BBC games used to have two: Big Al and The Evolution Game.
In Big Al you chose whether to eat or escape from prey and it worked out for you depending on your size at the time relative to the other critter and its food preference. If you didn’t eat enough you would starve, and your growing was, I think, dependent on your age. You also had to uncover more area to hunt in, at some risk of meeting a bigger allosaurus. You finally have to find a mate.
In The Evolution Game, you start as a nondescript animal, and actually become more carnivorous or herbivorous lager or smaller, with forward or side facing eyes, etc, depending o which of the items you encounter you choose to eat and how else you respond to them. The creature at the end looks different from what you are in the beginning.
This was my favourite, but it disappeared from the website. Big Al was there for a few years after Evolution Game, but I don’t know if that site is functioning. I tried to find it some time back and couldn’t find even the main site where the game are listed.
I have about 90 pages of different concepts detailing “nature simulators”, but I’m moved away from those recently. The problem is that “video gamers” are not really the sort of people interested in those experiences. That is why some of the best nature games, like Endless Ocean 2 “tanked” so badly – they were amazing, impeccable games, but there was no audience in the “gamers”. The sort of people that would enjoy these games are not shelling out hundreds of dollars on a video game console. As a result, developers are not interested in investing in these sorts of games.
One of my missions is to share wildlife with this “gamer” community – but to do that efficiently, you need to start with a video game framework first, rather than a nature one. Remember Pokemon? This is a game that is based on combat, exploration, and conquering objectives. But instead of real gritty war themes, it uses mythical creatures to represent its motives, and the game itself. This is one of the most popular games in the world – not because of the exploration and creature discovery, but because it is a video game at heart.
My top nature games are as follows:
Endless Ocean 1 and 2 (particularly 2, heavily invested marine life games with hundreds of species)
Everblue 2 (diving game with marine life)
Afrika (African safari/photography)
Beetle King (hardcore insect collecting, unreleased game, but fully playable)
Animal Crossing (“village life” simulator game, but with “bug-collecting” and “fishing” as hobbies)
He missed a lot – there’s a ton of inaccuracies not given, some very significant, but it still remains one of the most accurate bird depictions in a video game to date.
maybe it’s overly optimistic but i don’t feel like this has to be true and i think there are many who might respond to a really fun game that is immersed within a really active and responsive ecology, something procedurally generated and awesome… i think the bigger issue is this is incredibly difficult to do well, and also very computer intensive, so many people start out with this goal but end up with something gutted and dead inside like Spore or No Man’s Sky. Maybe just having one small element of ecology within a larger world could work. I am really interested in games where there is no guaranteed result and choices effect things in unexpected ways. Like dwarf fortress except with enough interface to actually use the game. But maybe I am weird…
I can only speak from a sales/market perspective but I think this is true, sadly. The closest reasonably well-selling games that are close to simulators are games such as Journey and ABZU (was mentioned earlier). But these games succeed not necessarily because of the “exploring nature” theme, but because the main investment is story-based, minimal as it may be.
To convince anyone to spend time working on such an ecology game, you’d need to prove there is an audience. I think the mobile market is the closest that we’ve ever had to potential here, since everyone has phones these days.
While these two games are evolutionary simulators and not true ecosystem simulators, SPECIES: Artificial Life, Real Evolution by Quasar and Thrive by Revolutionary Game Studios are still good scientific games. Just note, however, that they are still in their very early alpha stages, so they way be very buggy sometimes.
SimIsle. It might not seem like an ecosystem simulator, but in a larger sense it is – it simulates the ecosystem of a developing country and the ways it is being exploited. You make decisions about cutting down rainforests, mining, manufacturing, or developing tourism, and you have to be mindful of how much money you have, which means that although you do have an “ecology score,” it is hard to maintain because of the need to meet your development objective. The descriptions of game elements are rather cynical, which suits me fine, because I do tend to be cynical about development and its inveterate greenwashing.
“Alba: A Wildlife Adventure” just came out today - haven’t tried it yet but it seems lovely, according to this review.
Hi @MarkBittle , and welcome!
If you like a post, agree with it, or generally want to show support, you can use the “like” button (shaped like heart):
Quick question… do “likes” keep a topic alive? ie do they reset the auto-close countdowns like a reply would?
Can the mods do something about these posts that are adding advertisement links in the quotes? At least remove them from the quotation, they probably don’t link to very trustworthy websites.
that last post of mine seems to have a large white space after it… but for me it is blank… does it appear to have something else to everyone else?
[edit: and now the blank white space is gone… ???]
Some new users joined and made their first posts in here, quoting previous messages and embedding links to suspicious websites within those quotes to make it look like the original posters had included them themselves. It targets people who read responses later on and instead of going up to view the original post, they read and click links from the quoted response instead. The links were to websites involving software piracy and game emulation. Those just got deleted, I think, hence the spaces.
This one was just linked on the Discord server, it’s a wildlife photography game that looks fairly promising. Called Beasts of Maravilla Island: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1378020/Beasts_of_Maravilla_Island/
I’ve never played it, but apparently there’s another fairly old underwater diving game called Aquanaut’s Adventure, which also had a lot of wildlife to document.
It apparently had a sequel called Aquanaut’s Holiday: Hidden Memories.
Leafy sea dragon and Mola mola.
Darn. Sorry because this is kinda necroposting but I seriously FEEL this.
I absolutely love games with nature at its focus. Thing is, it’s incredible niche (pun intended, if you know you know) and often ignored in gaming.
Even if it was just breeding and survival, I’d take it. I really love creature collectors but oh if only they were built with actual natural roles in mind. In that sense, a lot of farming games sort of have it?
Though I want more wild, even educational ones as well.
There are games like this, that are focused on sharing species and their unique info, but they’re mobile games. Good ones in fact. Runaway makes good ones for example: http://www.runawayplay.com/
Computer games though? I’ll try to not add things that aren’t already listed but I might repeat:
- Ecosystem (Ecosystem/evolution simulator)
- SPECIES: ALRE (Ecosystem/evolution simulator)
- Wingspan (Strategy cards on bird migration)
- NICHE: A Genetics Survival Game (Ok so I mentioned it. Board game style based on evolution)
- Empires of the Undergrowth (Ant colony management sim)
- Meadow (Technically a Shelter game)
- Paper Beast (Ecosystem simulator, fantasy setting)
- Coral Island (Farming game that has gameplay based on coral reefs, not out yet tho)
- Drunk on Nectar (Survival, think of Shelter but it’s bugs, plants grow in real time)
Also this has been mentioned for sure but I should also tell everyone that there is a literal iNat simulator of a game… Alba: A Wildlife Adventure. You take pics of creatures to ID them, and raise awareness on the importance of ecosystems.
iNat simulator alright! Haha
I seriously love what I see. I’m following that one, thanks for sharing!
I’m not sure if it qualifies as a game, but have you tried flOw by Jenova Chen? https://www.jenovachen.com/flowingames/flowing.htm
(The play online link is broken, but the offline download still works. It requires Flash Player, but there is a PS3/PS4 version, I think.)
Oh yeah, I remember playing this on PS3.