What is Synthetic Selection? Game Dev Log 0

you might have seen these clips online before this is synthetic selection they gave about exploration creation and evolution I've been working on this project for a while and some of these clips you're seeing are from over 5 years ago so you might be asking yourself what happened and how do we go from this to this to this and where are we today this is synthetic [Music] selection this all started as a side project in University at the time I was playing a lot of Dark Souls and Shadow the Colossus and so I challenged myself to design one boss fight per week but because I'm a terrible animator I had to look for something where I could use my programming skills that's when I looked into procedural animation procedural animation is a set of Animation techniques that allow you to generate complex animations on the Fly using behavioral code rather than having to make every frame by hand since the AI and the animation systems of your character are tied together your characters are more adapted to their surroundings and more responsive to the player this is especially useful when you're animating characters with a lot of possible variations in movement allowing you to make creatures like this one which would normally be impossible to make using only traditional methods so after spending some time making more of these creatures these videos gain a bit of popularity online and I decided to make a game out of it I was eventually able to get some funding and put together a small team but then the pandemic hit and forced us to put our original plans on hold throughout this process I was left with a lot of tools and techniques surrounding procedural and physics based animation and so out of curiosity I decided to pursue an interest I had for a while which was to apply these techniques not just to the creatures but also to the player and so I began experimenting with some vehicles and during these experiments I found the whole process of constructing these creations really engaging imagining something entirely new bringing it to life putting it to the test and then refining that design all to solve some problem in the environment felt really rewarding and it reminded me of a secret that all game devs know but never tell the most fun game is Game Dev Dev and so I decided to lean into this part of the game play this idea of building the game within the game to beat the game think of it like a mix between Minecraft's block-based creativity and spores evolutionary gameplay you build a creation that allows you to explore an environment for new resources you hunt down a creature kill it absorb the DNA and that gives you access to New pieces you can use to evolve your creation so let's take a look at how all this works right now keep in mind that everything you're about to see isn't a fresh project and that our goal is to return to this quality of Art seeing now so in synthetic selection everything is made using a primitive piece pieces have some physical or functional properties and are then simulated in the world this means that something like an aerodynamic piece could be used like this or like this or like this or even like this combining pieces can lead to a lot of emergent behavior for example this attractor piece could simply be used to pick up objects but you could also use it on the back of this laser to get it to stick to a wall or or you can put it on the bottom of your vehicle to increase your grip and allow you to drive on the wall and ceiling the opposite of that piece is the Repulsor which you can use to hover objects or push away from walls activating them lets you jump and putting this ragd doll dude on top of it might keep you happy while you wait for Skate 4 to come out but I'm not really sure if this is helpful for fighting creatures so back to the topic of emergent Behavior here's an example of combining two pieces to create a completely new Behavior by arranging the Repulsor and the attractor in this array you create this kind of magift piece that pulls you towards the surface while keeping a minimum distance but what's really cool is once you've created something you can just save it as its own piece making the creation process fast and easy so I can just reuse those magl pieces on this turret base here or maybe I want to use these jumping legs to navigate more uneven environments or maybe my environment is really vertical and I just need to turn my turret base into a propeller drone or you could also just make whatever this is so we know that the player creation is made using these pieces but the exact same thing can be said for the creatures now what that means is once you kill a creature and absorb their DNA that gives you access to see how they're constructed so after that you could simply become that creature either identically or you can modify it to fit your mission you could even take some of their components and use it in a completely new creation or you could just use a printer to generate a whole Army of that creation and have them fight the creatures for you so the printer is a piece that I showed you earlier in this video and it's really one of the bread and butter pieces in this game since very little is predefined in this game the printer acts as a way for you to use equipment abilities and projectiles the printer allows you to generate and launch any other creation that you've built the simplest example is to just take this explosive piece and now you can launch grenades you can add an attractor to it and now suddenly your grenade is a sticky grenade or you could add a jet to the back of it and now you have a rocket propelled grenade and adding some aerodynamic surfaces sensors and Motors turns it into a heat seeking missile okay let's give this guy a break you can make a rocket that prints grenades you can make a grenade that prints Rockets you can make a printer that prints printers that prints printers that prints little chicken houses that lay eggs I'm not saying that you should but uh it's there if you want to you you could do that no judgment now you probably want to know more about the creatures as I mentioned before one of my goals was to bring these tools and techniques that I learned to the player now at first what that meant was having the player character use the same animation techniques is the creatures but since I began working on this creation system I wanted to take this idea idea of bringing the tools to the player a little bit further in fact everything you've seen in this video is made in game every creation Every Creature every level I mean if you want to call these levels everything can be made by the player like I said before it's about building the game within the game to beat the game so when we create the core content of this game you'll have complete access to see how everything was put together you can modify mix and match Creations levels and creatures you can challenge your friends to custom dungeons that you've built or play a completely new campaign made by a Community member so if any of this sounds interesting to you and you want to take part you can sign up for our Alpha Testing through our Discord or Reddit which I'll put in the description below and if you'd like to support the project I've also set up a patreon members can get access to the next round of testing without the wait list but don't worry because everyone will get to play eventually and waiting just means that your first experience with the game is going to be much more polished and fun so yeah I hope you enjoyed and I'll see you soon

Channel: Makan Gilani

Views: 1,257,670

Keywords: Game, dev, devlog, Unity, Unity3D, Procedural Animation, Indie Game, Indie Dev, Game Dev, Synthetic, Selection, SyntheticSelection, Monster Hunter, Ace Combat, Mech, Scrap Mechanic, Armored Core, Trailmakers, Builders, Terra Tech, TerraTech, Trail Makers, Robocraft, Robocraft 2, game dev log

Id: iNXzOuc9UWo

Length: 6min 28sec (388 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 13 2023