Beer and zombies
PolyFish looks like a peaceful little ocean. It started as beer yeast that behaved unnervingly like the zombies from a game I'd worked on.
PolyFish looks like a peaceful little ocean. It started with beer and zombies.
I had worked on a couple of zombie apocalypse games, and I was also a homebrewer who almost went pro. At some point those two stopped feeling separate, because yeast in a lot of ways felt like zombies. A yeast cell eats sugar, which makes another yeast, which moves to the next food source, which makes more yeast. Rapid population boom, then bust as they drift to the bottom. A zombie moves at its target until the target is eaten, then moves to the next one. Same loop.
So I built a little sim of it, and the thing that surprised me was that I didn’t need avoidance behaviors at all. No steering, no flocking, none of the code you would normally reach for. They were physics objects that couldn’t interpenetrate, so when they crowded a scrap of food they bounced off each other, and it read like they were fighting to eat. I got the behavior for free out of the physics instead of out of anything I wrote.
That was awesome, but a fermentation experience is not the VR thing I wanted to build.
What I wanted was the ocean. I love marine life and I love scuba diving, and some folks are never going to get to hang out on the ocean floor. So I took the same loop and aimed it at a stylized version of that, somewhere you could watch small changes have a big impact. Swap the yeast for fish, the sugar for kelp, the tank for a sea.
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