Overview
After I finished the popular goal-based game Ramps, I wanted to challenge myself with a more open-ended but ambitious experiment. I wanted to see if I could create a little amoeba-like organism, in a petri dish, that would respond to the user’s stimuli and develop a personality. The result was Organism.
The organism’s personality develops depending on three types of stimuli; amount of food, type of food, and petri dish temperature. His appearance and facial expression will change depending on his current state of contentedness (or, more often, lack thereof), weighted by his past experience. Facial expressions are determined based on a number of factors from multiple artwork assets, resulting in 1,144 possible combinations.
In order to correctly map the facial expressions, I created reference diagrams such as this one:
I don’t consider Organism to be a finished “game” in the same sense as Ramps, but rather a cartoony emotions experiment or digital toy. Now if only it’s eyes would stop following me, already…