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Cart #bists-38 | 2019-08-26 | Code ▽ | Embed ▽ | License: CC4-BY-NC-SA
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Bists have a brain with 23 parameters that governs how they behave, how much HP they have and how fast they are (more HP = less speed). They are aware of their nearest green bist, the nearest red bist, as well as the nearest food source. The decide how to move towards or away of these things, how far to look for their closest bists and food, when to switch their color, how often to think, and when to slack off and slow down their falling HP. When their HP is full they give birth to offspring that has randomly mutated parameters.

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Food tends to spawn in one tight (near the bottom right) and one wide (near the top left) cluster.

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Every now and then a trap will spawn. This looks like food to the bists but it will freeze the bist that eats it for quite some time.

Be patient, bists sometimes take a long time to evolve. There is a speedup option in the help/menu page that you can use if you can't wait.

You can also join the game and try to outlive the oldest bist or try put evolutionary pressure on them (e.g kill some while you are red, and soon bists will be avoiding red bists)

Make sure to check out all the the options that can be found in the menu in the help/menu screen.

If you evolve any interesting brains paste them here! You can save to the clipboard the brain of the oldest bist by opening the help/opts page finding "SAVE TO CLIP".

Every now and then bists will play a custom cry which is 100% based on the parameters of their brain. You can also listen to the cry of the oldest bist by saving it.

To load a brain and add it to the game just ctrl+v in PICO-8, then open the help/menu page look into the menu for the "ADD FROM CLIP" option.

I am mostly done adding new features unless someone has more ideas. I may release a bugfix version if I notice any bugs though.

EDIT: Spoke too quickly. I added a family tree in the help page.

Enjoy!

P#65079 2019-06-08 18:02 ( Edited 2019-08-26 23:33)

This is really cool - I don't really what's going on, but I watched it for ages! Debug level 2 is awesome ;)

P#66970 2019-08-27 01:38
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Glad you like it! It is hard to know what's going on. But in general, they need food (the boiling bubbly stuff in the water) to fill their health bars. If the bar becomes full, the give birth to an egg and the child will be having the same brain as the parent but with some random differences. Just staying alive makes them lose health. If they move they lose health even faster. If they touch other bists, they lose health VERY fast and they make a clashing sound. If they die while fighting like this, they leave one food on the ground for the winner to eat. If they die of starvation they don't leave anything.

With these rules, they have to evolve their brains to survive and reproduce successfully. They develop tendencies to move towards or away from other bists and food, they decide how close things need to be before their decision making will be affected by them.

I have a raspberry pi next to me with a small 7 inch screen playing Bists 24/7. It's like an aquarium. :-D Right now it seems like a slow and docile species has evolved in it.

P#66974 2019-08-27 17:16
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This is incredible! On my second life, I was able to survive for 174 seconds by brutally defending my territory :D

Joining the game was a great way to learn about some of the mechanics & made pure observation easier to grasp.

The trap is a really interesting mechanic to bridge "ancient" specializations across generations. I've often wondered what an evolution/sim game would be like with completely alien/foreign creatures -- stuff that we dont have direct correlations to on earth -- and you've captured that here. Well done :)

P#99084 2021-10-24 06:12

Thank you for the kind words professir! Yes the ice trap is supposed to do both what you mentioned, to see how old ones compete against younger ones, and also it help repopulate if something catastrophic happens and they all die of hunger by keeping old frozen bists everywhere. :-)

P#100508 2021-11-20 22:24

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