1 Million Creatures
Entry for PROCJAM2023
1 Million Creatures is a sort of universe explorer. Zoom in further and further until you encounter countless creatures living their lives. Since you found them, you can name them as well.
Controlled with the mouse
left mouse button - zoom in
right mouse button - zoom out
keyboard - enter a creatures name
Comments
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This is amazing. I haven't found any named creature yet. This is simple and yet beautiful. It combines two (three?) of my passions: Prcodural generation, huge-terrifying scopes, and weird pixel art interractive stuff.
I also love the landscapes when you're zoomed on the planet. I don't know if those are generated too or hand drawn? Anyway, they really give a frightening and beautiful sense of scale too.
Thanks for this experience <3
I found some named guys <3
yay
Thank you so much! I'm really glad you enjoyed it.
Everything is procedurally generated except for maybe the font, when typing in the names :P
The planet surfaces is what I spent most of my time on working. It uses open simplex noise, "domain warping" and a little spice that I came up with myself to get some more heterogeneity into the generation.
Basically in different parts of the terrain, different settings get plugged into the noise function. Here's a little toy version you can play with, if you are interested:
https://editor.p5js.org/holymoleymacaroni/full/bl1bbvHxK
Thanks for the toy version, I am indeed very interested. That's some skills i would love to learn. :)
3,7,9,4,7,6
3,2,9,5,4,4
Love it! Where do you store the creature names?
I store them in a database especially set up for this project :)
no use in trying to hack it, it only stores the names entered and nothing else ;)
Ha, I wasn't going to try to hack it. I was just wondering if you put the effort in to have backend functionality just for creature names. Pretty cool. :)
I did :) You can find creatures other people have named, but it's very rare.. I like that it kinda show how large one million really is! There's 1000 planets with 1000 creatures each so it's going to take a while for people to name even one percent of that number :3
Weirdly, the first planet I went to had existing names!
Looking at the database, a lot of people go to the same galaxy (number 4) for some reason. And in that galaxy most go to the same solar system as well - weird 🤷♀️
Maybe that's why some people stumble over named creatures surprisingly quickly.
Some also seem to follow certain rules - my mom always went to the leftmost option for example.
This is clever and super cute! I love the way it instantly makes me feel both incredibly insignificant and also so wonderfully special at the same time. Sure, we're all one of millions, billions, trillions, whatever... But we're also all unique and special, just like each of these cute creatures 🧡
- ✨Beth
Thank you a lot for your comment and for checking the game out <3
I'm glad you found joy in it :)