The Sapling (tuxdb.com)

The flower update

The first big update for evolution simulation game The Sapling will release September 10th, and will extend the indie sim with major new functionality.

Pollination & flowers, allowing the plants you designed to mix their genes. One way to spread pollen is by attracting animals with colorful flowers.
A new sandbox level, completely redone and 100x larger! Besides random mutations and timejumps, it now also allows you to change the overall temperature and see what that means for evolution.
A new scenario, teaching you how to set up an ecosystem with flowers.
Extensions to the procedural music system. It now adds rhythm in if you speed up time, making it even more responsive to your actions.
Bioluminescence. We all know that bioluminescence is cool (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BioluminescenceIsCool), so you can now add it to your plants and animals as well, to attract other creatures.

[previewyoutube=_aglK-7GFCI;full][/previewyoutube] Solo dev Wessel Stoop made good use of the current quarantine situation and spent 3 months to completely rewrite and optimize the underlying engine, making scenarios that are 100 times larger a possibility. It took a lot of blood, sweat and tears (okay, only sweat), and resisting the urge to not implement pandemic functionality instead, but when Stoop found himself accidentally playing and enjoying the game again instead of bugfixing, he knew something was right. The larger terrain is what made the rest of the features possible; mixing genes does not really make sense in ecosystems so small that they are fighting for space to grow. More details on the flower update will be revealed gradually over the coming weeks on https://thesaplinggame.com/flower:

August 17: more details on the pollination & flower mechanics
August 20: more details on the new sandbox
August 24: more details on how bioluminescence works
August 27: more details on the UI overhaul that is also part of this update
September 3-10: Twitch livestream where viewers can vote for the temperature to go up or down... will the ecosystem be able to adapt in time?

Useful links (that is, useful to me, but you might also like them):

Twitter: https://twitter.com/thesaplinggame
Press kit: https://thesaplinggame.com/press/sheet.html
Subscribe to the newsletter: https://thesaplinggame.com/newsletter
Website: https://thesaplinggame.com/
First look video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tFe4_-7cFA

[ 2020-08-13 05:11:32 CET ] [ Original post ]

The Sapling
Wessel Stoop

Developer

Wessel Stoop

Publisher

2019-12-12

Release

Singleplayer

Features

Design plants and animals.
Fast-forward time to and watch the ecosystem work like a charm or slowly fall apart (probably the latter :) ).
A sandbox mode where you can skip time and turn on random mutation, allowing true evolution.
An instinct system where you can specify what an animal should do when it hears or sees something.
A procedural animation system so any animal can perform any animation.
Procedural music mixed on the fly.
Everything set up to be easily extended by players.

This looks just like Spore!

Wessel Stoop has wanted to play a simulation game where you can build your own plants and animals, put them in a world, and see what happens since 2002. You can imagine his excitement when Will Wright, the father of simulation games, demoed his latest game Spore to an enthusiastic crowd. When Spore turned out to be all game genres except simulation, Wessel decided he wanted to try to make the game by himself. The Sapling is the result of that attempt.

MINIMAL SETUPOS: Ubuntu 16 or newer
Processor: A processor with SSE2 instruction set supportMemory: 4 GB RAM
Memory: 4 GB RAM
Graphics: Graphics card with DX10 (shader model 4.0) capabilities.
Storage: 150 MB available space
RECOMMENDED SETUPMemory: 16 GB RAM

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