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 :)
Thanks for the notes :) I had the opportunity to play CL at a party this weekend, and it was the first time in years that I've really sat down with it. I agree with a lot of your points — its difficulty running even a moderately complicated creature smoothing is a major issue. I did as much rendering optimization as I could back when I was developing it... unfortunately I think it's at the limits of its technology; the physics sim is the biggest bottleneck iirc.
Axons take up tiles because 1) they need to be selectable so you can inspect them (important for a lot of classroom applications) and 2) action potentials used to have to travel down the length of them and they were all different electrical compartments. The latter was removed to make creatures more responsive, but the engine still relies on them being that sort of entity.
Crescent Loom 2 is still a number of years off (gotta finish LT), but yeah more robust combat/opportunities for creature interaction and a map editor are going to be very high priorities for it. I really can't wait to get back to this. There's so many rough edges that a better underlying engine would solve.
I honestly think that axons should atleast be soft-separated from the grid system, as in it'd be a lot easier to interact with dense axons if they only became highlighted upon selecting a connected neuron. If you look at my creature, the brain code is very messy with a lot of overlapping axons. I ran into an issue where if I arranged the axons in a particular order (if an axon had to cross another axon at its synapse point) then I wouldn't be able to adjust the synapse strength of the axon. This shouldn't be a system where order matters.
Falling back on using functions and calculus again, you could probably use a function which describes the position of a signal along a given length of axon (linear interpolation my beloved) and calculate the time it takes for the signal to reach the next neuron (which would create support for either grid / gridless axons). You could then inspect along the length of said axon and it would basically render a 'slice' of this singular at a given point in the graph.
Most of the frametime stuff should just be rendering signals if the player happens to be looking in the general direction and zoomed in enough.
Once again: I'm not a neuroscientist and I'm guessing its not as easy as it sounds. I don't know any of the math involved in neurology so I would understand if simulation accuracy couldn't be maintained with simplified calculations.
Stugan is from 2018 and has since closed. I warned you to stop spamming these threads. I'm sorry but since you can't seem to control yourself, I'm going to have to ban you.
Not likely. I have an internal one but it's hard to use, and most future dev work will be aimed at making a sequel rather than large updates to this version.
I don't understand what you mean, there's not really a demo, just the browser and the downloadable version with the only differences being the ones noted.
this game would be cool with a generic alife game mode, it would be interesting to see if any kind of ecosystem could form on its own with evolution and little plankton as the bottom of the foodchain
It's currently mostly on hiatus. I have some grant money coming down the pipe to work on it for a few months next year, but besides that all my dev time is currently on Lancer Tactics.
I fully intend to turn towards Crescent Loom 2 after that though, made in an engine that can handle more than a few creatures at a time.
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?
I hadn't heard of Powdertoy before, what a fascinating game 👀 love sandboxes like that.
Yay, I'm glad it's got you thinking about what might actually be going on to allow us to move through the world. That's spot-on for what my intention has been with this.
The downloadable version lets you save creatures locally instead of on the cloud, has likely better performance, access to moddable files like being able to program your own ion channels, and a few niche utilities like being able to record and save neuron activity to file.
Yeah, the reason why I like Powder Toy is the same reason why I like Crescent Loom: I can just tinker about like a mad scientist and do stuff, resulting in either progress or mayhem. 😄
the downloadabe version runs faster and looks better than the website version.
aslo ive found that the longer i play the website version the more lagy it gets, to the point where i have to refresh the page. too bad i cant get the paid version :{
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.
To use Tab to change connection types, you need to be mousing over the connection you want to change, like this:
The downloadable HTML5 demo was made available for some teachers who needed to self-host it to get around their school's firewall — you'll need to use a chrome extension like this one to get a localhost and point it at the files. So I'd obviously recommend using the provided in-browser version instead.
? that's a fair bit into the ways of tutorial. You've made a full body and swimming animal at that point. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect between what we're seeing here.
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).
Hey thanks! I'm glad you're getting use out of it! I've thought a lot about Braitenberg vehicles while making this. It's interesting to see the difference in locomotion types and requisite underlying circuity when you have muscles instead of motors. Without a motor that turns a steady signal into motion, animals have to use a lot more back-and-forth rhythm-based systems. But the principles are identical! In case you haven't seen it, the "Zippy" premade creature is a direct example of the "sensory crossover produces wall-avoidant-behavior" design.
The current development state of the game is on the backburner; I'm doing bugfixes as they come up and features whenever someone tosses me some funding for a specific project. But I'm married to the idea of neurobio games and have the full intention of coming back with a Crescent Loom 2 in a couple years — likely under that sort of license-based biz model that keeps it free for most and paid for orgs that can afford it.
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.
Ah, that blue orb is an egg. Sounds like it crashes on it hatching, which happens ~8 seconds after being laid. Would you mind saving to the server the creature that crashes the game when the baby hatches and let me know its name so I can try to replicate?
And yes, sounds like you finished the tutorial, it doesn't signpost the fact super well. The game is just a sandbox after that.
i love the game, but i'd suggest 2 things, 1º, sterile creatures and the ability to spawn creatures, 2º, deleting certain parts of organs/body parts withou needing to get them eaten, to create scars or something like that
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 you can work as a neuroscientist and at the same time be an indie developer Lots of indie devs do the nights/weekends thing while working a day job — mine just happened to be in a lab. I'm not in any active research projects and now consider myself more of a science communicator aka making science-based games.
So I highly encourage you to lean into what you love about biology! If you keep honing your game-making skills on the side, I'm sure you'll find something cool and unique to say about biology in the language of games.
The downloadable HTML version needs to be hosted locally to work; it's mostly there for educators who want to set up games behind a school firewall but can't install the native version for some reason.
Instead, try the PC/Mac/Linux native builds that are included in the download. If you want to play in the web browser, you can do so at crescentloom.com/game
Yep, I haven't released an update since I decided to (organizationally) push it to 1.0, the number will get bumped up next time I fix or add something.
And yes, the tutorial ends there; I suppose a little notification or something would probably be good.
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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 :)
La creatur :)
I will be saving this to the server as wm-predator1
Thanks for the notes :) I had the opportunity to play CL at a party this weekend, and it was the first time in years that I've really sat down with it. I agree with a lot of your points — its difficulty running even a moderately complicated creature smoothing is a major issue. I did as much rendering optimization as I could back when I was developing it... unfortunately I think it's at the limits of its technology; the physics sim is the biggest bottleneck iirc.
Axons take up tiles because 1) they need to be selectable so you can inspect them (important for a lot of classroom applications) and 2) action potentials used to have to travel down the length of them and they were all different electrical compartments. The latter was removed to make creatures more responsive, but the engine still relies on them being that sort of entity.
Crescent Loom 2 is still a number of years off (gotta finish LT), but yeah more robust combat/opportunities for creature interaction and a map editor are going to be very high priorities for it. I really can't wait to get back to this. There's so many rough edges that a better underlying engine would solve.
I honestly think that axons should atleast be soft-separated from the grid system, as in it'd be a lot easier to interact with dense axons if they only became highlighted upon selecting a connected neuron. If you look at my creature, the brain code is very messy with a lot of overlapping axons. I ran into an issue where if I arranged the axons in a particular order (if an axon had to cross another axon at its synapse point) then I wouldn't be able to adjust the synapse strength of the axon. This shouldn't be a system where order matters.
Falling back on using functions and calculus again, you could probably use a function which describes the position of a signal along a given length of axon (linear interpolation my beloved) and calculate the time it takes for the signal to reach the next neuron (which would create support for either grid / gridless axons). You could then inspect along the length of said axon and it would basically render a 'slice' of this singular at a given point in the graph.
Most of the frametime stuff should just be rendering signals if the player happens to be looking in the general direction and zoomed in enough.
Once again: I'm not a neuroscientist and I'm guessing its not as easy as it sounds. I don't know any of the math involved in neurology so I would understand if simulation accuracy couldn't be maintained with simplified calculations.
Stugan is from 2018 and has since closed. I warned you to stop spamming these threads. I'm sorry but since you can't seem to control yourself, I'm going to have to ban you.
Will there ever be level editor?
Not likely. I have an internal one but it's hard to use, and most future dev work will be aimed at making a sequel rather than large updates to this version.
Love the quality
crescent loom is better the createur creator
Omg I'm going crazy and I forgot to tell you I'm a big big fan and I'm subscribed to you, Thanks for the feed back, love your game!
Is this a demo version or the full version? And is their multiplayer?
What you get with the paid version:
- ability to save creatures locally / to a private server
- better performance since it's running natively
It's otherwise the same as the browser version. The only multiplayer is being able to load other people's creatures in the race modes.
I understand but is this the demo version just please answer my question
Did you add multiplayer?
I don't understand what you mean, there's not really a demo, just the browser and the downloadable version with the only differences being the ones noted.
this game would be cool with a generic alife game mode, it would be interesting to see if any kind of ecosystem could form on its own with evolution and little plankton as the bottom of the foodchain
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 :(
It's currently mostly on hiatus. I have some grant money coming down the pipe to work on it for a few months next year, but besides that all my dev time is currently on Lancer Tactics.
I fully intend to turn towards Crescent Loom 2 after that though, made in an engine that can handle more than a few creatures at a time.
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?
I hadn't heard of Powdertoy before, what a fascinating game 👀 love sandboxes like that.
Yay, I'm glad it's got you thinking about what might actually be going on to allow us to move through the world. That's spot-on for what my intention has been with this.
The downloadable version lets you save creatures locally instead of on the cloud, has likely better performance, access to moddable files like being able to program your own ion channels, and a few niche utilities like being able to record and save neuron activity to file.
Yeah, the reason why I like Powder Toy is the same reason why I like Crescent Loom: I can just tinker about like a mad scientist and do stuff, resulting in either progress or mayhem. 😄
the downloadabe version runs faster and looks better than the website version.
aslo ive found that the longer i play the website version the more lagy it gets, to the point where i have to refresh the page. too bad i cant get the paid version :{
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.
:/
To use Tab to change connection types, you need to be mousing over the connection you want to change, like this:
The downloadable HTML5 demo was made available for some teachers who needed to self-host it to get around their school's firewall — you'll need to use a chrome extension like this one to get a localhost and point it at the files. So I'd obviously recommend using the provided in-browser version instead.
tutorial is broken, it stops working after it assigns you to see how the pacemaker works with the muscles in the brain
It could definitely be better signposted, but that's the end of the tutorial.
That's... Not even really a tutorial at all though? That's like, at best, a test to see if your mouse works.
? that's a fair bit into the ways of tutorial. You've made a full body and swimming animal at that point. There seems to be a bit of a disconnect between what we're seeing here.
That's a relief. For a moment I thought I was too dumb to complete the tutorial. 😄
Thanks for clarifying!
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).
Hey thanks! I'm glad you're getting use out of it! I've thought a lot about Braitenberg vehicles while making this. It's interesting to see the difference in locomotion types and requisite underlying circuity when you have muscles instead of motors. Without a motor that turns a steady signal into motion, animals have to use a lot more back-and-forth rhythm-based systems. But the principles are identical! In case you haven't seen it, the "Zippy" premade creature is a direct example of the "sensory crossover produces wall-avoidant-behavior" design.
The current development state of the game is on the backburner; I'm doing bugfixes as they come up and features whenever someone tosses me some funding for a specific project. But I'm married to the idea of neurobio games and have the full intention of coming back with a Crescent Loom 2 in a couple years — likely under that sort of license-based biz model that keeps it free for most and paid for orgs that can afford it.
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.
Ah, that blue orb is an egg. Sounds like it crashes on it hatching, which happens ~8 seconds after being laid. Would you mind saving to the server the creature that crashes the game when the baby hatches and let me know its name so I can try to replicate?
And yes, sounds like you finished the tutorial, it doesn't signpost the fact super well. The game is just a sandbox after that.
I saved it online as "crashreport-eris"!
Thank you, I'll take a look!
bad tutorial can't even understand much of the fundamentals
tutorial issue
The stuff it shows you IS the fundamentals...
Oh wow! I remember seeing this game at SIX years ago! Very cool to see how much it and you have evolved since then!
i love the game, but i'd suggest 2 things, 1º, sterile creatures and the ability to spawn creatures, 2º, deleting certain parts of organs/body parts
withou needing to get them eaten, to create scars or something like that
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 you can work as a neuroscientist and at the same time be an indie developer
Lots of indie devs do the nights/weekends thing while working a day job — mine just happened to be in a lab. I'm not in any active research projects and now consider myself more of a science communicator aka making science-based games.
So I highly encourage you to lean into what you love about biology! If you keep honing your game-making skills on the side, I'm sure you'll find something cool and unique to say about biology in the language of games.
Thanks for your kind words, I'll try to improve my game dev skills to make one day a game about biology and simultaneously become a biologist.
How do I actually play it? I payed but the version 1 html5 doesn't work.
Edit: I got the logs
The downloadable HTML version needs to be hosted locally to work; it's mostly there for educators who want to set up games behind a school firewall but can't install the native version for some reason.
Instead, try the PC/Mac/Linux native builds that are included in the download. If you want to play in the web browser, you can do so at crescentloom.com/game
Hello! Is there a community/ discord server somewhere for this game? Would love a place to share my creations. Thank you!
Hi! The reddit is probably your best bet.
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?
Yep, I haven't released an update since I decided to (organizationally) push it to 1.0, the number will get bumped up next time I fix or add something.
And yes, the tutorial ends there; I suppose a little notification or something would probably be good.