Bists

Here's a game I published under a different pseudonym some time ago. It's written in Pico-8 which is a fantasy console, hence the 8bit style. It's less of a game and more of an aquarium where the creatures actually evolve their brain to survive. But you can join in too if you want. X opens the menu, Z selects inside the menu or joins the game if you are outside the menu. Arrows move you around. Z changes your bist's color if you have joined the game.

I'll just copy-paste my past description:

Bists have a brain with 23 parameters that governs how they behave, how much HP they have and how fast they are (more HP = less speed). They are aware of their nearest green bist, the nearest red bist, as well as the nearest food source. The decide how to move towards or away of these things, how far to look for their closest bists and food, when to switch their color, how often to think, and when to slack off and slow down their falling HP. When their HP is full they give birth to offspring that has randomly mutated parameters.

Food tends to spawn in one tight (near the bottom right) and one wide (near the top left) cluster.

Every now and then a trap will spawn. This looks like food to the bists but it will freeze the bist that eats it for quite some time.

Be patient, bists sometimes take a long time to evolve. There is a speedup option in the help/menu page that you can use if you can't wait.

You can also join the game and try to outlive the oldest bist or try put evolutionary pressure on them (e.g kill some while you are red, and soon bists will be avoiding red bists)

Make sure to check out all the the options that can be found in the menu in the help/menu screen.

If you evolve any interesting brains paste them here in a comment! You can save to the clipboard the brain of the oldest bist by opening the help/opts page finding "SAVE TO CLIP".

Every now and then bists will play a custom cry which is 100% based on the parameters of their brain. You can also listen to the cry of the oldest bist by saving it.

To load a brain and add it to the game just ctrl+v in PICO-8, then open the help/menu page look into the menu for the "ADD FROM CLIP" option.

Finally this is the cart:

Save it on your computer and open it with Pico-8 to play or edit the code.