Lampyre

Creatures 3: the source of a long-lasting fascination for life

So many video games exist now - more than forty years of development and publishing have produced an ocean of softwares. It is even accelerating as staggering numbers of titles come out on Steam or various other platforms each year.

But whatever the amount of games you get to enjoy nowadays, we all have our original favorites. It may be because it's the first of a kind you ever played, or one holding exceptional childhood memories. Mine is without a doubt Creatures 3.

Developed by Creature Labs and published in 1999, this desktop game is a 2D life simulation set in a total sandbox layout. It was not my first Creature game - I started with Creatures Village, an educational version of the serie's games much more adapted to children (I was six or seven years old when my mom bought it to me - back then, sold as big cardboard game boxes on a shelf right before the cash register in electronic wares shops).

Both games consist in hatching little creatures named norns and watching over them as they grow, learn, have children of their own and at some point die (in more or less peaceful ways, depending on the Grendel and illnesses density in your game world). In Creatures 3, you would play on an isolated spaceship named the Ark and full of different terrariums rooms and technical decks.

Innovative systems

If the handmade game's visuals (and the norns' terrifying soul-sucking stare) might now be laughable to some, I still find them pretty and detailed. But it's the sheer depth of the serie's mechanics that held my attention. Having norn eggs incubate and hatch adorable babies is already a primer. And then the whole experience could get much, much more complex than that.

Controls are simple. You can use your mouse cursor to hold your creatures' hand and lead them around the world. Tickling their noses reward their behaviour and slapping them discourage them from repeating actions. You can also interact and transport all game items - but without a specific power-up, you can not easily move a creature from a location to another. You have to guide your norns all the way through the ship's corridors and tell them where to go. But grendels and ettins (two others creatures types popping out on the spaceship) ? Well, good luck trying to restrain them and their filthy microbes back from your home terrarium. That's where agents and automatic systems come into play.

Do you wanna build a snoooowmaaaaan fully automated lethal mud launcher ?

The game's interactables are called agents. Agents are almost any of the game's object existing on the Ark - doors, toys, food, fauna, machines. The whole Ark has dozens of handy tools to help you manage your creatures and the terrariums' ecosystems. Most of them also have IN and OUT signal ports, allowing widget communication and automated systems.

A famous example known by most players is the deadly mud cannon defense measure. You put a creature detector next to your terrarium entries, and set it to detect grendels. As soon as a jungle brute rears its ugly head through the door, the detector sends a continuous 255 (opposed to 0) signal through its OUT port. And what can you use that for ? Well, you viciously connect this outer signal port to the IN port of another machine: a mud cannon, firing for as long as the grendel is lingering around (yes, mud blobs hurt creatures and eventually kill them - now that we think of it, that's a pretty terrible way to die, but eight years-old me was not moved).

Many tools and widgets share this simple IN/OUT systems and each of them have an encyclopedia entry explaining what each signal triggered. It's a fantastic playground to design all kind of automated systems.

A few other examples are:

All in all, using the Ark's tools and rooms functionalities to your advantage can help you fulfill your sandbox goals and feel like the overarching ship keeper you are. Or, you can ignore all of it and let creatures manage themselves quite chaotically.

Lastly, the agents system enable a myriad of modders to create and share additional game content. And you can even mod the best part of the game, which ware...

Creatures breeds: a bit more complex than your usual tamagochi

Norns come in different flavors. You have the gentle white and black spotted civet, the fiery bengal or even more exotic types like treehuggers or magma norns. Their difference can be strictly aesthetical, but sometimes they are behavioral too - as creatures are detailed entities with their own genes, organs and chemical levels.

At any point of the game, a norn's genetics and its health status will nudge every one of its behaviours. For example, proteins, once ingested, are broken down into muscle tissue or amino acids for the body to process (these substances were dynamically tracked inside the creatures' bodies and you could measure their real-time values by putting a creature in the medical vat tube). If the norn's organism has dangerously low muscle mass or acids, it will trigger a hunger for protein feeling, which will rouse it up to move towards a nearby food piece rich in protein, or to look for some.

They can be cold, hot, horny, apathetic, angry, scared, hungry, rested, social, overcrowded, curious or bored (here's a look at all stimuli types found across the three games, and Creatures 3 chemicals list). Leading to an impressive amount of context-dependant reactions between individuals.

Some breeds have different quirks altogether because they express different chemicals baseline levels. Hardman norns, for exemple, naturally consider the jungle terrarium as their home biome, are resistant to pathogens and have a natural tendency to get angry at everything. What you reap is a norn breed that will colonize the jungle biome and beat the heck out of grendels, where its cousins feebly flee in terror ("Father, I CRAVE VIOLENCE").

When norns breed, they mix their genes pools - but mutations can happen (and they will, eventually). Some have no visible effects. Others lead to progressive color shifts and new behaviours. Just as in real life, unfortunately, it often means problems rather than improvements. You can see norns having staggered gaits and difficulties to move. Some die unexpectedly while growing up - others have a lack of behavioral triggers leading to starvation or incapacity to use buttons and elevators.

I don't think the game has any inbreeding mechanic built into it, but it did not hurt to insert some fresh individuals with a clean-state genetic pool every dozen generations or so.

Norns are not very picky about their partners. When sufficiently grown and mature, they'll eventually get lewd and kiss nearby kin of the opposite gender (yes, that's the cutest way of describing an intercourse leading to pregnancy - mind you, I'm still wondering how exactly I'm going to depict it in Lampyre). If different breeds were left wandering together in terrariums, you can expect some very colorful combinations of norns being born in the next hours. As real life genetics does, some genes and fur patterns can "disappear" from one generation to resurface onto the next. Each body part (head, body, tail, arms and legs) can display its own "breed" pattern.

Mix two bengal norns, and the kit is a perfect copy of its parent. Mix a civet and a bengal, and it randomly inherits patches of fur from both. Breed it with a zebra norn, and now the grandchild is displaying three different patterns ! It's a fun and effective way to introduce a kid to genetics.

Playing with life

Once you are familiar with the basics of norns, grendels, ettins and the ship's machinery, you can eventually set your own goals and play god. Healthy norns can start breeding around the 40 minutes mark and live for an approximate length of seven to nine hours (provided they did not drown, get lost, sick or murdered by a grendel beforehand).

You can carefully setup automated systems and micro manage each generation to ensure your protegees stay safe. You can run experiments, check on their vitals with the medical hub - let them reproduce, and then actively select norns for their agressiveness, resistance, or any other desired trait (some people even designed standardized IQ tests to ensure offsprings were capable of surviving autonomously).

A popular game mode among Creatures fans is the wolfling run where you just let your game world run free after hatching your starting egg pool and come back at regular intervals to see how the population has grown and adapted.

When you think of it, it's a pretty fantastic idle game (I'm not sure this game genre was even a thing at the time). The whole terrarium ecosystems are interesting to see evolve too, although they would often degenerate as the trophic systems were not perfectly balanced. Dragonflies would infamously disappear from the norn terrarium after a few hours of gameplay because the pond trouts would devour all their eggs. Some marine fish species were vanishing too, not reproducing fast enough. These could be prevented by regularly injecting new fauna (either manually, or through automated agents) or by using mods.

A harsh but poetic impression left about life

To me, the game shines for its apparent simplicity but extended gameplay. When I played it as a kid, I did not understand everything, and I did not need to. I was fascinated by the creatures and the terrariums systems evolving with time. Nowadays, I could still start a new game and try to finely micromanage the creatures biochemicals and design sophisticated agents loops.

Seeing your norns hatch to life, grow, learn language, try out things and become parents on their own as they get old is an experience that I found in almost no other existing game. It introduced me to the concept of procedurality, where creatures born with slight differences lead quite different lives and can completely ignore their initial qualities (or weaknesses) - leading to surprising situations.

It had a brutal side too. Creatures fell sick, drowned, starved or hatched with innate problems. They died with a soft whimper - whether they were peacefully departing during sleep after eight long hours of life, or as a baby cruelly beaten up by a roaming grendel. Having no NPC, story or dialogue, there is a feeling of emptiness and alienness as the exterior of the ship is nothing but infinite and starry void. More than once I found my whole population of norns dying after a few fruitful generations. And when the silence returns on the Ark, you better be in a sound psychological condition, because this software assuredly triggered some of my first existential thoughts towards the meaning of life.

For many people, it's just an old life simulation or even an annoing tamagochi-like application (try having ten norns having a discussion with the sound effects on, and observe how fast a headache surfaces). I fully understand that. The game is not perfect and eventually you'll run out of goals to set.

It personally left me an incredible impression about what a contemplative and procedural simulation can bring when you put sufficiently detailed systems into simple living avatars. Whether it's tracking prostaglandin levels in a bloostream, or just seeing offspring inheriting its looks after its parents. And it got me hooked on procedurality and sandboxing systems in games - a path I mean for Lampyre too.

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