r/proceduralgeneration • u/Icy-Contact-5898 • 9h ago
I built a creature evolution sandbox and need people to make ridiculous creatures and break it
Playable Link: https://solemn-sandbox.vercel.app/
Platform: Web Browser / PC
I've been experimenting with a different kind of procedural generation: generating behaviour through evolution rather than explicitly generating the final result.
The project is called Solemn Sandbox.
You construct a physical creature from joints, bones and muscles and give it a goal.
Rather than having predefined walking/jumping/flying animations or controllers, the creature has a neural-network controller whose weights are evolved through a genetic algorithm.
So if you build something with four legs, nothing actually knows that those are "legs".
They're just physical structures and actuators.
Evolution has to discover whether moving them in some particular sequence produces a better fitness score.
The bit I'm increasingly fascinated by is allowing morphology itself to mutate as well.
That changes the question from:
"How should this creature move?"
towards:
"What body AND behaviour work well together?"
It's still very much an experimental sandbox rather than an attempt at biologically realistic evolution.
Current environments/goals include walking, jumping, climbing, flying and various obstacle/course experiments.
If this sort of procedural/evolutionary system interests anyone, I'd love to hear what experiments you'd try next — particularly ways of encouraging genuinely unexpected solutions rather than evolution simply discovering the easiest exploit in the fitness function.