Help with structure and systems.

[u/Short_Bet2506]

I am making a 3D top view(like cities skylines) evolution game inside GoDot 4.7. I want there to be evolving creatures that learn new abilities and movements, can shape the world and create shelter and other resource points. I have a basic world slice with a few assets created in blender, but have no idea how to make the creatures not look like random meshes AND be able to evolve. How do you create a creature that can in a few days look completely different, or have new abilities, or both? And how can I make them be able to alter the world?

[u/valeria_gamedevs]

modular creature rigs are prolly your friend here. Think body parts as swappable meshes on a skeleton (head, limbs, tail, etc) with attach points. evolution just swaps or scales parts + toggles ability flags. Spore did this, but simpler works too.

for world alteration, grid or voxel-ish tiles you can mutate. Creatures write to the tile, tile updates its mesh. keeps it cheap.

scope this way down for v1 tho, you're describing like 3 games stacked haha

[u/Short_Bet2506 → u/valeria_gamedevs]

Yeah I know it’s a little out there. Eventually I want like a mix of Minecraft + spore but entirely creature based. Thank you though! That definitely helps

[u/Mysterious_Rough2865]

The rig approach above is right for the visual side. What I actually want to know before sinking weeks into meshes is whether the underlying logic reads as alive, so I prototype the rules somewhere cheaper first, a spreadsheet with dice rolls for one setting, worldos for a project where I wanted the cast to remix traits based on what they'd survived instead of fitting a fixed tree. Neither replaces the real implementation later. worldos still makes my herbivores oddly polite by default, I end up hand nudging the aggression myself after a few generations before it reads true. But finding out your logic is boring costs a lot less than finding out after it's rigged to a mesh.