- 01Observe population trends
- 02Form an intervention hypothesis
- 03Change one resource or group
- 04Track delayed effects
Food webs and cascades
Populations interact through predation and competition. A change can affect another group several steps later, making relationships rather than isolated meters the subject of control.
The player's decision
Add predators to control herbivores or restore plants first to prevent a later food collapse?
Original scenario
Original setup: a simplified grass/rabbit/fox system. Removing foxes first grows rabbits, then grass scarcity reduces them; one snapshot misses the long-term tradeoff.
Start with this prototype
Build three populations over ten steps with explicit growth, feeding and caps. Allow one intervention every two steps; keep all groups alive to win. Show history/reset and omit individual pathfinding.
Change one variable
Vary feeding rate and inspect stability, oscillation and extinction as game behaviors, not ecological forecasts.
What to observe in a playtest
Can counts become negative? Are results update-order independent and reproducible without intervention?
Take the full design card
Includes rules, scope, tuning questions and sources for further planning. It does not create a project automatically.
Original analysis · version 1
Common pitfall
In-place updates favor earlier populations. Compute the next step from one shared previous snapshot.
Observations and sources
Cases refer to public documentation. Developers and community wikis are credited separately; document review is not a claim of hands-on testing.
- Eco
Species disruption can cascade, with graphs exposing harvesting and pollution effects.
- Rain World
Prey and predators interact with each other, placing the player within an ecosystem.
Brief for the studio
Opens the AI studio with the brief below in the input. You can edit it. Nothing starts automatically.
Build three populations over ten steps with explicit growth, feeding and caps. Allow one intervention every two steps; keep all groups alive to win. Show history/reset and omit individual pathfinding.
Covers are original AI-generated style illustrations. Game names reference publicly visible design choices and remain the property of their owners. This atlas does not supply screenshots or assets from those games. Prompts and combinations are original drafts for new games.