Hello! Dan here, community manager for Ecosystem, with a couple of updates to share about Ecosystem. We'll hear from Tom further down about what he's been working on and what he will work on next, but first we have some big news!
IndieCade
We're super excited to announce that Ecosystem is part of of the 2023 IndieCade Nominees!
As well as being eligible for the following general awards:
- Grand Jury Award
- Jury Prix Award
- Innovation in Interaction Design Award
- Innovation in Experience Design Award
- Developers Choice Award
We've also been nominated specifically in the "Mike Sellers Systemic Design Spotlight Award".
The full list of nominees for the award as follows (some amazing company here!)
- Against the Storm
- Ecosystem
- Price of Flight
- The Signal State
- Unknown Number: A First Person Talker
- Viewfinder
You can watch the awards right here on Steam on Saturday November 4 from 10am PDT.
Tom will also be taking part in a Show and Tell session, again hosted here on Steam, tonight (Friday 3 November) between 10am and 12pm PDT!
To celebrate our inclusion in IndieCade we are currently on sale for 20% off!
With all that said let's hear from developer Tom as to what he's been up to recently - take it away!
Next Steps for Ecosystem
Hello Everyone,
Welcome to the November development update!
I just finished work on a minor update aimed at improving performance, mostly via reworking the level-of-detail meshes for Coral and some Misc food sources, as well as changing the minimap to be more efficient when there are large numbers of plants in an environment. Many thanks to volunteer community / mod-development liaison Stobz for noticing this latter issue and isolating its cause. Whether or not you see an improvement will depend on what kind of environment you have created and whether, in your specific scenario, your computer is bottlenecked by rendering foliage rather than processing creature physics. However, in stress-tests featuring very dense coral reefs, performance improved by 6ms per frame (the difference between 45 frames-per-second and 60) and in those with dense plankton growth, it improved even more, by 8ms, so hopefully this will make for a notable improvement for some.
With that complete, I'm now moving on to the next major update, which I think of as the Behavior Update. The goal with this next batch of features is to give the creatures a little more to do with their lives and more ways to differentiate themselves from other species. Since Ecosystem doesn't fit into a standard game genre, new features require experimentation and may not always work, so I can't promise any specific behaviors just yet, but I am looking at things like swimming in a school, communicating via biolumenescence, or building nests to lay eggs in. Ideally, many of these behaviors will not be a simple on/off switch, a single trait that a species simply has or doesn't, but instead will include room for variation, such as the specific colorations and patterns a species uses in biolumenescence, as well as what they are most inclined to actually communicate about. I hope to have a few more details soon as the update progresses.
Thank you for reading!
Tom Johnson