Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Creatures (video game series)
Summary
Creatures is an artificial life video game series created in the mid-1990s by English computer scientist Steve Grand while working for the Cambridge video game developer Millennium Interactive.
The gameplay focuses on raising alien creatures known as Norns, teaching them to survive, helping them explore their world, defending them against other species, and breeding them. Words can be taught to the creatures by a learning computer (for verbs) or by repeating the name of the object while the creature looks at it. Once a creature understands language, the player can instruct their creature by typing in instructions, which the creature can choose to obey.
A complete life cycle is modeled for the creatures - childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and senescence, each with its own unique needs. The gameplay is designed to foster an emotional bond between the player and their creatures. Rather than taking a scripted approach, the games in the Creatures series were driven by detailed biological and neurological simulation and its unexpected results.
There have been six major Creatures releases from Creature Labs: between 1996 and 2001 there were three main games, the Docking Station add-on (generally referred to as a separate game) and two children's games, and there were three games created for console systems.
The program was one of the first commercial titles to code artificial life organisms from the genetic level upwards using a sophisticated biochemistry and neural network brains, including simulated senses of sight, hearing and touch. This meant that the Norns and their DNA could develop and "evolve" in increasingly diverse ways, unpredicted by the makers. By breeding certain Norns with others, some traits could be passed on to following generations. The Norns turned out to behave similarly to living creatures. Norns respond to external stimuli, such as interaction with the player, and internal stimuli, such as changes in chemical concentrations or neural activities. Sight is simulated by having a group of neurons representing each type of object in the world.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.