How time flies! Yesterday marked the second year of Ecosystem's Early Access release and to celebrate we're not only on sale for 10% off, but we've also got a new update which doubles the amount of heads and skins in the game, meaning that there's going to be more variety than ever in your ecosystems!
The full patch notes are at the bottom of this post, but first I wanted to update last years Early Access journey graphic I made to bring it up to date for our second anniversary and give you a little insight into what is to come!
Two Years of Early Access As A Solo Dev
What Next?
Whilst waiting on getting the new heads and textures from the artist, Tom has been working on the next major update that will be coming to the game, which will be a complete overhaul of creature combat. We don't have anything to share just yet on this, but we will do soon!
After the Combat Update there will be an Interaction Update, which should increase the ways in which your creatures will interact with each other in the world, whether this is a positive interaction or a negative interaction.
And then looking ahead to 1.0 we are finally able to announce that the Crustacean Update is going to be coming. We've been hesitant to commit to this fully up until now as they're quite technically complex when interacting with the current game systems, but Tom has done some early prototyping and is confident that he can get crustaceans into players hands!
This is likely going to be the 1.0 release of the game, but as always, game development is fluid and things change and get re-prioritised, but this is the current plan!
Tell Me About These Heads!
As mentioned, today's update doubles the number of heads and textures in the game, adding 8 new heads and their matching procedural textures. This will allow for a lot more variety in the game now and give you more choice when creating your creatures using the editor.
I won't spoil all 8 of the new heads for you in this post, but here is the concept art for the Scorpion Fish, and the blockout of how the head appears in game.
The full patch notes are below - whether you've been on the full journey since 2021 or have just joined, thank you for your support!
PATCH NOTES
- Doubled the number of available heads for creatures.
- Added new skin type for creatures with the new heads.
- Add hotkeys to the version of the Interact Menu that appears when you select a creature.
- Fix: creatures sometimes have knowledge of eggs that have been laid without actually having to sense them.
- Fix: the 'burst' effect when the player spawns new species sometimes disappears.
- Fix: notifications from previous games can persist for a few seconds after loading a new game.
- Fix: temporary scratch data used by the creature's brains for calculations is now saved alongside those brains to ensure there is no variation in behavior when a game is saved and loaded.
Changed files in this update