From a Renderer to a Game

The last entry was about a renderer that reads genetics. This one is about what that renderer is for. In the past week Gecktopia stopped being a gecko drawn on a page and became a game you can sign in to and play.

You start with a collection that belongs to you and is still there tomorrow. Every gecko in it has a name you give it, and a plain explanation of why it looks the way it does, gene by gene.

Breeding works end to end. You choose two geckos and see the odds of what could hatch, worked out by the same engine that decides what actually does. The pairing takes time on the game clock, the clutch goes into the incubator, and each egg hatches into an animal nobody could have predicted exactly. When it does, every gene the hatchling carries is traced back to the parent it came from.

Hatchlings now look like hatchlings. The renderer draws each gecko on the body its age calls for, so a new hatch is drawn as a hatchling and grows into the adult it will become.

Space turned out to be the heart of the game. You start with room for five, and your first hatch opens more. Hatchlings go into boxes, growing geckos into grow-out tubs, and when the collection is full the game says so before you commit to a pairing rather than after. The ways out are real decisions: keep an animal back as a holdback, retire it to the archive where its record stays, or find it a buyer.

“Space turned out to be the heart of the game.”

The website and the game are now one site. The front page has been rebuilt so that nothing on it is a picture we drew: every gecko is generated from its genes in your browser as the page loads, and you can steer one, then crack an egg from a real pairing and see what hatches. The morph builder was redesigned around one rule, that the gecko never scrolls out of view while you change its genes, with a search that finds every gene and 31 named combinations by name.

The game itself is not open yet. For now it is being played by a small group close to home, which is the best way we know to find what works and what does not before anyone else arrives. The Hatch List will hear first when that changes.

There is a lot still to do, and some of it is only half built. Founder support is not open yet, and it will stay closed until the parts that handle money are finished and checked. Next is watching those first games closely, and fixing what they turn up.

Written at the time and left as written. The geckos on this page are drawn now, by the renderer as it stands today, which is not the renderer the entry describes.