GooGrid - The World's First Massively Multiplayer Online Ecosystem

GooGrid is an online ecosystem where animated critters designed by players crawl from one screen to the next across the internet, fighting, eating plants or each other, and reproducing. New players can make a critter in seconds with the "critter wizard" and the "random beetle" graphics, but the real fun of the game is using "advanced species design" mode and making your own animated custom critter drawings.

Custom drawings

Each species you design can have up to 21 animation sequences. Each sequence corresponds to a critter behavior, such as eating, fighting, sleeping, walking, running to attack, or running to escape.

Species design

You can choose from 26 different body parts (such as brain cells, body armor, sabre teeth, and hooves) and 28 different strategy parameters (such as prey filters, frustration handlers, group defense strategies, and prey/food supply management).

It's alive!

Even when you're offline, your creations can be crawling around on other players' screens. Once you release a species, it has a life of its own. Other players may choose to collect a specimen of your species if they like it. This saves it for later and counts as a vote towards the most popular species list.

Open Beta

GooGrid is now in open beta. That means the game is not officially released, and may change day to day, but it's free and open to the public.

Critter drawing contest

During the beta test, if you make a really great custom drawing, email it to root [AT] googrid.com. Please include your GooGrid username. Your critter drawings (.guc files) can be found in the CustomCritterDrawings subdirectory of the directory where GooGid was installed (usually c:\Program Files\GooGrid\CustomCritterDrawings).

The top three drawings will be posted on the website. Also, when the game is released, several of the best drawings will be used as the GooZoo example critters that users see when they first install the game.

Version 2.1 released

At last, the long-awaited results of my partnership with Mindsurge Entertainment - a much better looking and more user-friendly GooGrid.

Changes:

• The Grid Map. Allows you to see who's around you, view still pictures of their screen, and even relocate your screen.
• Terrain types. Each player chooses his or her own terrain type. You can see your neighbors' terrain on the edge of your screen, or water if there's nobody there. Different terrain types affect critters differently.
• You can now be isolated, on a little Galapagos island by yourself. This should allow firewall users to log in anytime, while allowing players to be isolated for testing purposes or together with a small group of friends.
• Chat messages by default only go to others on the same continent, but it's now also possible to send a message to everyone.
• Help files, finally. I'll eventually add more detail to these, but this should be a good start for beginners.
• The top 10s are now all top 20s, and a list of the most recently published species was added.
• No more anonymous logins or confusing plugins. The old stardust plugin is now part of the title sequence, and it goes great with the wonderful theme music by Scott Morton. The erosion plugin will be re-released on its own as a standalone program as soon as I get a chance to implement some of the ideas I had for it while backpacking in Yosemite.
• New GooPod images
• Added some extra disgusting flyswatter sounds. The sounds depend on the size of the critter and its armor level. Armored critters crunch, unarmored critters squish. Not recommended on a full stomach.
• Fixed several crash bugs and a bug that was causing some players not to get the top ten lists.

Version 2.1.9 released

Mostly bugfixes - but very important ones, so it's worth an announcement here.

Changes:

• Fixed the species not saving bug
• Fixed the "These species will be deleted if you continue" bug. However, any species that it was already warning you about are already gone, so go ahead and say yes. The bug that caused them to go missing is fixed, but as always make backups of your *species.dat files just in case.
• The server should crash far less often.
• Made the automatic placement much smarter, so people should end up less scattered.
• Players will be automatically re-positioned if they become isolated, unless they have manually chosen a position since their last login.
• Added a new terrain type called Ice, and modified the effects of Sand. Read the terrains section of the help files for more info.
• The "Most common" list is now a "Most biomass" list. Regardless of the number of screens a species is on, this list ranks the top species by their total mass, so that bigger critters have a fair chance.
• You can now control the game speed separately from the food supply

Version 2.1.11 released

More bugfixes and game balance fixes

Changes:

• The server should be FAR more stable.
• Running and jogging are now less efficient
• Added 2 "-All" boxes to the GooZoo. Put critters that annoy you in there. These boxes also count as a -1 vote in the most popular list.
• Fixed weird drawing bugs that happened after you mask something. Also fixed crashes that happen after a mask.
• If the server goes down, you can now just leave GooGrid open and it will automatically reconnect when the server comes back up.
• Much better status messages for logins.
• Fixed a bug where the game appeared to freeze up after viewing someone else's screen. This was because there was an error message box that was hidden underneath the map.