Emerge from the Soup: A Prime Ordeal

You are a piece of Primordial Soup, and the world is your oyster! Or it would be if oysters had evolved yet. But let's not get ahead of ourselves! For now, you must journey around the Soup, collecting nourishment, encountering other primitive life, and undertaking challenges to evolve into whichever forms suit you best.

As your journey from amino acid to animal (or approximation thereof) diverges down different branches on the tree of life, the background music adds different parts to the audio, so your final form has its own unique soundtrack.

As of submission to the Soup Bitsy Jam, there are four possible outcomes for the game. Eight were originally planned, so there is one part of the game where I had to implement some convergent evolution in order to meet the jam's deadline.

Andrew Yolland's Borksy was an enormous help, adding such vital features as background music, making the player character's avatar change for different areas, and "Exit From Dialogue".

That said, animated avatars, when combined with changing avatars, seem to cause technical problems in Bitsy, and although I was given the code to patch it, I didn't have time to figure out how to do that with it, unfortunately. If any of you Bitsy users can walk me through it, I'd be eager to learn. Then I'll update the avatar sprites in this game with animated versions, as nature intended!

THAT said, it's unlikely that I'll expand this game into eight (or sixteen) more outcomes, but as a proof-of-concept it could someday lead to a non-Bitsy version with more than 6 days of production time. I had fun playing with the idea, and I've wanted to make a game with this very theme since I first played Sim Earth back in the mid 1990s.  (Even if such a game already exists.) So that was fun!

Please report bugs and deliver constructive criticism if you can.

- Andrew Kepple

"Soup" BitsyJam Nov-Dec 2019