Terrance888
Discord Reigns
I would think that all "energy" genes naturally have a food seeking component. Like tux said, flesh eating is almost a behavorial gene in that having it starts hunting.
Okay.I'd rather not have anything new come from plankton directly which is why I didn't give them any genetic details. Looking at your long term plan, the best way would be to start with maybe the Tailus from Era 1 (it is still around) and for your changes, add plant eating and remove plankton eating. This would put you only 3 genes away from your goal and avoid directly evolving from plankton.
More specifically, I really enjoyed NESLife3. I wouldn't go quite so far as to rig votes, but it was the one thing I generally hoped would come back most of the time. I thought about doing this almost as soon as it became apparent that NESLife3 was going to go into near-permanent hibernation.
But I never wanted to step on Daft's toes or be seen as the guy trying to steal his idea by others. I spent lots of times trying to come up with various other NESes; I've worked on maps of pseudo-earths, rulesets, and blackboxes. I finally decided to do this after talking to my biology professor about NESLife3 who was very interested in it and the teachable concepts in it. I came home, wrote up the starting info, drew the starting creatures, asked Daft if it was okay, presented it on the ideas thread, and opened this thread as soon as I had at least 1 person appear to be interested.
Lessons learned:
I understand why it can take a long time to get an update up and rolling.
Trying to stay on schedule (posted or otherwise) will burn me out very quickly...This may be an issue I need to address before trying to run a more "normal" type NES.
While you can say all day that the pictures don't matter and any update is good, there is something special in seeing your creature visualized by another person. <- learned this from NESLife3
Posting the final product of an update really feels impressive while at the same time always feeling inadequate for the amount of time you made the players wait for it.
There is likely more lessons learned, but I'll spare you. That and I don't fully know how to express all of them.
I kinda stole the Idea off a few spore forums, and twisted it a bit into a form that would fit a NES.
this was long long ago. even before spore came out. there were these evolution games. the author would write up events, then pose a vote to the readers. they would vote on what evolutions would be done, how the creature at the focus of this story would react. rinse, repeat. I really should go back and look a few of them up to see what they have become.
anyway, I simply changed it to a multi-player format. each player took control over a single creature/cell and competed against each other. Daft took it farther with better graphics and much more detailed updates.