This game has great potential, here is my wishlist for Crescent Loom / 2 if you intend on working on it. Note: I am not a neurologist, but I am a person who likes designing things - in particular I have 800 hours in From the Depths which is a vehicular building game.

- Optimisation. Half of the game's selling point is being able to program your creature using neurons, however trying to do more than animate your ragdoll creature (i.e. collision avoidance / hunting) severely bogs down performance for seemingly no good reason, even with performance boosts from running the game natively. I read that Crescent Loom 2 would be made in a tailored engine, probably to handle this simulation better, but a performance update would be nice.
- - I assume that every neuron / axon's signal is being updated at frame time, which would be extremely bad for performance. Compiling signal strengths as functions over time, and using calculus to calculate when conditions are met (e.g. delay neuron) would greatly reduce iterations.
- - I feel like the signal graphs of every neuron / axon updates even when I'm not looking (haven't tested fully), which would be a needless calculation.
- - Every neuron's state change gets rendered on the brain even when you zoom out, LoD could be implemented here.
- - If there's troubleshooting steps to be done on my end to improve performance, I haven't done anything so I would love to know. The game also just seems to be... running poorly, without having a high CPU load.

- Physics joints / fixtures.
- - I feel that this is easier described with an example. I wanted to make a creature with a jaw that could open and close. I was able to animate it with muscles just fine, however both jaws could independently swivel left and right. If you imagine how gears rotate in opposite directions, that is the kind of stiffness I would prefer for opening and closing jaws
- - All parts will always have a single point of failure because every part is extruded from the brain, being able to brace together parts (thinking Besiege) would be excellent. This mostly relates to using bones / structural parts as armour.

- Proper combat. Jaws instantly kill parts belonging to other creatures, including other jaws, which makes predator vs predator confrontations disappointing. It would be cool to see either physics based destruction (using f=ma for damage and perhaps using cross section to differentiate between part severing / blunt damage?). Either that or standardised parts that deal fixed damage would be fine too (thinking Spore / Sipho).

- Improved axon controls. I wish you could select an axon (edge) and edit its vertices. The controls are fine for really simple brains since you can simply paint the path, but the moment axons cross you need to rely on the pathfinding which doesn't always give you a nice tesselation. Do axons even need to take up space?

- Sandbox tools. Described in a comment below, but some sort of level editor or at the bare minimum the ability to load in creatures onto the cursor would make it easier to slam monsters against each other.

Footnote: I love Lancer Tactics. I haven't been able to get a party to play Lancer with, but already having limited build customisation is pretty awesome, and now I'm fixated on Lancer content :)

Will there ever be level editor?

Is this a demo version or the full version? And is their multiplayer?

Is this project still being worked on? i first saw it on youtube like 5 years ago and i still love it but im gonna be really sad if its dead :(

I'm a really late arrival to this neurological sandbox. I discovered it purely by accident when looking for a sandbox game like Powdertoy (yes, those are two different genres). It's fantastic and I'm glad to hear it will still be around despite finalization at 1.0. I also am happy to hear a possible Version 2.0 is planned in the years to come.  It's nice to get a peek behind the scenes at what makes me do the things I do without thought, like maintaining balance while walking, instantly pulling my hand back after touching a hot stove and so on.

What is the difference between the downloadable and the website in terms of functionality?

The TAB button does not work to change connection types in the demo, so I can't actually get the cell to do anything at all. If this is intentional as part of the demo, then I'm not sure why you're presenting it at all, since it's functionally unusable to demonstrate the first thing it suggests you try to build.

Additionally, the downloadable demo version simply does nothing at all. I'm not even sure which file is supposed to launch the game. Index opens a blank page, favicon opens a picture of the icon, and main.js just crashes outright.

:/

tutorial is broken, it stops working after it assigns you to see how the pacemaker works with the muscles in the brain

Loving this game as a tool for teaching introductory neuroscience at Oberlin College! Thank you for creating it! I'm so impressed.

I'm just starting to use it in teaching. I'm pairing it with readings from the late neuroanatomist Valentino Braitenberg's book, Vehicles. This game lets you implement some of the simple creatures, or vehicles, described in that wonderful book, and that really brings the ideas to life.

I hope you keep up development, because students love this! I bet you could get site license purchases from colleges and universities for this (if that was something you wanted).

Hi! I've finally picked this up after getting through a bundle pack, but it seems to crash after a while and I don;t know if im past the tutorial (not that it's hard, it just stops talking after i plug in the auto neurons).

Then I tried using the keyboard inputs so i have direct control of my creature, and then after a while of playing, I get the big blue orb presumably from eating enough food and I crash shortly after.

bad tutorial can't even understand much of the fundamentals

I saw your biography at your itch.io page and was amazed to discover that you are a neuroscientist and also an indie game developer and I felt so identifed by your history because I am studying biology and I also likes pretty much neuroscience. I also likes to develope games and I usually make the music but I also have learnt some programming by myself. And when I played your game Aesthetic and learnt that you also were LGTBIQ+ as I am, I was very surprised by the resemblances. Well to the point, I wanted to say that I loved Aesthetic(but that game doesn't comments section and this game was the one you mentioned in your biography as your main project) and wanted to ask you how you can work as a neuroscientist and at the same time be an indie developer because I'm very interested in doing that too. PD: I find the idea of your thesis very interesting because I love zoology and neurobiology.

How do I actually play it? I payed but the version 1 html5 doesn't work.

Edit: I got the logs

Hello! Is there a community/ discord server somewhere for this game? Would love a place to share my creations. Thank you!

I thought the game was on V.1.0 but I see 0.7.22 when I launch. Also is the tutorial supposed to end when she tells you to press play?

So I bought a bunch of schtuff on itch.io and I am going through it all and seeing if I like it or not. This got my attention. I am on Arch Linux. I am slowly learning and have resolved many issues. One I cannot get past, when trying to run this, I get:
"./Crescent Loom: error while loading shared libraries: libcurl-nss.so.4: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory"

What are the requirements for this? I have gone into the arch repository and installed: 

curl, curlftpfs, lib32-curl, lib32-libcurl-compat, lib32-libcurl-gnutls, libcurl-compat, libcurl-gnutls, nss, lib32-nss

I then went looking for 'libcurl-nss.so' and I cannot find it anywhere under /root. I have updated all installed packages and reboot and still nothing.

Crescent Loom 1.0 is a huge success in so many ways, Bravo in so many ways, keep up the excellent work your doing. The foundation is amazing and solid. i will certainly keep an eye open for your work coz' anything that follows  will certainly be great , interesting , touching etc    thanks 

In the linux version the game sometimes crashes when an egg tries to hatch. I looked at the terminal output message and it says:

Cerberus Runtime Error : Memory access violation

I have the full logs if you need them. Also i tried the HTML version using firefox and it just gives me a black screen, the demo works fine though.

The stand alone player consistently slows down and eventually crashes as I play between 30 minutes and an hour, but it saves what your last build was and replaces it on restart so I'm not even mad. Though if it stayed stable long term I would definitely just set up an aquarium of little custom critters and let it run.

Hi, I am create a co-op bundle to celebrate World Environment Day, I want invited you to join, all content related with nature and environment can be join, if you are interested you have join in the follow link: https://itch.io/jam/world-environment-day-bundle-2022

I'm excited and I appreciate your interest and your participation, thank you very much and good luck!

This is a really cool and well implemented idea.

To me, it's just missing a puzzle/problem game setup to drive players to explore the possibility space and discover their own solutions.

Too bad this project seems to be abandoned. Here a dump of the console in case the developer decides to come back:

Uncaught DOMException: The operation is insecure. main.js:1
Uncaught TypeError: c_Rotator.m_flashTimer is null
    m_Update https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    p_OnUpdate https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    UpdateGame https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    UpdateGame https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    UpdateGame https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    i https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    setTimeout handler*BBHtml5Game.prototype.ValidateUpdateTimer https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    SetUpdateRate https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    bb_app_SetUpdateRate https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    m_UpdateGameVMValue https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    m_Set3 https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    m_Set4 https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    m_ResetToDefault https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    p_OnCreate https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    StartGame https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    StartGame https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    Run https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    Main https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/main.js:1
    onload https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/index.html:140
    EventHandlerNonNull* https://v6p9d9t4.ssl.hwcdn.net/html/5572115-546301/index.html:40
main.js:1:340967

This is while running it from their website on FF with all blockers disabled.

im not really sure that 'scheming weasel' was the best choice for the trailer lol

also how do you run the demo? i cant run it on file or in the itch app.

I am new to the game. I did the tutorial to the point it tells me to press play and watch my creature move, but after that, i am not sure what to do next. is that the end of the tutorial or is there more to learn the systems of making sensory stuff work like eyes, whiskers, etc and to react to the environment?

This game is AWESOME! Just what I didn't know I needed! I've run through the tutorial, and flipped through the patterns (a genius idea, the pattern book), and I already see the massive potential for what else I can do. 

But I'm having a problem: the Tab key doesn't cycle through the neuron connection types for me. Is there an alternate input that does the same thing? Like how you can move the camera with WASD or by using the left mouse button to pan around the environment? 

It looks like all the creatures in the pattern book require connections of type Inhibit to keep the neurons from all firing at once, and I can't figure out how to do that. I'm not sure if this is just my computer or a problem with the game, but it's happening on the downloaded version and the online one. 

Also, I love the music. It's very chill. 

This is definitely going to be my favorite game for a while!! Great idea and swell execution so far :))

I love this game!

maybe you could could make the way to put multiple creatures in one ecosystem easier, and make them compete, like the race mode and the only ecosystem but combined! 

another thing would be adding more maps and ready ecosystems!

as well as making the current non walled maps bigger/making it so there are more obstacles and decorations.

a fatal flaw i noticed is that a carnivore eating its offspring actually has some net gain, (i think), it should be more of a loss than a gain, also there should be a way of differentiating your species from others in the neuron system

other than that, i really enjoyed playing this game :)

Hey, I really like the game, super interesting and fun to experiment with. That said, whenever I try to run it on Chrome it works pretty well until anything tries to lay an egg, then it freezes up and can't be recovered. =(

This is the log that appears when it freezes up: Creature '' laying egg.

Anyways, hope you fix it and keep up the good work! It's inspirational!

EDIT:
Have you considered adding scenarios? Like "you must consume X pieces of food before Y time/energy runs out and you can only use Z number of  creature parts". Idk, I think the extra challenge would be great, just a thought!

Could you make it so that you can toggle on a version like before all  of those neuron gates were there and all the complicated neurobiology stuff? Maybe just a mode to set where you can put the complexity level down like to the version were all the gates and the yellow lines weren't there? Other than that I've been having fun with cannibalism, but in the end my babies got my fishie