RE: 🧬 SteemBiota — A No-Backend Life Simulation Built Entirely on Steem
🐾 SteemBiota Update — Your Creatures Are Alive Now
Just shipped a fun update. The creatures on the canvas are no longer static paintings — they move around on their own, and they respond when you poke them.
🚶 Autonomous Movement
Every creature now has a tiny brain running in the background. It picks a behaviour at random, acts on it for a while, then picks the next one. There are five states:
- Walk — wanders diagonally across the canvas at a relaxed pace
- Run — sprints at nearly 3× walk speed
- Jump — launches into a proper physics arc and lands with a little alert reaction
- Idle — just stands around doing nothing for a few seconds
- Sleep — curls up with the sleeping pose until it feels like waking up
The creature's health and mood heavily influence which behaviours it picks. A well-fed, thriving creature will spend most of its time running and jumping. A hungry or neglected one will mostly sleep. So feeding your creature actually looks different now — you can see it in how it moves.
Movement is fully 2D — creatures travel both horizontally and vertically across the canvas, bouncing off all four edges and reversing direction naturally. There's also a subtle body-bob layered on top while walking and running, which makes the motion feel more organic.
And the legs actually walk. Each of the four legs swings forward and back in a trot gait, with the paws lifting slightly off the ground at the peak of each stride. Run speed uses a wider stride and more air time.
When you navigate away and come back, the creature remembers exactly where it was on the canvas — position is saved to sessionStorage between page loads.
👆 Click Interactions
The canvas now responds to clicks.
Click directly on the creature and it gives you a short expressive reaction. Three moods cycle in order so repeated pokes feel varied:
- 😲 Surprised — snaps to alert pose
- 😄 Happy — breaks into a playful bounce
- 😤 Grumpy — plops down with a sulky expression
...then loops back. These are deliberately short flashes — a second or two — so they don't get in the way of normal watching.
Click on empty space and the creature walks to that exact spot. It moves in a straight line at walk speed, legs animating the whole way, and stops neatly when it arrives. Then the normal autonomous behaviour resumes after a short pause. It's a nice way to herd them to a particular corner of the canvas.
Reaction animations triggered by feeding, playing, and walking still take full priority over both of these — they interrupt and restart the behaviour loop cleanly once they finish.
The creatures are still the same on-chain — genomes, ownership, breeding, permits, all unchanged. This is purely canvas-side. But it makes a real difference just watching them.
Feed one and see what happens. 🌿