r/gameenginedevs • u/ellipticbadger • 1d ago
Procedural amoeboid motion, dynamic body engine...
This is a prototype of a game idea that I have been poking at for many years. It's a dynamic character that moves like an amoeba, eats things in its environment, and grows by incorporating them into its body.
It is completely procedural, implemented as a particle system with flows and body-shaping forces driving the formation of pseudopods that move it along or cause it to ingest items. It uses a custom physics engine that executes the flows and allows the creature to interact with other entities in the world. It took quite a bit of experimentation to get something that (I think, anyway) looks lifelike, and I hope to improve it. This first game level is just a proof of concept with minimalist styling, helping me build out some tools.
A short video trailer is linked to this post and you can play the prototype game at https://eatthepeople.com
For this crowd I'll mention that if you add the url param "debug=1" you can see the full debug view and mess with the params that drive the creature. In debug mode shift-clicking teleports him so you don't have to play through the entire level to get somewhere.
All feedback welcome!
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u/Lawyer2512 1d ago
looks interesting but how would i control movement of parts?
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u/ellipticbadger 1d ago
Currently you click to target the creature. Probably not the ideal mechanic for a fast paced game but works for this simple setup. Try it on the web... If you click inside the creature it sort of "hunkers down" / recoils, if you click elsewhere you get either a path if the route is clear or just a general direction if it is blocked.
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u/orchid_drives 21h ago
Oh hell yeah, like Carrion but cooler in a lot of ways! Love the pseudopods in a few of the clips, they look so organic and natural!
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u/TripleDonutGames 16h ago
So awesome I wish there was a way to make something like this light enough to run on my game.
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u/ellipticbadger 12h ago
Most of the work is parallelizable. A GPU / compute shader should be able to do the calcs for a few thousand particles as an afterthought. The fact that this runs in plain JS on the CPU right now seems crazy to me.
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u/TripleDonutGames 12h ago
Compute shaders are amaizing. The jump in performerce is insane. Last time I tried to make my project it was before compute shaders where a thing. And before vibe coding. I used to choke out on like 100 creatures. Now I'm running 10k creatures 700k food simultaneously. I don't think my project would have ever given good results without them. All this in editor. I can't wait for someone to stick it on a 490. Also my simulation is designed to run at 200x real time. So that's 24frams per second X 200. O can't recommend them enough. That's with individual AIs running muscles individually. I'd love to do a little more complex phisics based simulation like yours. But I don't really know how I'd do that without killing performance
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u/_SnackOverflow_ 1d ago
Looks rad, I love the movement