Aboard the Beagle is a video game in which Darwin searches for new species of animals and engages in Pokemon-style battles against other naturalists and a gang of pirates. It will be available for Windows, Linux and Mac. For more information visit my website:
http://eljuegodedarwinysusanimales.blogspot.com.es
You can see more images of the game in the image gallery:
http://eljuegodedarwinysusanimales.blogspot.com.es/p/galeria-de-imagenes.html
First demo of Aboard the Beagle
The game will be free and will be available on my website. You can now try the first demo:
There will also be a special edition, with twenty more species and three new levels, exclusively for those who support me at Ulule.
Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace attempt to prove the gradual change (natural selection) hypothesis at the Royal Society. William Buckland and his followers reject this hypothesis. They think that God has created and extinguished living beings several times, each time creating completely different animals. Darwin goes on a trip with the mission of looking for new species and fossils that demonstrate the gradual evolution of living things. Meanwhile Buckland sends his collaborators with the opposite intention: to search for evidence for his catastrophic hypothesis.
When Buckland’s followers arrive at a site before Darwin they hide the fossils and exotic animals so that he cannot study them. Darwin uses the animals he has trained to win in turn-based battles and take over these new species. He has to constantly train his animals because over time his rivals get stronger.
Our protagonist finds a very old fossil on an island that defeats Buckland’s belief that the world was created 6,000 years ago. On that island there is a band of pirates who worship the fossil as a sacred relic, and vow to take revenge on Darwin for stealing it. The journey has become a race against time to find the animals and fossils before they are taken from him and to flee from the pirates who try to lock him up on their pirate island, where they have founded the Republic of Libertatia.
Darwin spends time locked up in Libertatia, until the pirate captain takes pity on him and frees him. When he returns to London he expects a reception in style. He is astonished when he is imprisoned on charges of piracy, as it is well known that he has spent a season with pirates.
It’s up to you to prove his innocence and publish the theory of evolution. The more scientific evidence you gather the more arguments you will have to win the case and to convince the naturalists at the Royal Society that animals evolve by natural selection. If you succeed, you will go down in history as the best naturalist of all time.
The object of the game is to collect enough knowledge points to convince Buckland and his followers that animals gradually change by natural selection. Knowledge Points are earned by discovering new species and collecting fossils. To reach the last level you must get at least one animal of each species. Nothing happens if you don’t find all the fossils, but the more you have, the higher your score.
As a good scientist, Darwin carries a field notebook where he records all his observations. In the notebook you can see the species you have discovered, the status of your companions (the captured animals), the inventory and the scientific conclusions. Every time you discover a species or a fossil, you earn knowledge points. For every certain number of points a new conclusion appears in the notebook. These conclusions are the basis of the theory of evolution and the arguments you need to overcome the last level. The more conclusions on the list, the easier it is to win the game.
Aboard the Beagle has come from the idea of making a nineteenth-century Pokemon. In the normal edition there are a hundred different species; in the special edition “extinct animals” the number of species is 120. Darwin captures animals and uses them to fight against his adversaries. In the shop you can buy objects with which to catch wild animals and others with which to heal your companions after fighting. You can also take them to the Beagle’s hold, where Robert McCormick, the expedition’s official physician and naturalist, helps cure them.
The fighting is Pokemon style. Your companions gain experience with each fight. When they are quite experienced they level up, improve their stats, and learn new attacks. There is an important difference with Pokemon. In Aboard the Beagle the animals do not evolve into another species, because the changes are gradual, and it takes a long time for a new species to appear. The central idea of the game is gradual change as the basis of evolution.
It will be available for Windows, Linux and Mac. I have programmed it in Java. The drawings are vector images in SVG format that I have created with Inkscape. Typography, music, and sound effects are Creative Commons licensed works copied from the internet.
On the world map you can navigate from one port to another and enter the levels that you have unlocked. The game will have twenty levels classified into two categories: narrative and anecdotal. The narrative levels tell the story and roughly correspond to the places Darwin visited. You cannot enter a narrative level until you have passed the previous ones. You can return as many times as you want to the levels you have unlocked.
List of narrative levels:
In the special edition there are three levels set in Borneo, for a total of 17 narrative levels.
Anecdotal levels tell side stories that don’t have much to do with the main plot. You can enter them at any time no matter what other levels you have visited before.
Within each level you can explore the map, enter buildings, talk to people, and confront enemies. As you explore, wild animals appear randomly. When you find a fossil, add it to your collection. They are valuable scientific evidence.
Charles Darwin
Darwin began studying medicine at the wish of his father, who was a doctor. Seeing the boy’s lack of interest, his father sent him to study letters with the intention that later he would be ordained as an Anglican pastor. Among other things he studied natural history, geology, and the life of marine invertebrates. Shortly after finishing his studies, he received an offer from Fitz Roy to join the Beagle expedition.
Robert Fitz Roy
On the Beagle’s first expedition to South America, the captain of the Beagle was Pringle Stokes, who committed suicide before returning to England. After this tragic event, Robert Fitz Roy, who until then had been the second in command, took over. Fitz Roy was so afraid of depression and suicide that he invited Darwin to join the expedition to keep him company. He was interested in Darwin’s geological knowledge because he was sorry he had not studied the geology of the coasts on the first trip.
Robert McCormick
McCormick was the expedition’s official physician and naturalist. Unfortunately he did not get along with Fitz Roy, which led the latter to seek the company and friendship of Darwin, who has gone down in history as a Beagle naturalist instead of McCormick. Logically, he did not get along with Darwin either.
Alfred Russel Wallace
Wallace explored the Amazon River and the Malay Archipelago. He financed his travels by collecting exotic insects that he sold to British collectors. He discovered many species of insects and learned about the geographic distribution of animals. He noticed that animals from Asia live on some islands in the Malay Archipelago, and animals from Australia live on others. His discoveries led him to develop the hypothesis of natural selection.
William Buckland
traveled the UK and the rest of Europe to visit paleontological sites. He was the first to publish a complete description of a dinosaur that he named megalosaurus. Buckland believed that geological changes were the consequence of biblical catastrophes such as the Universal Flood. He concluded that there had been several successive creations and extinctions in which God had created completely different animals, such as dinosaurs and modern mammals. He rejected the hypothesis of natural selection.
Olivier Misson
Legend has it that Olivier Misson, captain of a French warship, decided to become a pirate for a utopian ideal of freedom and justice. He founded the republic of Libertatia in northern Madagascar and dedicated his life to boarding the ships of European empires, which he considered unjust and oppressive.
With these rewards you can participate in the development of the game as a designer of a character or a level, as a beta tester or giving your opinion in the development forum, and you will also appear in the credits as a collaborator, beta tester or designer. If you like the game and have good ideas to improve it, do not hesitate, participate! Each reward includes all of the above.
If you help me with five euros or more
I will send you some beautiful wallpapers to decorate your PC.
I’ll put your name in the credits so everyone knows that you helped me finish this game and how much I appreciate it.
You will have access to an exclusive development forum for those who support me in Ulule. I’ll keep you posted on everything I do and we’ll talk about how you want the game to be. Beta testers will have a sub-forum reserved for commenting on test results.
If you help me with ten euros or more
You will receive the wallpapers, you will appear in the credits as a collaborator, you will have access to the development forum and …
I am preparing an exclusive special edition for those who support me in Ulule. The “extinct animals” edition has twenty more species than the regular edition and three levels set in Borneo, in a region that Wallace had already explored on previous trips.
Remember that Wallace is a great naturalist and friend of Darwin, and together they are trying to demonstrate the gradual change hypothesis. When Darwin arrives in Borneo, he discovers that Wallace was waiting for him to enter the most inaccessible and mysterious part of the island together. The last time Wallace was there, he found signs that there are still valleys where no one has ever entered, which are home to unknown species.
If you reach the isolated valleys you will find twenty species that were supposed to be extinct, but had survived on this remote island. You already have living specimens of species that you only knew from fossils. This discovery dismantles Buckland’s hypothesis that God causes mass extinctions and creates completely different animals.
The only way to get the “extinct animals” edition is to give me your support in Ulule, that is, choose this reward or any of the following.
If you help me with twelve euros or more
You will receive the wallpapers, you will appear in the credits as a beta tester, you will have access to the development forum, you will receive the special edition “extinct animals” and …
You will test the game as a beta tester
If you choose this reward, you will be able to try each level when it is finished without waiting for the rest of the game to finish. I’m not asking you to do professional work. All you have to do is explore the level well looking for anything that doesn’t work or can be improved. Talk to all the characters, fight all the animals that get in your way and do everything you can think of to break the game. It doesn’t matter if you miss a bug because there will be more people testing at the same time as you.
The tests will take place in the months of February, March and April. In the development forum you can discuss with the other beta testers the problems you have encountered and what you found fun or boring in each level.
If you help me with fifteen euros or more
You will receive the wallpapers, you will appear in the credits as designer of your character, you will have access to the development forum, you will receive the special edition “extinct animals”, you will test the game as a beta tester and …
You will have your own NPC. You will decide the appearance of the character, his name, the story of his life and what he will say when he talks to Darwin. All characters must meet the following rules:
Let it be a human being. Your character cannot be an animal or a fantastic creature (zombie, goblin, orc, unicorn …).
Make it consistent with the setting. is a person of the s. XIX that does not possess supernatural powers or technologies too advanced for its time. He cannot be an alien, nor a time traveler, nor a sorcerer.
That it has the same proportions as the rest of the characters, without accessories that protrude much from the body, such as a spear carried at the ready. This condition is due to technical limitations.
These rules are not strict. Your character can be a skeleton rising from the grave or an illusionist who surprises Darwin with his tricks. It doesn’t have to be historical, but it does have to be consistent with the setting. Here are some examples of valid characters: sailor, pirate, naturalist, citizen of Buenos Aires (or Rio de Janeiro, or London), gaucho, peasant from the Andes, villager from the Cape Verde islands, European explorer, wife of an army officer, Australian Aboriginal, merchant. If you need help choosing, ask me to give you more details about the level at which you want your character to appear. (the list of levels is above).
If you help me with thirty euros or more
You will receive the wallpapers, you will appear in the credits as a designer of your level and your character, you will have access to the development forum, you will receive the special edition “extinct animals”, you will test the game as a beta tester, you will design a character and …
You will have your own level. You will also be the first to try it, even before the rest of the beta testers. You will decide the name of the place, the setting (urban, wooded, mountainous …), the NPCs, what the map is like, a story to tell and the characters’ dialogues with Darwin. The size of the map will depend on your ability to fill it with interesting things. You must comply with the following rules:
If you help me with fifty euros or more
You will receive the wallpapers, you will appear in the credits as a designer of your level and your characters, you will have access to the development forum, you will receive the special edition “extinct animals”, you will test the game as a beta tester, you will design a character, you will design a level and …
You will design four other characters. In total you will design a level and five characters, which you can put in your level or in one of the narrative levels.
If you help me with a hundred euros or more
You will receive the wallpapers, you will appear in the credits as a designer of your levels and characters, you will have access to the development forum, you will receive the special edition “extinct animals”, you will test the game as a beta tester, you will design five characters, you will design a level and. ..
You will design another level. In total you will design two levels and five characters, which you can put in your levels or in one of the narrative levels.
Creating a video game is a lot of work. This money is a help so that you can dedicate more time to it during the months of February, March and April, and publish it in May already finished. If he dedicated many months or years to this first game, it is likely that he would not finish it and that he would not be able to finish any other. So I want to finish it as soon as possible. Thanks to this financial aid, I will be able to spend more time at home for three months to program, draw and test.
The development of the game is continuous. I am developing it now and will continue throughout the funding campaign, but slowly due to lack of time. Starting in February I will move much faster.
When I started it in late 2014, I knew next to nothing about game development. Throughout the year I have been able to create the plot, the main characters, a couple of levels and a program that works well, with everything necessary: graphics, combat system, artificial intelligence …
So far the game has been a personal project without any repercussions. To finish it I need the support of the users. This funding campaign is also an excuse to make it known and ask users to help me improve it. After all, the game is for them, and it is good that they participate in the development with their criticism and suggestions.
It is time for one last concentrated effort in a few months. If I get the financing I will publish the game in May 2016. Everything is ready, I just need your support. I invite you to participate by joining the development forum, designing a character, designing a level, or as a beta tester.
The € 600 that I ask will be distributed as follows:
The financing campaign begins in November and will end in January. In February I will deliver the wallpapers, launch the development forum, and speak with beta testers to begin testing and with character and level designers to begin their designs. In May I will publish the normal edition, which can be downloaded for free from my website, and the special edition, reserved exclusively for those who have chosen it as a reward (all those who have contributed ten euros or more).
My name is Andrés, I am 32 years old and I live in Madrid. I am not a professional programmer, I program as a hobby. At the end of 2014 I decided to fulfill one of my dreams, to create a video game. My brother had told me that a nineteenth-century Pokemon in which Darwin competes with other naturalists to discover new species would be interesting.
I liked the idea so much that I started to think about what the game would be like. I already knew how to program and draw more or less well. He had everything he needed to get started.
For the fighting I have been inspired by Pokemon Gold and for the exploration in The legend of Zelda: a link to the past, which is one of my favorite games. The story of Aboard the Beagle is based on Charles Darwin’s voyage of exploration aboard HMS Beagle in the 1930s.
I would like to dedicate myself to video game development. I already have ideas for a second game when this one is over. I plan to make several similar games to Aboard the Beagle with 2D graphics in overhead and isometric perspective. When I have enough experience I will create a real time strategy game. In the meantime I hope you dare to try Aboard the Beagle and have a lot of fun.