Richard and Gordie are friends and they both share a passion for explaining science in a way that it is accessible.

Gordon originally approached Richard´s foundation to talk about doing a narrative based game to teach science and reasoning, however after lengthy discussion and meetings we all agreed that we should take on this challenge together.

For the Evolution game Gordie had initially proposed a more statistical approach to the evolutionary process, but Richard was keen we should only do it if we could create a population of creatures that lived out their lives.

So the Pokemon method of calculating who lives and who dies was ditched in favour of a persistent world where everything exists and lives whether a player can see it or not and takes its chances in a physically modeled environment.

Richard wasn´t sure that could be done so challenged Gordie to produce a prototype to prove that it was achievable. (Richard is a healthy skeptic after all)

Gordie went home from the meeting at Richard´s house to create a functioning demo of the evolutionary process and within a few days there were cubes and spheres rolling around eating stuff, giving birth etc.

Gordie being a game designer and programmer thought this would be proof enough, but before showing it to Richard showed it to Robyn the CEO at the Richard Dawkins foundation.

Robyn said... "It doesn´t look very organic".. which was true, so the "parent" creature made of cubes and spheres was quickly switched for a sort of Crab thing with 4 smaller versions of itself for limbs.

From that setup a profusion of different creature types emerged by natural selection from coral like colonies to airborne beasts with horn like structures.

Richard was happy and surprised with the demo, so that meant Gordie could move on to migrating the game to work with a system of servers online. This allows a population of hundreds of thousands of creatures to be processed instead of the 500 in the demo.

So that´s how they work, bit of back and forth, Gordie goes away makes things and then they discuss.. and so on.