Devtober Day 8

Today, I did a display that shows some of the results of this genetic “color math” looks like, and in the process, re-enabled my code for melanistic and leucistic fauna as rare traits. Anyway, enough bugs were fixed that I could finally run my new visual demo.

I spent a lot of effort on this patterning system, which is deterministic from the genes. This is a placeholder template, so it’s not final art by any means (and I’m learning from this first demo that the coverage masks I made should have fewer in-between areas, for one; it defeats the point of a coverage mask if it just faintly shows the pattern most of the way on the body). But it is still my own art, which I drew in Krita. Just… faster than I should have, because I badly wanted to see the results of my programming.

Anyway, some of the results are pretty neat!

But flexibility comes at a cost. Some of the randomizations are… a bit of a mess.

Other times the complexity sort of cancels out and leaves it looking “speckled”.

Melanism is a modifier on the colors to make them darker and more saturated, so if the colors started out as very light, it can cancel out…

A more typical melanistic fauna. This exposes an art issue with the temporary template, as the discrepancy between the size of the teeth is far more noticeable when melanism darkens everything but the teeth.

Leucistic trait does the opposite of melanistic. It lightens and desaturates all of the fauna’s colors.

There’s crossing, and offspring. Though, I need to scrutinize the genetic data that is being produced here, as melanism is supposed to be a dominant, not recessive trait.

This demo still needs more connective tissue (back buttons, etc.) before I can share a playable version to the public, and I need to fix an issue with performance once there are a certain amount of saved fauna. Still, it feels good to have something I can actually play with.