Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox

In a universe driven by targets, a faceless corporation has employed you to create an evolving ecosystem you will never control.

Intelligent Design: An Evolutionary Sandbox is a god game with fully simulated genetics and evolution. Create species of plants, herbivores and carnivores, release them into a world, and then find out what evolution does with them.

Evolution isn’t just a mechanic. It’s a simulation.

Every organism’s behaviour comes out of its genes. How tall will a plant grow? How fast can a herbivore run? How often does a carnivore go looking for prey? Those genes pass down generation after generation with random mutations, and there is nothing underneath them but the simulation. No tricks, no statistical approximations, no scripted events waiting to fire. Leave a world running long enough and species will speciate, boom, crash and go extinct without you touching anything

You will spend a lot of time watching… which is the point.

This is a slow simulation. Populations take generations to change. Your role is to seed a world, change something small, and come back later and see what happened. One of our players leaves it open on a second monitor during work, I leave it on my TV while I’m cooking. If you’re looking for objectives, scores and explosions this is not that kind of game (but we do make those).

Genetically modifying creatures and crops have real consequences.

You can engineer the genetics of organisms directly, but you should do that carefully, because once a genome is loose in your ecosystem it is very hard to control. And do you even know what those genes do? Getting a food chain to balance is satisfying. Watching that same food chain collapse in 2 minutes because you made the equivalent of a spelling mistake is, we’d argue, even more satisfying.

Before you buy

This is for you if: you have heard of SimLife, SimEarth, Creatures or Framsticks; you find a population graph more interesting than a quest marker; you are happy leaving a simulation running while you do something else.

This is probably not for you if: you want goals, a story or a win screen; you want something to happen in the first ten minutes; you want the game to tell you what its numbers mean. One of our own players put it in capitals “THIS IS NOT A QUICK GAME DON’T EXPECT STUFF TO HAPPEN FAST” a positive review)

Who made this

Pill Bug Interactive is two people in Wales, Sean and Dave. We have been making games about systems that misbehave when you leave them alone for the best part of a decade, and we were nominated for a BAFTA Cymru along the way.

No Generative AI was used in this game. We pay humans for art and music.