Разработчик: Polymorphic Games
Описание
Defend the galaxy against an encroaching horde of evolving enemies! In this arcade style space shooter, only the fittest enemies reproduce to create the next generation, causing the population to adapt to your play style. How long will you be able to survive against the Protean Swarm?
Darwin’s Demons models biological evolution using enemies with digital genomes. Enemies acquire fitness by being the most aggressive, accurate, and longest lived, and only the most fit enemies reproduce to pass their genomes on to the next generation. The result? The creatures you found hardest to kill have all the babies, making each generation more challenging than the last!
In ARCADE MODE, take command of 22 different ships, 18 defensive systems, and 11 secondary weapons to battle the Protean Swarm.
In LOCAL MULTIPLAYER MODE, up to four players can fight the swarm side by side.
In EXPERIMENT MODE, get your nerd on and take control of the evolutionary model. Change parameters such as mutation rate, population size, and the fitness function, to test your own evolutionary hypotheses.
Be warned: No matter your play style, your enemies WILL adapt to your selection of ship, weapons, and defenses.
Climb the leaderboards as high as you can, but in the end....
EVOLUTION ALWAYS WINS
Поддерживаемые языки: english
Системные требования
Windows
- OS *: Windows XP SP2+
- Processor: SSE2 instruction set support
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: DX9 (shader model 3.0) or DX11 with feature level 9.3 capabilities
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 1 GB available space
Mac
- OS: Mac OS X 10.8+
- Processor: SSE2 instruction set support
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: DX9 (shader model 3.0) or DX11 with feature level 9.3 capabilities
- Storage: 1 GB available space
Linux
- OS: Ubuntu 12.04+
- Processor: SSE2 instruction set support
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: DX9 (shader model 3.0) or DX11 with feature level 9.3 capabilities
- Storage: 1 GB available space
Отзывы пользователей
It gud
I love this little thing. It's so good at kicking my ass but I love it.
I had fun, and it's a challenge. I enjoyed unlocking the achievements.
There's a couple achievements that I don't understand. Item unlocking? What Items?
If the small handful of remaining bugs were fixed.. this game would be amazing. It adapts to each player over the course of several rounds to specifically try and **** YOUR PERSONAL PERFORMANCE into the ground.
I love it...
The game has potential. It does. For what it is.. it's pretty amazing...
The game is all about evolution and recent contact from the devs on 5/2/2018 says they are trying to see this project through.
I eagerly await the release of their next effort, Project Hastur.
Think Darwin's Demons... as tower defense. <3
Don't Play this Game.
================================================================
T H E D E V E L O P E R S F A I L T O F I X T H E B R O K E N A W A R D S Y S T E M.
C O M P A N I E S L I K E T H I S , G I V E S T E A M A B A D N A M E.
================================================================
They all should be barred from publishing any materials on Steam W H A T S O E V E R P E R I O D.
Woah! Space Invaders meets genetic algorithms! Some pretty fun ideas. Go into this knowing it was created by college students trying to prove a thesis, and you will be much happier.
That said, there is quite a bit to like in this game. Lots of unlockable ships and upgrades. Think of it as a campaign, where you try to keep pace with the alien upgrades with your own ship upgrades, except the aliens are watching to see where your play-style is the weakest. This looks like it was a big university effort, so you get a lot of polish here for the price. Fun and compelling. (Just be sure that you are ready for a space invaders style gameplay.)
Works on ubuntu linux 16.04 through 20.04 with radeon mesa drivers. Unity engine. I could not get a gamepad to work. I could not get multiplayer to work. Nice graphics, but slow load times.
Very challenging, yet very fun! Best way to learn how you think and discover your weaknesses when it comes to strategy!
8/10 Highly Replayable Space Invaders
If you're a fan of Space Invaders or classic Galaxian/Galaga then you'll probably enjoy this game. If you're a fan of Bullet-Hell games you might enjoy this. The evolution aspect is a fresh remix of the formula; you're never quite sure what you'll be blasting next though, sometimes the evolution gets a little wonky and you get an early generation that's much harder than it usually would be. Most of the ships feel nice to play and with their unique weapons they each have a different techinique to popping bugs. The secondary weapons are a mixed bag, some feel much more useful than others but it also depends on which ship you're using. The defenses are pretty much always useful with the exception of the intentionally situational ones.
It's Space Invaders with Evolution. It's also the start of something bigger at U of I, me thinks. Honest developers. Can even give it the, "It's educational" spin. ;)
Worth considering if you see it on sale. Good buy, if you're feeling generious towards education sector (University of Idaho, in this case).
A very nice twist on the shoot-em-up concept. Between the wide variety of ships and accessories available and the way the enemies keep evolving, it's a new game every playthrough and the game stays interesting after many hours. I've spent hours playing arcade mode and having fun. However, I think the game as a whole has a lot of areas for improvement.
The fantasy background is really bright and I have trouble seeing the enemy projectiles on it. It would be nice if there was an option to turn it off, and/or it was made less bright. Some of the achievements are tedious, especially the Ace and Ace of Aces ones. Also, there seems to be little reason to play on any difficulty except easy except for bragging rights. Maybe make the credit reward for playing on the higher difficulties larger?
The feature I would most like to see added is more information. By that I mean stuff like the precise stats of each ship and information on what each of the charts on the stats screen mean. It would be really interesting to me to see how the aliens evolve, but I don't know what half of the stats on the stats page even mean. Specifically I have almost no idea what the different shields do, a more detailed explanation would be nice.
In conclusion, I think that this game presents a great concept, but it could use a lot of improvement as a game. I think it's well worth it for the current price, and I hope to see these issues fixed in the future.
Summary
Essentially Space Invaders, but with a true natural selection system which facilitates evolution of enemy behaviors, resulting in progressively greater challenge (and virtually inevitable defeat for the player, given enough time.) Heaping helpings of player ship, weapon, and ability unlocks. Somewhat of a rogue-lite sensibility is present here as well, in that the object is to adapt and survive as long as possible against an equally (or more) adaptive opponent. But unlocks are persistent, so your tools expand over time.
Full Review
How many different takes on the basic formula Space Invaders and its kin created 40 years ago have we seen down through the deaces? Probably too many. I find most to be boringly derivative, and very few that are at least fun, let alone compelling. Fewer still, though, can be called truly remarkable. Darwin's Demons firmly positions itself within that handful of Space Invaders re-interpretations to distinguish itself in a truly novel way.
"Adaptive difficulty" was briefly a buzzword in game design a few years back, along with procedural generation, verticality, and the like. But as with those, few games truly leverage the concept to do anything particularly noteworthy. And rarely has it ever been truly adaptive, so much as simple difficulty scaling.
It's surprising then that no one has thought to marry the basic premise of natural selection to a wave-based SHMUP before. Because the result - at least this implementation of it - is astonishing both in its "Why didn't anyone do this before now!?" DUH-ness, and the sheer fun it provides.
Other games do incorporate something along these lines, albeit in a less direct form (Boss Constructor comes to mind, wherein you can pit designs against one another to determine fitness, and then either use those designs yourself or deploy them as enemies.) But the simplicity of the Space Invaders inspired gameplay here makes the product of natural selection so much more immediately apparent, transparent, and, for me, entertaining.
As in the classic shooter, you move your ship left and right while firing at advancing waves of enemy spawns, possibly utilizing the cover of various optional, player-selectable defense barriers (more of which can be unlocked.)
At the end of each battle (called "generations" here,) the game chooses enemy types based on fitness - measured by speed, movement types, aggression, dominance, and projectile speeds, among other under the hood calculations. The most successful designs, coupled with the potential for mutation and genetic anomalies, then get "inherited" into the next generation. Thus the game becomes progressively more difficult over time.
The player can likewise earn a form of currency by playing skillfully and dispatching waves quickly, with which to unlock their own ship, weapon, health, and defense upgrades. You are therefore essentially in a race against time, trying to establish an equilibrium that allows survival for another generation in the face of an increasingly deadly AI.
Evolution and Emergent Behavior In Response To Playstyle
The brilliant thing about this design, is that the way you choose to play can influence how the AI evolves over time. Some examples I noticed while playing:
- Unbeknownst to me, there was some slight leftward drift in my left analog stick due to calibration error. It was almost undetectable to me due to being engrossed in the game, but the AI "noticed." (That's an anthropomorphism of the natural selection system in the game, of course. The enemies which survived relative to that flaw in my own behavior simply became dominant in the evolutionary process.) Enemies began bunching up and rapidly advancing on one side of the screen, exploiting my slight bias, as if to account for my apparent aggression toward that side. When I finally realized what was happening, I recalibrated my controller, and over successive generations this shift to the left gradually diminished in the AI ships. However, it then began to spam enemies towards the right, perhaps "learning" (to be clear, no actual learning happens in this game - it's not using reinforcement learning, just pure natural selection with dynamic fitness and mutation) that I had been paying attention to the left more than the right even after I consciously corrected for the issue. That ended up being how I lost, as I was so used to focusing on the other side, I missed an enemy slipping through my defenses on the right!
- In Experiment Mode (more on that later,) I decided to make myself all-powerful. I set myself up for rapid advancement through upgrades, and maximum payoff for victories. But I also wanted to see what the AI could do when pushed to its limits. As such I set up its evolution to advance rapidly, and its potential for useful anomalies to be greater than normal. The game surprised me, despite what I expected to be an easier challenge than the main Arcade mode, by ending my run only 19 generations in. It adapted to my overwhelming firepower, by selecting the enemies which survived longest: in this case, those whose projectiles formed defensive clusters which protected the ships from my auto-targeting Needle lasers. This filled the screen after a few generations with so many projectiles my system could no longer render them at a smooth frame rate. Eventually, unable to compensate for the input lag this introduced, they whittled my lives down and killed me. (Their firepower also quickly became so great, that my fully upgraded defense barriers were even ripped to shreds!)
[*]I decided to experiment by intentionally taking hits from weaker enemies, and quickly destroying the greatest threats. I was pleasantly surprised when the game began to produce weaker enemies, as it interpreted their fitness as higher than the real dangers. You can fool the system!
These are just a few examples. I doubt whether they would be so clearly communicated, so fun, or so immediately apparent if this were a more sophisticated game. Somehow the simplicity of a Space Invaders-like design is a perfect fit not only for demonstration purposes, but also for the most important thing in any game: FUN.
Experiment Mode
In addition to the main Arcade mode, which has multiple difficulty settings, there is also the Experiment Mode. Here you can adjust all sorts of modifiers to make the game harder or easier for yourself, change how the AI evolves, its biases, how it measures fitness, player rewards, and more. This allows you to do exactly what it says: experiment.
You can use it effectively like a cheat mode if you want to, or you can genuinely make the game more challenging than it could ever be in Arcade mode even on Insane difficulty. The choice is yours.
Recommendation
This is a surprisingly clear & direct demonstration of user-interactive natural selection at work in a software environment. More importantly, unlike more advanced evolution sims, it's a functional, intuitive, fun gaming experience. If you like Space Invaders style SHMUPs, you'll likely enjoy this one. Even more so if you like rogue-lite style progression, and have any fascination with truly adaptive difficulty.
It's Space Invaders, evolved... literally, and pun intended.
PROS
Tons of potential mutations, resulting in many different ship types, attack patterns, weapon varieties, etc.
Genuine adaptive difficulty - one of the few "real" implementations of it, in fact.
Clearly communicated fitness measures, demonstrating basic natural selection understandably and enjoyably.
A fun SHMUP in addition to all of this.
Plenty of player unlocks, and an empowering sense of progression balanced against increasing challenge.
Simple but pleasing visuals.
Catchy mixture of electronic & metal tunes.
CONS
Evolution always wins in the end
Potentially repetitive
Lags with heavy particle rendering
I'm not sure I could say anything about this game that has not already been said. This game is a great test of skill because, as the name gives away, the Protean swarm evolves every generation.
A fun arcade game with a neat twist. Could use more variety on what the aliens can mutate to though, espeicially when everything is going very, very badly for them.
Or, it might just be that "The Finch" ship is extreemly OP - massive offence and defense mean it is easy to survive without wasting money, and you can then get the splash size of your main weapon up so large that it clears the back wave. Combined to getting the fire rate down to 0.05 seconds, it measn the entire inital wave vaporizes when you first fire, and everything that spwns in dies instantly.
Fun though.
I've pretty much only started with this, but so far it lives up to what I hoped it would be.
Basically, it's Space Invaders, but with a lot more player options, and more importantly, aliens that adapt to your ship and strategy. I unlocked a ship whose strategy relies on blocking enemy fire with its own fire... and before 10 waves were out, wound up going up against a population of lightning-eyes aliens whose projectiles all favored moving in a right curve. Thus neatly avoiding the projectiles that were supposed to block them.
Other rounds I've done so far have ended with other really interesting setups that clearly show adaptation to the ship used, and incidentally to a strange playing quirk of mine... my hearing is bad in one ear, so I tend to "ignore" one half of the screen in playing a game - if I'm not paying attention, it's the one on the same side of the bad ear, if I am paying attention, I usually overcompensate and so don't pay enough attention to the other side. Pretty much every game I've played so far, the aliens will "huddle" on the side that I'm failing to watch properly. This actually hasn't done a lot to help them so far, because I don't actually fail to watch that side, I just will show imbalanced favoring - but I bet it would make a difference in later rounds, when I get better.
These are just a couple examples of the interesting behaviors I've seen develop. This is a fascinating use of adaptive AI, and I look forward to playing with it in the experiment mode more, which I've only just started with.
Also, the lore is a nice bonus - the game didn't NEED any lore, strictly speaking (I mean, it's a Space Invaders thing), but having it there adds some extra interest, I think.
I'd say that this is a good game to get if you:
A: Are interested in adaptive AI techniques
B: Like Space Invaders type games, and would like one that gets pretty darn difficult
C: Enjoy the ability to play with a game's systems for yourself
An excellent game that takes a refreshing spin on a rather old concept!
The amount of "genetic" detail within the behavior of the individuals is rather uncanny!
Slay the majority of the populations that congregate in the center of the screen?
More enemies tend to prefer the left and right sides...
Get your rump kicked in by those blue suckers with semi-homing projectiles?
Guess who's gonna be more populous next round...
A game definitely worth the price of a dejected Stat Trak CSGO Skin,
or, a lovely cup of gourmet coffee at your reigonal overpriced coffee dispensary.
An excellent space shooter with one outstanding and innovative feature - a self-learning AI that will make your life very difficult!
This game becomes harder and harder as you progress and learns from your mistakes, then exploits them.
This is essentially a gamified Neural Network that creates a close to unbeatable AI. Try to survive for longer than a few generations on the hard mode and you'll feel like a champion!
Check out a full review here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAg_r4OjBRo
Definitely highly recommended
Overall I can say that this game has a very good idea and execution. Ships, alternate weapons, and defenses are all varied enough to give novel strategies and trying to manage the evolution of your enemies adds another layer to it. The devs are also quite friendly and frequently interact with the community, which is a great sign in general.
There are many games that are only a 'good idea', and have very little atual gameplay.
This game is completely different.
The genetic algorithm creates a game that is specifically hard for you, and no matter how much you try to game the system, it will eventially beat you. But that doesn't stop the game being fun, firing guided missiles and lasers at space-invader like enemies. I'm sure I will get many hours of fun out of it.
If you are thinking of buying, just go for it. It costs £4.
I know a few people on the development team for this game, and was excited to try it out for myself. I have always been a fan of the space invaders/galaga style bullet hell games, and the twist that this game adds is exciting and different every time. The enemies can get very difficult if you don't know how to handle them, and are quick to exploit any weakness if your playstyle. Overall, very fun and remember, evolution will always win.
It's space invaders with a unique (and interesting) twist.
Darwin's Demons brings something new to space invaders. The whole premise is to apply the evolutionary theory of "survival of the fittest" to the aforementioned invaders. The invaders that have the best survival stats influence the next generation of invaders.
This manifests itself in the most annoying way possible. The invaders quickly learn your greatest weaknesses, and soon you are facing entire waves of enemies that know the best way to defeat you. You have to adapt and evolve at the same time they do.
My first run lasted 2 waves. In the first wave, I let too many reach the bottom of the screen and in my panic to stop them, I let them land a few hits on me. In the second wave, I died to lots of enemies trying to rush to the bottom.
In my next run through, I had to learn to adapt to my own weaknesses. I spent my time targetting enemies that were the closest to the bottom. This served me quite well. Around wave 5 I took a stray hit form an invader that could shoot diagonally with a high degree of accuracy, and more of those popped up. Around wave 7, I accidentally let a few reach the bottom, and the dreaded zerg rushing invaders came back for more.
Darwin's Demons is incredibly simple in it's presentation, yet this simplicity belies an interesting game with complex mechanics at the core.
The UI is simple and minimalistic, and serves it's purpose. At the end of each wave, you can take a look at the invaders' evolution statistics - you can see which patterns are emerging and preemptively change your strategy to counter the least desired traits. You can also spend some time upgrading your ship and defenses using currency you earn from completing waves. Give yourself more lives, upgrade your ship, secondary weapon, and planetary defenses.
Speaking of which, the game offers a variety of different ships, secondary weapons, planetary defenses, and other perks. Each ship handles differently and has a unique weapon, secondary weapons offer a variety of unique effects, and planetary defenses help you... not lose. You can unlock ships, secondary weapons, and planetary defenses using currency you earn after completing matches.
Another thing, which I will try as soon as I find some friends, is the local multiplayer. The game supports 4 players on the same screen. You only ever use 4 buttons, so you could conceivably play with 4 people using a single keyboard.
Closing Remarks
Darwin's Demons is something special. It's not going to redefine gaming, but it is well polished and great for what it is. For only $5, it's hard to go wrong with it. Highly recommended.
This student project from the University of Idaho brings a new bent to the classic and beloved Space Invaders.
Gameplay, is of course, basic, but the real beauty of this game is the algorithm behind the scenes. Every ten generations or so, the aliens would evolve enough to really start giving you a challenge. The further you go, the more of a bullet hell it becomes.
No matter how much you try and manipulate the aliens gene pool, they will eventually match you, and then better you. You will lose, but how long will it take?
Crisp graphics, great art style, addictive, simple and complicated all at once, has better procedural content generation than No Man's Sky.
And this is a student project. Eat that, Hello Games.
Игры похожие на Darwin's Demons
Дополнительная информация
| Разработчик | Polymorphic Games |
| Платформы | Windows, Mac, Linux |
| Ограничение возраста | Нет |
| Дата релиза | 02.02.2025 |
| Отзывы пользователей | 93% положительных (29) |