World of Goo founder creates "Egg Worm"

Kyle Gabler creates evolution fishtank

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10 July 2009 10:35 GMT / By Duncan Geere

Award-winning indie game developer Kyle Gabler, responsible for the smash hit "World of Goo", has posted an interesting bit of software on his website.

It's an evolution simulator called "Egg Worm" that generates random creatures and then animates them. The first four to reach the right hand side of the screen survive, and get taken on to the next generation. Any that end up on the left hand side, or are too slow, explode into bloody chunks.

"This was supposed to be a shooter, where you shoot peacefully evolving creatures. But I didn't finish, and the creatures turned out too stupid to fight anyway. So instead, its a fishtank where you observe randomly generated creatures evolve and kind of learn to walk", posts Gabler on his blog.

In our testing, we found it fascinating to see which rough amalgamation of limbs made it to between generations. Although our speed record was set by green superstar named "Mason" from the seventh generation, his luck didn't last long, being rapidly overtaken by Earnest and Christa, who survived much longer.

If you fancy giving it a shot and seeing if you can evolve an elephant, then there's a link below. You'll need Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 installed, if you've not got it already, but there's a link from the download page to that. Share your creatures' speed records in the comments below.

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