GenePool Swimbots
| Category | Price | Seller | Device |
|---|---|---|---|
| Education | Free | Wiggle Planet, LLC | iPad |
It's a computer simulation where hundreds of virtual organisms evolve swimming skills. These organisms are called "swimbots". You can set mate preference criteria and thus influence what the swimbots consider as attractive qualities in potential mates. The most attractive swimbots get chosen most often to have little babies, and so their genetic building blocks propogate to future generations. Eventually, swimbots get better at pursuing each other, competing for food, and becoming babes to other swimbots. Local gene pools emerge which compete for mates and food (for energy to have offspring). Eventually a dominant sub-population takes over.
Sometimes, everyone just dies. That's not a bug. That's nature! If you want, you can move swimbots and food around to help your favorite critters survive.
Gene Pool is best appreciated as a virtual Darwinian aquarium in which you initiate a primordial soup, and then occasionally check up on what Virtual Mother Nature is up to - about every fifteen minutes (or every few days, if you are interested in long-term evolutionary experiments!).
Reviews
Mesmerizing
McReviewyPants1
This is a pretty cool game. Or simulator. It's very detailed in what you can control. Every little thing about the little wigglies can be tweaked and mutated if you like. Or sometimes you can do forced breeding to get traits you want from these guys. The only little thing I have a problem with is the length of time it takes to see the wiggles progress. I've sunk several (very entertaining) hours into messing around with this. I wish there was a speed up time button somewhere. Other than that it's pretty dang cool!
Very Interesting Game/Simulator
RoyTheBoy21
Great simulator for having fun and to pass time with. The engineering traits is broken for me, when I adjust the values, it acts like I set it to 0 no matter what and I can't change it back. Mutate works though so I'm having fun with that during the mean time but it's hard to try and get somewhat you want just by it. For this review I've given a 4 because of that.
Missing things
J...77
Very good simulator but, I'm using my iPad and the arrows and zoom buttons are too small. Also could you add a thing so you don't have too be in the app for them to move and eat. If it had these it would be a 5 to me.
Pretty Good Except for the Tweaking!
mathjk2017
I think this is an amazing app. It certainly entertains me and keeps me connected. There is only one problem: the engineering buttons are broken. It turns to zero every time I try to edit something, which makes it very annoying indeed. Please update it eventually, so I can edit the wigglies. :) If you are interested in the genre of evolution, this is an app for you!
With a little help from...
Garettj25
Enjoyable for an all herbivore evolution simulation. I have seen too many first generation creatures demonstrate advanced directional mobility . Maybe they had big brains to start or maybe they got a little help from their designer friends from above. At the same time, the long straight worms with superior swimming efficiency are condemned to cluster in the corners stupidly helpless. So the same kind of structure always wins. What's fun is how much you care for these things. And it's cleverly designed to let you bring your favorites food, move competitors away, etc. and tweaking the environmental conditions can have amazing consequences. Overall a beautiful 2d pond.
Very Good, Except...
Jebidiah Kerman
This is an excellent evolution simulator! The only things stopping me from rating this 5 stars is: 1. There is no evolution for a carnivore. They cannot exist in this simulator. 2. There is no landmass that the organisms could potentially evolve to live on. (This is a minor issue) 3. I am sure that many other people would enjoy a photosynthetic/chemosynthetic/radiosynthetic organism, meaning that it would be possible for the swimbots to evolve into a plant-like organism. 4. I have witnessed two members of apparently different species reproduce. Is this a bug or are they really two members of the same species? The issues I'm having probably cannot be implemented, except for number one. Out of all of these, I think number one would be simplest. If not for these things, my rating would certainly be 5 stars. And I do realize that it is still very early in development, so I do understand. I hope that you do at least add predator/prey relationships or symbiosis relationships, as parisitism. Thank you for (possibly) reading this and (possibly) responding via an update or text.
Update
CRS354
I love GenePool and making experiments, but these are suggestions to make it more interesting. 1: Behaviors: Survival is about more than good movements and attractiveness, it's also how an organism acts. Maybe in another update some SwimBots can be carnivores and herbivores. Also, you could add scavengers. 2: What if someone wants a certain feature of a SwimBot to live on or go extinct. Think of a blue dot that goes around killing of feeding organisms with high of low features. (Kill/Feed) SwimBots with (High/Low) (-). The - represents a feature such as Limb Size, Aggressiveness, etc. Whatever you call the blue dot would be in a category next to the SwimBot category then if you tap it the setup would pop up. I hope this gets seen, but overall this is really fun!
Great start
Tesseract King
This game is good for a new game. I've always wanted an evolution simulator for iOS. Here are some ideas for gene pool: 1. Evolution for plants. Plants would grow leaves and roots and could reproduce sexually and asexually. They would have flowers, pollen, and fruit. 2. Green dot plants would be replaced by brown dots of detritus that plants feed on. 3. Carnivores, herbivores, and detrivores. 4. Animals poop trails of detritus. 5. Multi-headed animals. 6. Different head shapes and eyes. 7. Creatures would be able to swim more easily and would actually swim towards food when they're hungry. 8. Dead animals and plants would decay into piles of detritus.
