In this game, evolution is the star. The warm and gooey centre of the theory is that children are slightly different from their parents, and the children who have useful differences will be more likely to grow up and have their own children, passing those differences on.

What this means is that I will need to be able to create an infinite number of creatures within my game. Instead of having an artist create 3D models of various bodyparts and then sticking them together in the way that Spore does, every creature shall be defined solely by a set of parameters that a series of mathematical functions can use to spit out a 3D creature - complete with limbs, face, textured skin, skeleton etc.

Progress on this goes well, I can now create textured parameter-based objects, as the first image shows. The second image should give you an idea of how I can use this ability to start fleshing out the shape of a creature. The bulk of the creature is made up of three basic segments - tail, body, neck. Each of these segments is defined by a cubic-spline, and a circle that can be squished/pulled either horizontally or vertically to determine the cross-sectional area between segments. The shape of the creature is interpolated over these splines. By changing the positions of the control points in the curves, or the shapes of the circles, the look of the creature can be drastically altered. The limbs can be created from the same basic procedure. The head is a little trickier, but I'll get to that later.