Name: HOUND

Publishers: Meridian4

Developers: Nick Shesterin

Genres: Simulation, Indie

Platforms: PC

Released: 2017-03-28

HOUND

Breathe life into an empty void and watch as it grows, evolving into a world of your choosing. Your only goal is to create a complex ecosystem - it can be a brutal world of predators or a peaceful garden; breed an intelligent species capable of speech or a super-organism that will consume the stars. With HOUND, you make the world that you want.

HOUND gameplay is simple: you start with an empty world, build your ecosystem, design your first organism and throw it into the void. HOUND’s advanced artificial intelligence analyses your creation, finds it strengths and weaknesses, then gives it competition in your world. Watch as life evolves before your eyes - literally; the creatures exist in three dimensions, develop legs, wings and communication*. Your organism will fight for survival, stimulating successful mutation and increasingly more complex life forms.

Leave your new world for too long though, and the simulation will go out of control. Overpopulation, plagues or even a supernova explosion will turn your world into a wasteland… unless you fight back.

The AI speeds up natural selection and genetic mutation, so that your world will evolve in a matter of days instead of millennia. Every move you make changes the outcome - you can add new organisms, tweak the environment and more through communication with the AI. The twist? Working with the AI can be a productive partnership or a brutal rivalry.

Your application will be a part of a network that creates one global genetic database and a global ecosystem. AI is blank at the start, but as the network grows, it will
improve, building itself with algorithms, picked to fit your individual simulation, and overtime your game will become more than just an evolution simulator, as the
built-in neural net learns the laws of mutation and genetic recombination.

Success in HOUND isn’t about earning “achievements” or beating levels. Success is controlling the program so that you create your perfect world by containing and stabilising a bursting stream of life.

HOUND gives you the tools and the assistance of a powerful AI to create artificial life, design and manage virtual ecosystems and interact with neural networks of high organisation. It is not a game, in the strictest sense; rather, it is a powerful engine you can play that will give you a new world in a small-scale simulation to shape and conquer.

*Our research team encourages all players to try to breed creatures that can communicate - talking is preferred - as that will help us with the scientific development of the project.