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

this game is amazing!! i was playing the web version and i was blown away by the details! ive played a couple of 'brain making sims' before but they were janky and unreliable, so i was really impressed to see how well this works!! 

at first i was pretty confused on how all the different things in the brain worked and was hesitant to try and make a creature from scratch because i honestly had no idea what most of those things meant, but after some trial and error i actually managed to figure out some bits and managed to make a controllable creature! so points to you for making it simple enough that even i could understand it :D

oh and once i figured it out i spent so long making a creature! i really love the variety of shapes you can make them out of (and how the different shapes have different functions too!) and i absolutely love the inclusion of bioluminescence (i definitely overused that feature,,,no regrets). unfortunately before i could upload it the game froze while i was taking it for one last spin so i had to reload and lost my little creature :c (farewell lil guy, you looked super cool before u were eaten by the void u_u). though of course this is in development so im not that upset!! i just figured it may be worth mentioning in case you're looking for bugs to squish c:

but yeah overall im absolutely loving this game! the visuals are lovely to look at as well and the internal mechanics are genuinely so impressive so good job!!!! i am completely broke but just know that if i had the money i would absolutely buy this game :D (wow this is a long comment O_O)

I really appreciate you for making this game! I got this game in the racial justice bundle and honestly glad I've gotten to experience this even though my ecosystems aren't the best I still try (they are all loved : ) I wanted to use this since we have a upcoming project in zoology and I found the perfect chance to not only get better at this but to show my other classmates about this game as well!! I know some kids may not be interested and I understand that but this is such a neat little game it's hard for me not to show it off. I also talked to my teacher about it, I hope he remembers to check it out it could, he could teach so much more things with this program, and not only that it would be interactive with students, we wouldn't have to sit in a lecture about invertebrate because we could make them ourselves! I'm rambling right now but I just had to show my appreciation, thank you! : )

So I've recently been experimenting with making ecosystem chains, and sometimes the ecosystem does not interact the way I want to because of creatures of the same species gobbling each other up.(Though it still is fun to take control of my own creature and join in on the gobbling!) Also, could you implement a healing sort of mechanism where creatures that were injured from predators can grow back parts once they get enough nutrients?

hey do you have discord?

and if so can i friend you?

also the demo version is vary laggy and i want to by the game but dose it work on cromebooks and ipads?

Just a quick question: I noticed that there don't seem to be any more muscle spots on the carnivorous jaws, just curious if it's a glitch or it's on purpose?

Just wanted to say I've had a lot of fun with this game, and I see how it could have HUGE potential as a learning tool besides that.

I can count few occasions where I felt as accomplished as when I finally made a little organism that could reliably navigate without constantly braining itself.

I have had some trouble, though. The version I downloaded for Windows (crescent-loom-windows-beta.zip) doesn't seem to want to connect? I can save and load creatures from disc but it won't go online. Is that normal, do I have to play the browser or another version to access the online functions/designs?