Devlog #1: Tidekin begins

this started as “what if i made a little evolution sim?”

then the little guys got brains.

Tidekin is a browser-based evolution sandbox built in C++ and compiled to WebAssembly. the world starts empty, which feels right. nothing exists until you add it. click Spawn, drop a Tidekin into the universe, and suddenly the map has a little nervous system moving around inside it.

the map can zoom and pan now, so it feels less like a fixed aquarium and more like a tiny open petri dish. you can place creatures, add food, drop toxins, create vents, mutate the population, and inspect individual Tidekin.

Inspect ended up mattering a lot. at first, clicking a creature opened its stats, but then spawning near an existing one got annoying because selection stole the click. then i fixed spawning and accidentally made it impossible to inspect anything. very elegant. very normal.

so Spawn and Inspect are separate tools now. Spawn means “put another one here.” Inspect means “pause the world and look at this specific creature.” the popup shows species, generation, energy, traits, and the new brain drives.

that is the big thing: neural brains.

the first behavior was rule-based. creatures looked for food, fled hazards, avoided crowds, wandered, and reproduced when thresholds lined up. it worked, but it felt too authored. they were following rules i wrote instead of carrying their own weird little decision systems.

so now every Tidekin has a tiny fixed neural network encoded in its genome.

there is no training server, no Python model, no backprop, no cloud brain. it is just C++ math inside the sim. the genome has normal trait genes, then extra brain-weight genes. those weights mutate, and children inherit changed versions.

the brain reads inputs like nutrient direction, hazard direction, energy, toxin, heat, crowding, velocity, and a little restlessness. then it outputs movement plus drives for food, hazards, and breeding. those show up in the popup as Food drive, Hazard drive, and Breed drive.

that changed the feeling immediately. a Tidekin is not just “seeking food” because the engine said so. it has weights pushing it toward or away from things. a lineage can become food-focused, reckless, avoidant, or weirdly obsessed with reproducing at bad times.

i also slowed the sim down. early on, creatures ate too fast, bred too fast, and the whole world became a population explosion before you had time to care about any individual. now reproduction takes more age, more energy, and more cost. eating is less of an instant battery refill too.

the goal is for individual creatures to matter longer. if you inspect one, watch it move, and later see its descendants, that should feel like a tiny story instead of just another dot in a swarm.

Mutation storm is there too, because obviously it is. it mutates the current population and lets you throw the gene pool into chaos. useful? sometimes. responsible? probably not. fun? yes.

the creatures are still simple. they do not know anything in a human sense. they are little weighted reactions drifting through fields.

but that is kind of the point.

an empty map.

a click.

a tiny creature with a tiny brain.

and then the uncomfortable realization that if you give the dots enough rules, you start rooting for them.

thanks for reading :)