Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox

Very fun!

I keep coming back to this game every so years, I love the concept and game-play. Getting a balanced ecosystem finally can feel rewarding. I keep making little weeds that are over efficient or rabbit's that eat up my plants lol

The game has a great concept but it's executed in a way that presents itself as bland and confusing. The game could've had way better UI design and just better general concept integration. I can't recommend this game unless you're really curious about the idea of observing evolution

As the title suggests, "Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox" is a sandbox game in which the player tries to create a stable ecosystem consisting of plants, herbivores and carnivores.
By collecting biomass it is possible to buy a research building that allows to adjust given genes. So the player may create and save different species... that may survive, die immediately or crash your whole ecosystem.

The graphics and audio are... compared to other games... nearly not worth mentioning, but all in all it suits well to the style of the game. For example the plants are displayed as cylinders of different size, color etc.
To mention an other disadvantage of the game you can create a few different ecosystems, but after 10-15 hours it is possible that you have experienced most of the content and the game could become boring easily.

Lets come to the advantages: If you love searching for the right composition of genes using different regulators you may have a lot of fun, because you are able to witness your own creations. Will the carnivores wipe out all of your herbivores or does the population stay stable?
It is also possible to reach most of the steam achievements by playing which it is quite fun.

I can summarize that "Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox" is worth the prize. If you do like to tinker at your own species, and enjoy the results for 5-15 hours gameplay, you should buy it :).

Simulation - This is the main reason I bought the game, and it's pretty clear a lot of care went into it. Organisms speciate and go extinct, populations go through boom and bust cycles, environmental forces drive adaptation and specialization. Even with nothing else going for it, this part of the game is still pretty interesting.

Performance - I have a beefy machine that can handle complex graphics well. Even on the minimum settings, this game lags horribly, to the point that it's not playable. It also crashes every time I exit.

UI - It doesn't ruin the experience, but it's definitely not helping me have a good time. I'd like to be able to compare organisms side by side (all the genes, not just one), look at heat maps and Pearson correlations. For a game about science, there are very few built-in ways to actually do it.

Sound - Voices are absolutely hideous, every menu action makes an annoying pop, music is nothing special. Just turn it off.

this game is interesting enough in its mechanics, to me, to give it a thumbs up, although seeing the general opinion and commentary on this game i see there are just as many reasons to give it a thumbs down, a neutral vote would be amazing here.

all in all this is a fairly simple looking game, but not very optimized for what it needs to do, especially when populations start going into the thousands the game grinds down to a snailspace or worse, this is because of the many calculations going on while the game is not multithreaded, leaving it incapable of processing its own data at a fast enough rate,besides that, and if you keep populations low enough (amount depends on your pc's cpu power) you will have a fun time for a while.

this is a game where you try to play a balancing act with the 3 types of available creatures, in my opinion its not the greatest thing in existence, and will get dull pretty soon, but its fun enough and will keep you busy especially if you are going after the achievements, which once you understand how the game works are easy to get, but before that moment you will fail and struggle a lot.

weird as it is, as the deciphering has little to do with the game's actual content, the most fun i had was hunting for the codebreaker achievement, the content you unlock is however very very relevant to the game and will greatly help you understand the games core mechanics ;).

if you are into a game that uses the concept of evolution/genetics or just like something different for once, then get this game, preferably when discounted.

its not everyones cup a tea, but surely worth checking out, also there are not many games in this type of simulation genre anyway so give it a try.

Conceptually, this game is interesting; create a balanced ecosystem to terraform worlds, via genetic tinkering. By examining what survival strategies work, and which ones don't, you can create more adapted, survivable organisms more likely to flourish. Unfortunately, the game makes achieving it's own goals difficult ENTIRELY through being opaque about data.

Genetic traits are not explained. Some are obvious, some are not. Changing traits and observing differing outcomes between species is difficult, because you can't view an organism's traits after it's created and you can and often will lose them amongst other organisms, making gathering data impossible. Further, you can't track individual populations, so two near-identical looking populations coming into existence instantly means you are unable to observe the success of either group; they could both be flourishing, or one might have gone extinct immediately.

The end result is that simply spawning vast numbers of random organisms, and waiting the few minutes it takes for natural selection to choose succesful organisms is both faster and more efficient than attempting to make your own; making it a game that rewards you for not playing it.

While I like the idea of this game I’m quite unsatisfied with the presentation.

The game gives you not enough information about the results of your experiments.

- There are no explanations about the genetic traits you get to modify.
- There is no statistic which shows you how any of your creatures fare. There is only a total.
- There is no automatic history of your creations so you can not go back and try the same build in another area. Though you can save the current settings to file. I haven't tried loading it though.
- There is no clicking on a species in the game window to get ANY information about it.

So you can only change the values and stare on your testing grounds in hope to distinguish the different species and see how well they do.

With more information this game could be fun, even with this reduced presentation.

It's a fun and relaxing game with a simple look to everything and shouldn't be played with the mind set that it's a competition or race it's more like watching nature be nature on a calming walk in a forest. Also the notes that are around are entertaining to read. If you're looking for a relaxing/simple semi-idle game that requires some foresight and strategy this would be a good game for that.

I've only spent a few hours on this game so far, but it has me quite intrigued. As of late June, 2017, it is a fairly new game, and the developer has decided to allow the players to do most of the figuring out of how the game's genetics (and other factors) work. This is very much a "Sit down and sink your teeth into the mechanics" kind of game, and it is very, very much focused on genetics, evolution, adaptation, and extinction.

You can create plants, herbivores, or carnivores. You 'earn the right' to control some of their genetics over time, but you can create random individuals without controlled features whenever you like. Once something starts to survive, especially if it is a plant, well there you go - good luck getting rid of all life in your place again.

I really like the study of genetics. I don't want all the factors explained to me, and I want great depth and complexity. This game offers me this.

For example, plant color. Sure, the graphics are simple and representative of the genetic differences... but there are visible phenotypic differences. Some plants are a different color - but there is no "color" gene. It's something else making the change. And through study and comparison of individuals, I can see where it clearly isn't, and where it probably is... and lo and behold, it is likely from the interplay of two different genes...

Such studies entertain me. Real genetics are as or more complicated than this, and real genetics are not labeled as doing whatever until scientists figure them out - and even then, it is not certain everything has been understood yet. The game mirrors this well. I like it.

Additionally, once you earn the right to control some genes, you can only partially control them. Natural variation extends outside of the range you can create. Want to get exceptionally low or high values? You can start in a direction, but that's the end of the "intelligent design" - it's the environment and random happenings that take over. I have noticed gene values can go negative as well.

What does -1.4 "seed drift" gene mean? I don't know yet, but the game has just enough visual detail combined with genetic detail and space for individuals to play out their phenotypes that I think I can puzzle it out.

I highly recommend this game for those who want to sink their teeth into a genetic drift and gene function simulator, who want to figure it out from many, many examples instead of being told.

Science!

This is a game for people who enjoy patiently solving puzzles. Completing all the game objectives is not the end game, it's where the game starts. Once you know how everything works, you spend time trying to develop genetic recipes for plants, herbivores, and carnivores. You can conduct experiments inside the contained forcefields. You tweak the balance until it stays stable. You observe how random mutations either help or hurt the design.

I spent an entire day developing my "stepping stone" plant recipe. Over the next few hours the plants mutated into taller "fat candles" that were better able to stand up to the stresses of wild fires and getting munched on by herbivores. This weekend I've assigned it as a science project for my homeschooled kid. I haven't figured out how to get the herbivores and carnivores into a stable balance yet. I have lots of experiements left to run!

The down sides are in the simple graphics and unpolished UI. Framerates do drop when populations get high. This is because every plant and animal has its own genetic profile and behavior.

The game is still new and the developer is rapidly working on improvements. The lastest update, allowing you to scan existing organisms to see their genetic values was a big help. (Keep up the good work!)

If conducting experiements and tinkering with variables is your thing, you will love this game. If you're looking for a polished commercialised adventure game, this isn't it. The $6.99 price tag is pretty decent considering the hours I've put in so far.

First game I have ever refunded on here. I get the dev is trying to make it a "figure it out yourself" kind of game and I would normally be in to that. But sadly a clunky UI, zero feedback and zero in depth info at all make this title a wash. If this was an EA game I would have kept it in the hopes that it would eventually get detailed stats of your evolutions, some way to recreate the same plant/animal in a saved database (yes I can write down the 10 stats that made that evolution, but come on), a graphical engine that has more variation between creations.

This is a $7 game written by a single developer with a day job. Games like this need our support. The bottom line is that this is an innovative concept that is worth supporting. So buy the game. Yes, you have to figure things out. Nothing is going to be handed to you, there are million other games out there that do that for you. Yes, there are definately performance issues. So don't build 9 million plants and animals for now. People are reviewing this game like it was a $60 game built by a studio. Get real. If you want to see indie games like this die because they aren't the smooth production masterpieces built by major studios, then by all means, keep hammering it with silly reviews.

This game has a nice idea at it's core. Unfortunately, it is flawed in many key ways that basically make it unenjoyable.

First lets talk about bugs:

• The collision box for the sky box does not work. Moving up to the top of the map causes you to vibrate against it. On at least one map (I haven't test them all) it is possible to move off the map entirely and see down the side. Not even an invisible wall. Fixed by Dev.
  
• The UI toggle button doesn't fire once per press. Hold it down and it will flicker, once per frame. To actually toggle the UI you have to either tap the key as lightly as you can, or get lucky that the frame you lift off is a frame where the UI is in the state you want it in.
  

• Drop down menus won't close when the player doesn't want to interact with them. To close a drop down menu you have to open one of the other menus that isn't a drop down and then close it again.
  
  
• Annoying controls. On the research station and radar there is a single intereaction button, "upgrade" and "Activate forcefield". Since space is the key for perform action then you'd expect it to activate those buttons, espcially as while your hovering over these machines all other activities the space key can perfrom are disabled. Instead you have to detach the cursor from the camera to click the button. Annoyingly, once you've made the mouse hover over the button, space will now activate it.
  
  
• The slog. This game has a slow start. You need 750 biomass for your first research station. With a generous 10 biomass from your first collector, that's 75 seconds. Now you can increase the rate of collecting. A second collector costs 600. So assuming exactly double the rate from having 2 collectors we're at 60 + 37.5 seconds to get your first research station with 2 collectors. (And that's not counting the fact that your collecting rate drops overtime, without fresh plants).
  
  
• The fact that game punishes you for interacting with your biosphere by lowering "world efficiency" when you do interact with it. I am playing an interactive experience, yet I am punished for actually trying to increase the rate at which it does things. Yes, I'll let you parse that through your head.
  
  
[*] The inability to have more than one save. I don't think need to elaborate this point.

Great concept! Unfortunately this game is far from production ready. Looks more like a school project in progress. Lacks basic UI fundamentals and uses what looks like placeholder modules.

I think the developer is on to something but this could use a lot more work.

Needs to be put into early access. Very little content, filled with bugs: I could move the camera right off the map, tons of genetics options straight up broke the game (if you set seed drag to maximum they just stay in the air forever), among other things.
Don't buy this expecting a polished game, otherwise it's alright.

If you enjoy Evo sim style games, this one is one of the better one's I've played in awhile.

Cons:

- Not a game con per say, but know it's pretty CPU heavy once things get going, your "hour of play" vs mine or anyone elses will vary greatly in terms of actual sim-speed time. The only con here is if you're interested in the leaderboards as in this case, it makes an uneven playfield in relation of output vs relataive time investment.

-- The Gene/Science UI is very clunky, especially once you start hitting single digit frames. There's no ability to save presets or previous combinations, so if you wanna recall a certain combination, you have to manually select each one of several different pop up menus + slider options.

This gets pretty annoying when the UI also starts hanging due to sim lag.
This featured was added ina recent patch- great addition.

Pros:
+++ The Gene mechanic: If you're one that enjoys critical thinking then its utility is incredibly intuitive- designing flora or fauna to fill/meet specific ecological niches is easy to visualize once you see the traits unfold. There's a couple intentionally vauge descriptors, but nothing difficult to figure out.

++ Game pace: there's really no pressure in the game outside of setting your own goals. The very early portion you deal with a small resource grind but within 10 mins or so things get rolling and its a non issue- funding's no longer the focus allowing you to instead focus on tailoring your ecosystem to what you have in mind.

+++ The Force-field mechanic: Isolation can breed just as much diversity as direct competiton, and though the scoring systems is pretty vague- it's already obvious to me that utilising this feature to maintain balance long term has been incredibly useful.

??: + / -

??: Replayability- To been seen, with the current Science/research system progression is really straight forward, so short of just trying a different approach for the sake of doing something different, Imnot sure how often I'll be wanting to start new.

??: Graphics: I have a decent rig (gtx960 4gb SLI, 16gb ram, i5-6600k @3.3ghz) but am bottle-necked at the CPU, so Im running it min spec settings. Its not really a "graphics game" so Im not turn off by it, but should be noted. At roughly 4-6k entities in the world I'm chugging at 6-8 fps.

** Note there's now been additional optimization passes- game performance has been upgraded.
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If you enjoy the genre and can shrug off the some what clunky UI, this game is a steal at only $6 USD.

4.5/5




Edit.... typos, typos...
Update per response, UNTIY launcher has re-map function

Good idea, not greatly worked out. First of all, it is a very SIMPLE game mechanic, that will show you basically everything off the first 30 minutes of the game. And that's "ok" for the kind of game it is indeed, but when you start to stack up things in bigger numbers there come the issues. On the technical aspect, it is bad designed and does not take advantage of multithreading and other resources. I'm running on a R7 1700 @3,9Ghz and RX580 8GB, my average FPS after plating a thousand plants and some hundreds of creatures were between 5-20 on average, with rare 30+ peaks. Therefore, in the current state of the build I do not suggest it. It looks more like an early access rather than a finished work.

It's a calm, thoughtful game of gardening, based on terraforming a chunk of alien desert. The graphics are simple and the UI is a bit rough, but the music, atmosphere, and core game concept are all lovely. My main wishes were that feedback was a little more clear (my herbivores chill out next to plants and die consistently, what am I doing wrong?) and the controls are REALLY rough (like, it took me 2 hours to get a lucky mistake to figure out how to upgrade research stations). Still, because there's no rushing or pressure even the problems are more annoyances than obstacles to play. Plus, honestly I think the game is really beautiful with its limited color palette and striking alien sunsets.

This is one of those rare little indy gems that I'm really glad I grabbed.

It's an ecological balancing act, and a fairly classic one if you've done your reading. At its most basic, you've got plants, animals that eat plants, and animals that eat animals. The trick is to have enough plants to support a population of herbivores, and enough herbivores to support a population of carnivores. Everything evolves. You can also impact that evolution directly.

If your balance is off, then you might have a situation where the herbivores are breeding too fast and eat all the plants, and then die out, leaving the carnivores with nothing.... and the next thing you know you're flying over a barren planet.

Or you might be fine, but suddenly your carnivores start breeding too fast, and wipe out your herbivores... then they starve themselves, and you're flying over a planet full of shrubbery and nothing else.

Graphically simple, but quite pleasantly charming. Audio is almost non-existant apart from some music. The UI could use some polish and is a little cludgy... but the game itself is nice.

I would like to see a bit more transparency around the genetics side of things, and I would like to see some more aesthetic variety on the life forms - which tend to be represented by quite simply polygonal shapes - but it's early days yet, and these things may come.

The game slows down a little in later stages - but that might just be my relatively poor rig.

It's one of those rare games that lets you choose your level of involvement. You can micro-manage your colonies, or you can throw your life-forms onto the planet and come back in a couple of hours to see what you've ended up with... both have so far been quite satisfying.

Do I recommend this game? Absolutely - with caveats.
It still feels a bit early-access - though I understand work is continuing - and if you're after an action-packed roller-coaster ride, you should probably give this one a miss. This is a game which requires you to quietly observe what's going on and figure things out which might feel a bit opaque to start with.

I'm enjoying it quite a bit.

Intelligent design is an interesting simulation and definitely a fine pickup when on sale. Growing a thriving ecosystem has never been so interesting nor intimate before.

Taking place far, far away on a desert planet you pilot your remote drone in a small designated area growing plant life with the intent of creating a pocket thriving ecosystem. This of course takes time and effort to balance out. Have you what it takes? That all depends on whether or not you enjoy simulation games coupled with wanting to simply watch the world unfold before your eyes.

Drawbacks include a simple genetics scheme and lack of explanation to what the genetics options actually do. It's definitely a game where you just sit back and watch with minimal input to reach a working balance.

Experiment. Sit back. Relax. Intelligent design is your personal creation put to work.

This is a game for people who like observation over interaction. The game starts off by giving you the option to place randomly generated plants, plant eating animals, and animal eating animals. Each creature has a bunch of genes they are made of. At first those genes are hidden, but as you place research stations near activity, you reveal the hidden stats and are allowed to modify them for future plants and creatures.

After you unlock new genes, you can start placing your own plants and creatures. From there you get to observe how they interact with each other. You can make plants invasive, so that they spread fast and take over, or you can make plants that spread slow but are giants, or giants that spread fast! It's really up to you and what you want to see or experiment with.

So far I have really enjoyed watching the enviornment grow and change over time. The graphics may be simple, but the game is definitely enjoyable to watch. Personally I have it running on a second monitor to see what happens over time. The game is definitely not for everyone, but for those who like to watch a world grow and change, you might want to consider picking this up.

PS. The leaderboard is a great addition that compares your world score with other players.