Love this book! I wrote Adrian after reading it and asked for permission to build a game inspired by it and received his blessing (
https://i.imgur.com/JWwNMR4.png) :)
(slight spoilers, FYI)
https://ant.care/ https://github.com/MeoMix/symbiants It's my first game, so it's going pretty slowly, but the goal is to have the player fill the role of the Eliza/Kern hybrid. You send commands to your pet ant colony once-per-day when orbiting the planet gives you line-of-sight. The act of caring for the pet gives you a renewed sense of purpose and a reason to care for yourself and is a mechanism for helping undue the insanity and create personal growth.
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what the game mechanics will look like (if you have suggestions, I'm all ears!), but I took a stab at some creative writing to build up the plot a bit. It feels very Children of Time-y and some might enjoy reading bits of it:
Half-Assed Technical Document:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/17ACH1XLCn7hkKz2dhuL1c_nx...
Freeform Creative Writing of Scripted Game Intro:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1wET9mWaYae_GMqbm8n37UoNF...
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Regarding the interview, I would love to know more about his process for deciding which aspects of an animal's ecology/behavior to represent in his fiction.
Tynan Sylvester (creator of RimWorld, a popular video game) wrote this article called The Simulation Dream, https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/the-simulation-dream, and I think about it a lottt. One concept Tynan stresses for creating a rich and engaging simulation is to "Choose the minimum representation that supports the kinds of stories you want to generate."
I would love to know why Adrian chose to give ants/spiders/(octopi..) the behaviors they have throughout his series and, if he considered other behaviors that he ultimately omitted, what his thought process was for ruling those other behaviors out.
