G'day,

This game was created by Ross Kevin Moffat (AKA Mandle) for the July 2016 Monthly Adventure Game Studio (MAGS) contest.

The game is a simple simulation of the predators/prey/plants relationship.

At the moment there is no way to either "win" or "lose"...It's basically just a sandbox where you can explore the various interactions of wild animal and plant populations.

Observing the fluctuations of the different populations should give you some first-hand experience with the concepts of dwindling resources, boom-and-bust in plant and animal populations, and even extinction in extreme cases.

BROWN pixels are DIRT: All animals and plants CAN spread into DIRT areas.
BLUE… pixels are WATER: All animals and plants CANNOT spread into WATER areas.
GREEN pixels are PLANTS: PREY need PLANTS to survive and spread. PREDATORS can also spread into PLANT areas.
YELLOW pixels are PREY: Herbivores...PREDATORS need PREY to survive and spread.
RED pixels are PREDATORS: Carnivores...Top of the food chain but will soon die without herbivores to prey on.

The panel controls are:

S or f5 to open the Save Map window.
L,R, or f7 to open the Load Map window.
Q,Ctrl-Q, or ESC to open the Quit Game (or continue) window.

The in-game controls are:

Left Mouse Click to draw on the map.
Right Mouse Click to change the draw cursor's colour.
Scroll Wheel Up/Down to change cursor size from 1-10 pixels.

The TITLE SCREEN at the start of the game is an actively running map. To change to a different map and start playing it you will need to either delete the TITLE SCREEN map bit by bit (yawn) or hit L or f7 to open the Load Map Screen where you will find a few sample maps as well as an ALL BROWN map, an ALL GREEN map, and an ALL BLUE map to start drawing on.

IMPORTANT: NEVER, EVER DELETE THE AGSSAVE.998 FROM THE SAVED MAPS FOLDER!!! THIS IS THE TITLE SCREEN AND IF YOU DELETE IT THE GAME WILL HAVE NO TITLE SCREEN ON START-UP AND MAY CRASH!!!

The game cannot be paused while running and you can draw on the screen at any time regardless of the scanning progression of the calculations.

You can pause the game if you need to step away from it for a moment by opening the save game, load game, or quit/confirm window, and then hitting the CANCEL or PLAY button when you are ready to continue.

If you leave the game running it will run forever. You can come back an hour, day, week, month, or year later and it will still be running your map.

As this game was made fast and rough in only a few sittings it is lacking many features that one would probably expect, such as population counters, graphs of growth and decline, etc etc. but even in this crude state I feel it could be useful in a classroom situation where cycles of boom-and-bust in nature, and/or extinction are being studied, or even just for your own personal study of such.

The game is 100% FREEWARE and was created on the also free ADVENTURE GAME STUDIO engine, which was created by Chris Jones.

I, Ross Kevin Moffat (AKA Mandle), give full permission to you to freely (but only for free) redistribute this game as you see fit.

I hope you have a fun, interesting, and/or learning experience.

Cheers!

EDIT:

The mirror is the original game file before I heard that some people had problems loading the game...

The main link is the new updated version that is attempting to fix those issues...