The Master Race is yellow and wiggly and looks disturbingly like sperm.
http://www.the-underdogs.org/game.php?id=3428You start with a virtual pond where a large number of little creatures called "swimmers" sit among a large pile of food dots. Swimmers have one to four legs, come in different colors and patterns of colors, and can move in an almost infinite variety of ways. The swimmers you begin with have their genes randomly generated, and are thus mostly retarded. They generally flail around randomly until they expend all of their energy and die.
But some of these swimmers happen to move in ways that constitute actual propulsive swimming. These guys will succeed in reaching the food, and will thus have the energy to mate. A swimmer prefers to mate with a partner of the similar coloring, but will go with whatever is closest in a pinch. Offspring share the characteristics of both parents, with a small chance for a random mutation.
After a while, the starting pile of food is consumed. Food respawns, but in random locations and not all that quickly. Natural selection is thus invoked. Leave your pond running while you do other things, and you'll come back to find that mob of randomly flailing swimmers replaced with a group whose members crawl along purposefully. Not only that, but thanks to their color preference when it comes to mating, swimmers tend to segregate into distinct races with unique physical traits. The game continues to run while minimized, and doesn't take much in the way of resources, so it can be left running in the background while other programs are being used.
It's not a game in the usual sense, but a player can pick up individual swimmers, randomly mutate them, adjust their genes in specific ways, clone them, move them around, kill them, drop extra food, delete food, and so forth. Individual swimmers can be saved, then dropped into other ponds. The "master race" referred to above is a strain of little yellow one-limbed critters I came up with, who squirm along like eels, eat ravenously, breed explosively, and have never failed to zerg rush every other race in any given pond into extinction. Another nice thing is that the save file for an individual swimmer is tiny.
0.073914
0.522095
0.775269
0.250458
0.447906
0.480437
0.025867
0.261169
0.720356
0.370117
0.934723
0.706632
0.322211
0.547391
0.399800
0.000000Paste the above into Notepad, give the file a .dna extension, and you have a specimen of the MR which can be cloned and dropped into any scenario one likes. I have six or eight people on another board crossbreeding their species and pitting them against one another, then posting the gene files of the winners for other readers to experiment with.
It's good fun. As was said, it can run in the background, waiting for you to come back and see what sort of oddity has evolved. Some move like eels, some pull themselves along with four limbs like little frogs, others flap two or three limbs behind them like fans to get around. Some are aggressive and try to eat everyone else out of house and home, while others just sort of float along eating whatever comes their way. It's certainly... different.
Author
