This is my personal blog dedicated to the Creatures series of artificial life games/simulations released in the late 1990s. Creatures is effectively Tamagotchi on steroids for nerds: cute, fuzzy digital pets, each with their own fully simulated genetics, biochemistry, and a (primitive) neural network for a brain. These critters, called Norns (and their scaly counterparts the Grendels), can interact with and learn from their environment and the player. They can reproduce with each other, passing on their digital DNA - potentially with new mutations that can affect everything from their appearance to the chemical reactions in their simulated biology to the very structure of their virtual brains.
There are three main games in the series. Creatures 1 features warm, nostalgic graphics based on a photograph of a physical model, and is the simplest entry in the series as far as the simulation goes. Creatures 2 introduced a gorgeous CGI rendered world with an advanced ecosystem, but unfortunately suffered greatly from rushed development. Creatures 3 and its free, once-online expansion/plug-in Docking Station changes the setting to a spaceship, adding numerous gadgets that can be linked together in the game world, but no longer including the various "applets" or tool windows that the previous games featured, obscuring much of the game's inner working to the casual player.
This blog engages with the series on all levels - from the simple storytelling of what my Creatures are up to in the Journal tag, to deep dives into analyzing and sometimes editing their DNA in the Genetics tag, to the very code the game world runs on and my adventures in modifying it in the CAOS tag.