- Stats of different tetragotchis visible along with the dashboard you
talked about to switch between each.
- Maybe some sort of way of "keeping score" in different ways
(fitness, assimilations/kills, units currently controlled)
- Ability to control multiple Tetragotchis at once
- I feel like if you lose your last unit then your attacker should
assimilate and be able to control your old body, and then you should
be able to go through a rebirth phase where you create a new one
- A color customization option!
- Semi-programmable simple behaviors to set up for your tertragotchi
(aggressive, defensive, evasive)

I have no idea how hard each of these would be to implement, but they
are just suggestions of course!

Anyways, I'd like to ask for some advice.  I'm trying to self-teach
myself some coding.  I'm interested in the design of artificial life
simulations such as Tetragotchi, and other "natural" things like the
random maps that Minecraft creates.  However, I am completely new and
I understand that reaching that level will take me many years.  Is
there any advice you would give to a beginner like me?  I'd be
flattered for any help from someone who created something like this
game.

I have it set up so that you can easily select among a number of different tetragotchis whose names appear in a list on the right (where the text is now).  The idea is that we will soon be building tribes of tetragotchis to battle with other tribes, instead of the current scenario with exactly one tetragotchi per player.

The current game has players assimilating each other, producing competitors that share the same body shape afterwards.  I will be changing that system so that we actually battle and kill the tetragotchis of opponents, and the planet surface will turn red where kills have taken place.

In future versions you will not assimilate opponents, but instead you will eat until you are full enough that you are able to give birth to a clone, and in that way we will build up our tribes and prepare them for battle.  When online you will be able to give commands to all members of your tribe in turn and that way we can organize massive concerted attacks.

I will also be working to get as many numbers and statistics available about each tetragotchi as possible.

Color customization is probably a good idea so we can clearly see the difference in color between the different teams, but I'm not sure that the semi-programmable behavior is something that I can realistically add on the short term.

I'm not sure what kind of advice I could give you for learning how to program this kind of stuff, but probably one of the best ways is to fetch the source code of something that exists and try to figure out how to tweak it a little yourself.  This would involve, in the case of tetragotchi, downloading the source code and setting up a development environment, and I'm not sure how much of that you can already handle yourself.  The nice thing about doing it that way is that you start from a working scenario and you can experiment, but it may even be better to start building something really simple from scratch.  How elaborate a thing do you want to code in?  Tetragotchi is the result of quite a few months of part-time software engineering, and you might prefer a much simpler petri-dish kind of bacteria world to play with while learning.

Gerald de Jong
http://delving.eu

On Jun 29, 2011, at 9:35 AM, Erik M-G <erikmillerga...@gmail.com> wrote: