Evolution - Learning Creatures

This is a simulator about natural selection where these little stick-creatures try to evolve and do different tasks by changing how their muscles move, but not their body shape. It’s cool how you can build your own creatures. TO THE DEVELOPER: I know how many people want the creatures’ bodies to evolve, which would be neat, but it would be hard to do. But, I do have an idea for a big update: to add to running, jumping, obstacle jump, and climbing, you should add Swimming. Here’s how it would work: The task is to swim the furthest, like running. There would be a surface where water physics aren’t a thing, and then maybe 25 meters deep would be the ground, because that would be weird not to have a ground. Whatever part of a creature is submerged, it has hydrodynamics applied to it. (Like aerodynamics.) Hope you add this feature and please respond with you thoughts.

I love this game and have an idea that could add more depth to the game. It would be nice if we had options to choose what fitness was based on, especially in the running obstacle. Often, I'll to make a creature with legs, and one of them will lose balance and flip itself over forward where it can't get back up. This normally wouldn't be a problem since there's supposed to be some randomness and learning and mistakes involved. However the one that flips over often becomes the "best" early on because it still moves the farthest, farther than the creatures balancing correctly on their legs can initially scoot forward. Therefore, the creatures that remain upright get eliminated in favor of the ones that quickly fall over. This leads to a dead end where every subsequent generation just has the creature flip over first thing and stop moving. It would be nice if we could adjust weights for multiple parameters to determine how fit a creature is instead of it only being based on length traveled. For example, there can be a setting where you could choose to have the algorithm not only select for most distance, but select for or against creatures whose ending position is rotated more. You could even choose to select for or against one who jumps higher to favor ground vs jumping motions, and you'd be able to adjust the weight of how much each parameter is worth when calculating the best member of each generation. Perhaps this could take the form of a "custom" challenge setting. You would have the original four challenges, but then a fifth "custom" one where you can choose the arena type (flat ground, stairs, balls) and also the weights of different parameters (distance, upward height, rotation). Also an option to have wider or less steep stairs would be nice - I still haven't actually managed to get a creature to climb upwards.

For a basic look at how evolutionary algorithms work, this is a fun start. I did however quickly bump up against some limitations which I think could make it better. - Muscles should have maximum and minimum stretch. I tried to make a creature with bones only connected by muscles (no joints) and found that the muscles could stretch to absurd lengths. So much so that they would extend way beyond the edge of the screen - There should be a zoom out/zoom in feature so you can see your entire creature if it extends beyond the edges of your device - It would be interesting to allow exact attachment locations on a bone rather than just the middle - Multiple muscles between bones would also make it more interesting - For experimenting with boneless creatures, it would be cool to have direct muscle to node connections rather than restricting them to bone connections - And finally, for longer simulations (10 seconds or more) the creatures often get trapped in a steady state where nothing happens. There should be some sort of progress detector to look for stationary states and force the creature to do something different. For what it is, it’s fun and easy, but it was so successful that it quickly had me wishing it could do more complex things.