>>5139560

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VfQ0DCUW98

>>5139560

funny, I'd expect more interest given summer visitors

>>5139581
Spec evo is boring

>>5139582
>Boring
Not when Koseman and Barlowe do it

>>5139615
No, all of it is boring

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Bump with sea striders

>>5139581
The discord killed all outside interest in it.

>>5139623
Thanks for reminding me to purchase expedition as soon as possible. Darwin IV is just too based

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>>5139560

Bumpu with a Knight-esque pic

>>5139627
Trooncords are a cancer

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>>5139560

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How would you make a spec evo game fun when nobody wants to be the prey? Should it be all predators competing with one another over npc prey?

>>5139966

Maybe you can be the prey if given badass defense mechanisms

>>5139966
What style of game do you mean? Something like the isle?

>>5139627
there's a discord? and that's why the thread died?

shame I like the thread

>>5140095
I was imagining something like the isle, but on a larger scale, where surviving long enough lets you get to “reproductive age” and choose a mutation that increases one stat and lowers another (like a slight increase in heart size could let you run for longer, but you would run out of hunger sooner from the increased calories that fuel it)
When you spawn you get the average of your parents’ stats
Then you could watch how each population changes over time, and which strategies were the most successful

>>5139966
well when it comes to megafauna, it helps to remember than generally the majority of hunts result in failure, too many games have prey be simply helpless against predators existing as nothing but walking snacks

for herd species, could always make the juveniles or even majority of the herd be NPC's while the players are the pack leaders

>>5140667
>weaker members of the herd are npcs who need the real players to defend them
That could be a good way to balance it, keeping the prey players powerful and able to defend themselves, while still needing coordination and skill to keep your young alive

>>5140320

same

Here's a crazy idea

A Different Best Friend
>A timeline where The Striped Hyena became domesticated instead of The Wolf
>Assorted Hyena breeds (including SMASHED AND SLAMMED breeds)

>>5142170

hyena pugs

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>After Man was adapted as a documentary à la Future is Wild with stop-motion animation by Japan in the ‘90s
WHY didn’t any of you faggots tell me about this?? How the fuck do I watch it.
>inb4 Man After Man was adapted too and no one told me about that either

>>5142300
Theres only like 10 minutes of stop motion in it. It's mostly people talking. The entire things on youtube.

>>5139966
>>5140618
I would prefer simulator game where you create habitat and then create new species there and see how they survive and adapt to your world

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>>5139560

>>5142451
it's still in development, but The Sapling might be of interest

i wanna do something with monitors. i drew a few with a dog-like upright leg posture but it just looks kinda boring... idk what direction to take these monitors in. aquatic monitors would just be mosasaurs.

>>5142845
i mean we have mosasaurs in the water and megalania on land
if your goal is just to make them top predators then you might want to do it in a way different way

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What are some animals you would like to see as part of a spec-evo project, be it future prediction or flat out seedworld?

For me at least it's skinks, particularly the Egernia genus that have a lot of potential

Omnivorous, flexible behavior, high intelligence (for a lizard), a body plan that is sufficiently generic it can easily be taken in a bunch of directions

And of course skinks are fascinating from a reproductive perspective, ranging all the way from typical squamate style eggs all the way to true placental pregnancies (T. Ivensi)
Egernia being viviparous but depending on the individual species the remaining role of the internally fertilized eggs can be still quite large so a regression to oviparity is still entirely possible

>>5142845

I had an idea for a terrestrial cursorial monitor which converted the fifth toe of the hindleg into a biological "high heel" that would allow it to generate enough thrust to propel it at higher speeds

>>5142845
I had an idea for a termite eating monitor called the Aarddraak

>>5143411
bipedal with long claws or quadruped?

>>5142969
> be it future prediction or flat out seedworld
Rather than those I want more things that split off the natural history timeline, like Multiberculate Earth or World of Monotremes, preferably even further back. Give me a world where cartilaginous fish were the vertebrates to make it to land or where the Opabinia lineage never died out.

>>5143574
problem with going further back is, for the purpose of spec evo, that we often don't know well enough how these animals worked to get into the interesting part of working with a modern animal, where you can start from very minute changes to internal biology that have long lasting consequences (Kappa is being really neat about this, figuring out ways around the constraints of snapping turtles or even their invertebrates)

even Multituberculate Earth ran into a massive rewrite issue because a new discovery made pretty much all their work regarding procreation and it's constraints invalid

>>5139560
My sketches are communicative enough to show anatomical details, but not at all comparable to all the popular spec art I see. Therefore I've been trying to write short stories that feature my alien biospheres, but that doesn't work for all my ideas. How much encyclopedia style stuff could I get away with using minimal art? I'm assuming not much.

>>5143425
quadruped

>>5143607

Yeah, that caught me offguard big time.

>>5139582
Because it's always "what if cows were raptors." Every time. What if thing were other things. What would a cow look like if it was an alligator? What would a cow look like if it was an anteater? It's just endless palette swapping.

>>5145851
to be fair, palette swaps have been a thing IRL as well due to convergent evolution because some niches just require very similar types of bodyplans

for the cow if it was an alligator, having elevated eyes on top of your head as a riparian ambush predator just makes a ton of sense
with seed worlds generally one of the draws or more creative parts is figuring out how an animal gets around the constraints of it's body plan to fit a niche

>>5145851
>>5146409
The way to make this interesting is when you run up into the limitations of the animal's bodyplan, Serina did a good job of this before it jumped the shark with metamorph birds just being able to do anything.

>>5146703
I honestly think that Serina didn't jump the shark up until he chickened out and didn't freeze the world solid
at least before that even the metamorphs still had some constraints preventing them from becoming literally dinosaurs again, and the archangels were honestly kinda neat once you remember that Serina has lower gravity

But yeh, post that, the return of the sauropods was just too much
And it's a real shame because some of the other more recent creatures are interesting (I genuinely love the concept of cement-trees), but it's also clear he is trying to milk the series for all it's worth, would have been interesting to see how the ocean age originally would have been resolved, and if he'd still have done the deus ex machina or actually allowed his sophont society to collapse

>>5146703
>>5146719
I remember a few years back I asked Sheather why he doesn't do some deep sea animals and he replied "ummm well the ocean isnt deep enough for them" and then a few months later he did a few lol

>>5139623
I just don't know how Barlowe does it. I try to think "Well maybe he was inspired by (this) or (that)", and I know he has a deep knowledge of zoology. I want to design fantasy monsters that are as informed as his.

>>5146795

He basically doesn't care about biological accuracy, just that it looks cool

>>5146864
I mean half the fun of spec evo is biological plausibility

>>5148470

In my case it is, but making shit up for funzies is sadly too common

>>5148731
>>5148470
Designing cool creatures is the main appeal, you're both delusional.

>>5148744
if you don't at least pay lip service to biological plausibility you're not doing spec-evo you're designing fantasy creatures
nothing wrong with that but just owe up to it is all

>>5148922
>you're designing fantasy creatures
That's what spec evo is

>>5149014
there's a big difference between giving an animal spikes because it looks cool and giving it spikes because it needs to ward of predators

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hear me out
what if aquatic hadrosaurids

>>5149847

I like the idea, but that execution isn't very plausible

So is spec evo basically dead nowadays? Haven't really been involved in the community for three years.

>>5150114
It all moved to discord

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>>5149847