Spore Style Game

In this game you the players (whoever many of you there may be at any time) will choose the actions and evolutions for a race of creatures that starts out as a single celled organism and... well we'll see how far it goes. You will also be able to choose other stuff about the world/universe in which it lives.

Just post whatever decisions you want to make for the creature that is the current protagonist and I will take the suggestions of everyone who has said something by.... well really whenever the hell I feel like time is up for that thing (minimum 1 response). If there are multiple conflicting ideas (examples: "eat that thing!" and "run away!" or "we should evolve X ability" and "we should evolve Y ability") I will try to be fair about it. This might mean mashing the two ideas together, going with whichever one I think works better, going with whichever one was posted first, or asking for a tie breaker opinion from someone if I think we can get one in a reasonable amount of time.

People are free to include more than one idea in a post, as long as they're not saying conflicting things. This in particular includes deciding on not immediately important features like the name of a creature or object (celestial or otherwise), features of the universe or whatnot that don't need to be defined before we start with the creature, etc. In the case of those kinds of things it will more or less be first come first served (depending on interest).

I will probably provide ideas at random whenever I think people might benefit from some or at least some examples. As far as what it takes to evolve your creature, I'll probably be keeping the actual numbers stuff behind the scenes unless it seems like it'd work better otherwise I suppose.


So we probably want to start with what the planet is like. Do not feel required to give regular responses. We can go for a discworld just as easily as we can go for a dyson sphere or something donut shaped. We just need the important things like the shape (or other nature of the world/universe if it's that kind of thing) and what things it's mostly made of (don't need to be super specific, just general will work).

Though if you have random thoughts on how many/the composition of moons/suns/stars/space (or space equivalent), feel free to voice those as well since we'll need at least some basic amount of info on those things too before getting to our creature.

If there's any questions/something I forgot to address here just bug me on skype or something. After we have some decisions made I'll make an OOC to keep track of stuff in a place where we can all see it and not have to constantly read through this main game thread.

Well, as for the planet I'm thinking something made mostly of ice or cold materials, maybe with large crystal formations,* and I think it would be cool to have a small sun orbiting around a big sun, maybe cold stars for both of them.** As for the shape of the planet I'm thinking ring shaped.*** Cool idea by the way!

Science facts! (Optional, but pretty cool in my opinion.):

Just trying to fully wrap my head around what you're saying so I have the same picture in my head that you do.

So the planet would be a ring of mostly ice and crystals and metals (not entirely sure what you mean by cold materials so I'm just guessing) and the water would be mostly pulled to the inner side of the ring. I'm not sure what you mean by the water forming a disc. Would it just be flat around the edge of the ring or would there be a disc of water in the otherwise empty hole of the ring?

And a follow up question, is the ring "solid" or is it hollow? (Basically, is there a potential for things to be living on an inside surface or not).

And just to make sure, there would still be atmospheric gasses so that the outer side of the ring's surface would be habitable right? (Because otherwise it's a atmospheric-less surface with no water and I imagine that would make things rather difficult.)

Edit: Keep in mind there's no need for everything we say to work in a proper scientific manner and that we can be essentially creating new elements to explain things that would not work on earth.

Edit 2: So I discussed some sciency stuffs with another person and these were our conclusions.

1) Stars don't orbit each other the way planets orbit stars. So either we have binary star system (this is not a problem, it's just a thing to note) or you have something like a brown dwarf and not a star. Also, the size of the stars don't matter, it's largely the heat. But to make things... not horribad we're going to say the "important" star for this solar system is still the big one. The second one just adds enough heat to basically cause seasons. (If it's a brown dwarf it needs to not be far away though because otherwise the heat would be negligible and have no real effect.)

From the perspective of the big star the planet needs to basically be a rotating circle (otherwise we're not going to have a ring shape as one side would melt unevenly).

The disc of water in the middle works only in the case that there is an element in the water there that causes water not to freeze, since otherwise it's exposed to space and the heat bleeds out. However we determined that while likely pretty cold here, the light from the stars still means that without the water freezing that life could still potentially survive in said water. (Maybe, close enough for our understanding of things anyway.)

Oh I see, Sorry to get a bit confusing with the suns but I don't know too much about astrology. And yes, I meant it would pretty much be in the empty space of the planet, more concentrated as it gets nearer to the sides, as that's how I'm pretty sure it would work and I kind of find it fun to use real science for at least partial constraints, Not saying anyone else has to I'm just saying. And now that I think about it the disc of water inside the ring of the planet Would probably be frozen (Which would make the thing look like a giant lens and be pretty cool looking in my opinion, especially from inside the disc when the suns are shining). I'm thinking that the ring itself be made of metal, while the ice be the aforementioned disc. I also remembered that it's actually only small gems that don't look like the stereotypical gems, and by large crystal formations I meant basically huge crystals poking out of the ice, as that's the place crystals would most thrive unless the planet is old enough to have a heated core within the ring itself. If that's the case then there may be quite a few  large underground lakes, letting the crystals form more all over the planet, also giving a basis for the life on the planet, crystals being quite close to classified as living themselves.And by the way, if anyone else comes up with a cooler/less confusing planet fell free to use this one as a moon or something, or just use parts of the idea, Hell, feel free to not use it at all (Though if it was a moon it would make for some pretty bad-ass solar eclipses). Wow that's a big wall of text.

EDIT: And of course I meant for it to rotate basically like the spinning inner rim of a globe, simple orbital physics. ...Well kind of, I mean simple for orbital physics.

Well Kal, the only other person who has explicitly expressed interest in this game, doesn't seem to want to worldbuild at this time (he explicitly said so). So I leave the matter of the ice vs flowing water + non-freezing element lens up to you. Either way works for me and is cool (sorry). As far as heated core or not, also up to you (though it certainly gives me more earth-like elements that I'm familiar with to work with and I like the way you described the results of that).

One thing that I will suggest is that this planet doesn't have an axial tilt like earth does. That would cause issues with the whole ice thing and axial tilt + two external heat sources would result in seasonal Idon'tknowwhatthefuck.

As for the two "stars", no worries man I don't really know a lot about these things either and it was a friend pointing it out to me. Still, you should make the choice if it's a binary star system or if it's one star and a close by brown dwarf. Neither choice makes a ton of difference from the other as far as we're concerned. The most it would effect is length of seasons. (The brown dwarf would make for long seasons and the second binary star would make for.... well whatever we feel like since there's so much to consider about stars that we don't need to define that we could basically say whatever.) Oh and on the subject of the stars, you should probably pick out a color for them. (And this is another thing I don't think really matters so choose whatever the heck colors you want that aren't purple or some complete nonsense like brown or black.) (Note: though I guess you can choose brown or black if we're abandoning "as real as we can get" still, why now?)

After all those decisions the only ones we really need to make to get into the "meat" of the game as it were is if there are any moons/rings and how many and what they're make of/how they look.

Oh okay then, I'd say we go with the heated cores and lakes, and as for the orbiting objects, it would be more likely to have a ring then a moon, or be a moon to another planet itself, since as I've said, it would probably be a recently formed planet. In fact, I think being a moon itself would make somewhat more sense, as the crystals would take time to form unless broken off from somewhere else, or even planted by a space faring species to see if life could form from crystals. As for the suns I kind of want to say one's purple and the other one's yellow, so that Superman can have super powers in at least one half of the year. And actually, with the underground lakes that would make certain areas have more crystals, even going up to having somewhat of a forest of them, while other parts would be wasteland-like, which gives a very large array of life available. By the way, I'm typing different possibilities because I can't really decide between them myself, so I'll just let you guys decide.

"You guys" currently is just you since it doesn't seem like anyone else cares about this aspect. I reject purple sun! Pick another color! (Also, which is which?)

I actually think this planet being in fact a moon would make the shape of it even more improbable than it already is. That said, I can just say "well whatever" if you really want it to be a moon anyway. The more I think about it, the less rings seem to make any sense on this thing. *shrug*

Also, while I won't veto it outright, I think it's more interesting if we don't say life was intentionally seeded here by another intelligent race. That said, we could always say crystals formed early due to other reasons or even that some of them came partially formed from meteors and such. *shrug* We really don't need to get into the technicalities there. You want big crystal formations by the time you guys are in control of the race, that's what happened for whatever reason. It's at least possible in many ways so, no need to make decisions based solely on that aspect.

Actually, neutron stars are purple, They're small suns that I'm pretty sure may be able to collapse into black holes with enough mass. But if not then does a big yellow one and a red dwarf sound good? Also, while the ring shape is quite weird, we don't really have to do everything completely in the bounds of science, I just like when science can be applied. And it would actually make some sense if meteors hit it in a way that basically made it a huge, somewhat tilted line, at which point it might basically bend towards the center, hitting the other end and due to equal and opposite reactions, stopped, making it at least theoretically possible. I'm thinking the ring mostly because it would look somewhat cool, By the way, a ring would be about as probable as moons, since they both are at their core just orbital objects, a ring simply being a bunch of small ones and a moon being one large one. Any orbital objects could work, They would just orbit in more of the shape of a large wavy line around the planet, being farther out on the parts over the ice and closer in over the ring itself. I'm trying to clear all this up since I think the walls of text have gone on far enough about the planet, since the focus is more the creature. And about that "Guys" thing, I was mostly just talking to anyone who happens to want to say something, including you.

EDIT: Oh and also with the other space faring race thing I was mostly just taking a shot in the dark, random possibilities that could lead to the planet looking like that and such.

Ok, I'm having a hell of a time understanding what you mean about the rings around the planet, but I guess it doesn't matter much. The important aspect is "ring, no moons". Maybe you can draw me a picture or something some time to illustrate what you mean.

As for the color... yeah, I should have been clear. I know stars come in purple, I just don't like the color purple and having a purple star would mean a lot of purple light and.... yeah, that'd be a lot of purple. Anyway, big yellow and small red dwarf it is. (Yeah it's amusing you have to specify the red dwarf is small... but you do.)

Ok, I'll make an OOC thread now with our current details and after that I'll come back here and make a post for where we're going to start to getting into the meat of the game. Of course, at any time people are free to suggest details on the larger scale or other ones that don't immediately matter, but that people might want to address at some point before said things become relevant.

Control over lifeform start

The camera starts in the deep star studded void of space and pans around to a view of the binary star system. There is a yellow/red lens flare as the camera quickly pans it's view and zooms over to a slowly spinning ice covered ring with a "lens" that reflects and refracts light brilliantly. We continue to zoom in over ice covered flats, rugged outcroppings of rock jutting out of the ice here and there on rare occasion, and large crystalline formations that make one wonder just how many supermen are here to justify this amount of fortresses of solitude. The silly thought it washed away, almost literally, as we pass through a storm cloud. There's a brilliant blue-green flash of lightning and the camera nearly comes to a stop, pans around rapidly, showing us a blur rather than reveal too much of where we are before tilting downwards and sharply diving at an angle. It submerses without a splash (since there's no actual physical camera) into a body of water. At this point it's hard to tell how much of what we see is the camera sinking into the water or simply zooming in in and farther in until we can finally make out the microscopic things of what would normally be little consequence. But here we chance upon a novel discovery. Things in these waters are moving..... of their own accord! Albeit if only managing to do so with a bit of wiggling. Well, they are quite young and I suppose we can forgive them this inelegance no? So, choosing on such lifeform at semi-random, you all now have a measure of command over the choices and fate of this creature and its breed for a great length of time to come.

Now, our creature is not much to look at. As simple as simple could be in fact. It is a blob of vague shape and little else. It can, like some other things in these waters move only by wiggling its entire body, and this form of locomotion leaves much to be desired. You'll just have to work with what little you have and try and build upon this wondrous blank slate.

Of course it will be impossible to "paint" much of anything if our poor creature does not have the energy to survive to procreation. So it seems the first course of action presents itself to us.

Nearby we can see (and I say we, for this creature has no sense of any such things) a number of ways for it to gain said energy and perhaps you fine sir/madam will be able to conjure upon a few more.

There is a nearby fleck of ice (being somewhat larger than our creature) that may perhaps contain some mineral or the like, there is a bit of hard rock of some sort (roughly twenty times the size of our creature) that one might hope to with effort digest something of, the creature could simply wait for a blob of easy to digest mineral-rich solution to pass nearby, or perhaps one could prey upon another creature looking to do the same that seems to not have even mustered the mighty wiggle. Further options include the dangerous prospect of trying to consume another wiggling lifeform in the vicinity or simply wiggling in the direction of the surface and attempting to absorb the energy of refracted light.

Suggested actions
1. Wiggle towards hard rock. Could provide a shelter if needed, though we'll probably need some sort of acid to dissolve it.
2. Try to dissolve/absorb nutrients from the rock. If we can't get the actual rock, maybe there's stuffs on the surface that we can scrub off and make use of.

Thoughts on the other potentials
Hunting: With wiggling as our only current action, combat's probably not the best place to be. Let's get poison or teeth or something before we start doing aggressive actions.
Eating waste of other creatures: It's literally waste, we probably won't get much utility out of it. We'd need to go near creatures on a much greater scale than ourselves to find amounts of usable minerals, and being near things that could just accidentally kill us doesn't seem like a good place to be.
Ice flek: We could do this instead of the hard rock, and it'd probably be easier to melt the ice and get some minerals out of that, but it seemed to imply not very much nutritional content.

I agree with Quiet, the rock seems the best option right now, though I suggest making it a home more then eating it.

Ok, you head to the rock and do what you can. You don't have the strength you do anything like carve out a niche to hole yourself up in or anything, but eventually you do manage to pry loose some nourishment. You still need more though. Same options as before pretty much, aside from the fact that you'd remain on this rock if you want to try here some more.

Also a second choice to be made. The current area you are in is largely water and a small amount liquid nitrogen. You could move to an area with very little nitrogen, more nitrogen, or remain in the same water/nitrogen mixture type area.

My suggestions:
The creature pushes the ice over to the rock and smacks it into it repeatedly, trying to carve the rock more. Meanwhile trying to examine its environment more as it attempts this mindless task.

Sadly you really don't have to capacity to do that. If you leave the rock it will pretty much be way outside of your movement range by the time you could get back to it. I suppose I could have been more clear in that although you have the same general options, we aren't talking about the same actual objects outside of the rock and the surface. Of course, even if none of this were the case, you don't really have much strength to push things with, a flek of ice probably wouldn't have much effect on a bit of rock aside from moving it, and most importantly, your creature does not have the intelligence to intentionally carry out that task, and it wouldn't ever really carry it out on accident as far as I can see.

Still, keep this kind of creativity in mind. Once you're not just a single celled organism with no abilities or intelligence ingenuity will likely come in handy.

New suggestion:
The creature looks around its area for more food.

The creature cannot see having no eyes. Nor sense things in any other way. Right now these choices are being presented to you guys, since the creature isn't really intentionally doing much of anything aside from moving or not moving because of biological impulse I guess.

Anyway, as far as "you" can "see" the only food is the same options as I listed before. There might be more than one of each thing in reachable area or not, but that doesn't really matter at the moment.

Edit: Unless you mean in the rock. There's probably more nutrition to be gained from it, if that's how you want to go.

Suggestions:
The creature tries to get more food from the rock, because it's his rock and he's not leaving like the only thing he knows is here.

Ok, well I'll wait for Kal or someone else to weigh in on the nomming and/or if you water to end up in a more liquid nitrogen rich or poor environment. (You don't have to get off the rock to do this. I would just say the rock happens to float that way.)

I'm fine with continuing to scour the rock. Move toward the more nitrogen area I guess?

Ok so you spend your entire life on a rock. Good times. A cold rock too. Great. You are "on the rocks" as it were. This will clearly be an upward trend for your species. =P

You spend some time on a rock and your descendants follow suit until one day one of them evolves a new feature.

What shall this new evolution be?

Feel free to suggest just about anything you think might be reasonable.

Here are a few general ideas:

Large: This is pretty much always going to be an option. It's not terribly exciting, but it means you can generally take more damage before dying (there's more of you that need damaging) as well as whatever other advantages of being larger bring. Note that you will naturally become larger as you become more complex, this just means you'll be larger than average for that level of complexity.

Lithotroph: You get more out of eating rocks. Whether this be because you simply are adapted to gain more nutrients from what's in them or you're simply better at getting those nutrients out. This by no means makes it impossible for you to get nutrition in other ways. At least, not at this point. At some later stages you will of course have a preferred diet and things like this will have an impact on that.

Some means of better movement (examples: flagella (decent speed and agility), cilia (poor speed, good agility), jet (good speed, poor agility)

A defensive feature

An offensive feature

Some kind of sense

Note that anything you choose now can at later end up changing into something quite different than what it's original purpose was depending on how you evolve. (example: flagella later becoming grasping tentacles.)

Suggestion:
I'd say we get some basic sight with snail-like eye-stalks, And it also fits for us getting very basic sight since snails don't actually have eyes, They actually just have the stalks themselves, which serve as very basic eyes.

Sight's generally a good thing to have. Works for me.

And then there was light! (Ok, it was there before, but you're noticing it now.) For now you have grown a single eye-stalk. The first thing you see is your other eye-stalkless half float over to another part of the rock. The second thing you're aware of is that a bit away there is a larger creature being attacked by one about your size, but it has a spike on it. There's nothing else immediately nearby of note, though you are free to wander off I suppose.

Suggestion:
The creature quickly hides behind its rock and watches the other creatures fight.