, so totally swamped with work these days.
There are some really cool IK usecases I have coming up like a spider sucking up liquified prey through its mouthparts, a bee pushing its stinger precisely onto a another creature etc, maybe I’ll club those into one video some day.
Even more fascinating IK usecases I hope to tackle some day:
Nature games are an endless repository of IK usecases, I just hope I’m up to the task of implementing all this!
**IK UPDATE:**- *For the sake of completeness, Drunk On Nectar switched to using [FABRIK IK](https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Animation/NodeReference/Fabrik/) before releasing on Steam, for more details see [this post](http://www.drunkonnectar.com/don-status-update-for-january-2016/#IKStatus).*This is awesome VSZ , really good concepts and work here.
And that 3D AI Navigation, I can’t wait to get my hands on it to see how it works.
Keep the good work!!
^ Thanks for your kind words Alexarg! I hope i can give back to the community by making that plugin useful.
I’m trying to make it more user-friendly right now so new users can test it and debug it easily. Should release it in 1-2 weeks if all goes well.
This is awesome progress VSZ! The species designer and camouflage are especially cool. Keep up the great work! =)
Hey, it sounds like my suggestions might be too late, but I am going to throw it out because it seems like it would be a fairly-easy-to-implement suggestion, and for the time it would take, it would likely be very worth its time, at least as a side option!
First of all I love your game!
Do a googleimage search for the words “tilt shift”:
https://www.google.com/search?q=tilt+shift&espv=2&biw=1920&bih=921&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjt1fvu1-TKAhXBKWMKHXYHAjYQ_AUIBigB
I think the above link will take you there. Look at 30 pictures or so, since some of them aren’t a very good representation. Maybe also try googling the phrase “before and after” at the same time. The tilt shift effect completely tricks our brain into thinking that the image we are looking at is very small! Everything looks like a toy scene.
This could work perfectly with your game, assuming you could set it up.
The reason it tricks our brain: Our eyes focus on one thing or group of things at a time. What we can simultaneously focus on is determined by how far away they are from each other in relation to their distance to you. Imagine you are in a very high airplane looking down at a city block. You focus your eyes on the buildings, and they ALL come into focus. Now imagine you parachute out of the airplane, and land on one side of that city block. You try to focus your eyes all of the buildings like before, but you cant. Only one or two are in focus, and the rest are progressively out of focus. To quote what I said before:
What we can simultaneously focus on is determined by how far away they are from each other in relation to their distance to you.
Bee movie with Seinfield used something like this some of the time, but not always. I believe the reason was for story telling purposes. If they always blurred everything “far away” from the bee, too much of the movies background would be a blur and thus rather uninteresting. Bee Movie - Trailer 3 - YouTube
If you did implement something like this, I think it would help immerse your players in the level, and you would have an added benefit of blurring those mostly bare mountains/hills in the background, which are largely irrelevant to the game play, I would guess.
Off the top off my head, if you were to attempt to implement this as a feature you would have to do some tweaking with the distance of the blur, and the rate of which things become more blurred. Some possible problems that could arise: If the blur is too much or starts too close, it might effect the players’ ability to navigate, to see where other insects are, to know where they are in the map, and if they are flying, to avoid obstacles. I think those could be solved by setting the distance to begin blurring further back. Also since flying may be a faster speed, you can set the blur distance even further back while the player is in flight.
So yeah, that’s my two cents. I like the look of the game! I am a beginner at game development, so if you DO like this idea, I cant give any technical advice!
PS: I have had a personal dream of making a similar game with mammals for many years! I actually just recently posted a thread for a question about my game.
From the first post:
So i just wanted to say thanks for having the same dream as my own, and actually doing something about it!