Niche: A Genetics Survival Game

[Azerane]

This game is still in Early Access, but I've been watching some game play on youtube. Very simple graphics and straighforward gameplay, but it seems to be the sort of thing that I could easily waste away hours playing, and even just watching this YouTuber play I feel I get very invested in the individual characters.

Basically, you start off with a male and female creature. You have to collect food to have the energy to make moves, breed your creatures, find new creatures to expand your genetic diversity, fight off carnivores etc. It's reasonably involved and your characters carry dominant and recessive traits which means you can't just breed anyone together. Plus you can get some pretty cute variations.

Check out some game play from the early build back in August. I think it's released next year. It looks like a fun :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcNoQ1wiLmY&list=PLwcmm96oJgXiHs3VD-z-pVcaN4_bCerA7&index=1

[HasiraKali]

Ooooooohhhhh! I might have to get this for my class. This is something that we study rather extensively.

[Azerane]

I ended up buying the game, haha. It's still fairly basic at this stage as it is early access, which means that once you've explored all the island and are still alive, there's not much else to do since there's no in game challenges. I had a really bad first round and was mobbed by carnivores about five minutes in which killed off my entire pack :lol:

Otherwise, it's kinda fun. Working out which pack members to mate to breed out genetic faults such as the 'no paw' gene which means your creature has one useless paw. It works well until a few of your creatures die off and you end up stuck inbreeding a little and hoping for the best :P

It's not quite solid genetics. There are dominant and recessive genes, however it's based more on slots than requiring two of a recessive gene to make it physically present. (Does it secretly bug me, yes. But it is a game so I'll give it a pass) So if one of the parents has say the gene for antlers in a recessive slot, the offspring can end up with the antler gene in the dominant slot. However it's generally less likely.

There's also a chart where you can pick certain genes to try and "roll" them as random mutations, or you can pick genes to be more likely selected from the parents. There's a 30% and a 10% slot for this.