What:
Evarium is a spunky little app designed by Ralph Haygood that contains little colorful critters that live, mate, and die.
What You Need To Know:
This app is separated into two parts: the Evarium which sits on your profile and has the colorful little creatures in it, and the Console which sits behind the apps column link. The creatures are small colorful symmetrical patterns called critters. They will almost remind you of the old Windows screen saver called Fractal. The critters come in all kinds of symetrical shapes, triangles, stars, flower like circles and more.
The critters are born, live, mate, and die. The critters move and swirl around the Evarium and when a male and female meet that like each other, they mate by spinning on each other and move on. If the mating is successful a small critter will be born with some traits of the parents. Critters age and eventually die by respectfully fading away. Clicking on individual critters will bring up a small profile about them with their sex, age, number of children they have been part of producing, what they are interested in, their relationship status, and what they are looking for.
The profile also has buttons to take actions on your critter. You can Discard them if you do not want them. My girlfriend discard everything that did not have a three-fold symmetry so that they would all match in shape to one that I had sent her. On the other side of the coin, if there is one that you particularly like you can freeze them. Doing this sends it to your freezer where it will be saved so you can put clones of your favorites back into your Evarium. Add clone adds a baby cloned version of the one you have selected, send clone will send a clone to your friends, and continue takes you back to the Evarium.
Accessing the app through the app column icon will bring you to the control panels. The Home link supplies you with news about the app and recommended reading while the Stuff link takes you to the Evarium zazzle.com store.
Console gives you all of the control for your Evarium that you could need. Temperature effects how quickly things happen. The warmer it is the faster they move, grow, and die. I like to have my critters around for a while so I don’t miss any of the new designs from the mutations so I keep this set to the default 2.5.
Changing the Mutation Rate effects how different offspring will be from their parents. Set this high to get a wide variety of colors and shapes for your critters. A good example of this function is again, after my girlfriend called all non-three-fold symmetry from her Evarium she set this function to 0 so that all offspring would maintain the theme.
There is a slider for male and female preference strengths. Each critter has an idea what it’s ideal mate is and much like real life will settle for something close if the ideal can not be found. Setting these preferences high makes your critters more and more choosy in who they will mate with. A really choosy critter may not mate at all.
The next couple of sliders are for male and female mating cost. Each mating takes a physical toll on the participants. In the real world the results of mating are much more straining on females than they are on males and this is shown in the Evarium by males living slightly longer than females.
The freezer contains the originals of all the critters you have frozen to preserve their genetic bits. From here you can send a clone to your Evarium or to a friend. You can also thaw them out and put the original back into the Evarium or discard them if you do not wish to keep their genetic bits on hand.
The Nursery is packed with baby critters that you can add to your Evarium there are currently over seventy types to choose from in a wide variety of shapes and colors. In addition to adding these to your little habitat you can send them to a friend. If there is a certain look you want to inject, you should browse through this and see if something shakes your fancy The last two links here are the RAQ (Reasonably Asked Questions) and Friends. The RAQ is like an FAQ except that the app is new so he labeled it more correctly, and friends is where you can invite friends to join you in the app.
The little critters, despite just being colorful symmetrical shapes are oddly cute and you will develop favorite ones that you will clone from your freezer over and over. You might even come up with little names for them in your head. That is something that we would have liked to have seen as part of the app, the ability to name critters, or a random name generator, or at least a species name. But that may be the only place this app falls short. It never asks you to invite friends and does not make you navigate through splash screens to use it. Ralph says he wants this to be a polite app and it really does prove to be. Something else about Ralph, it seems like he is very active on his app page. He post answers to questions asked on the app page wall and keeps the app news updated so his users know what is going on.
Over all this app is a win. Simple, fun, educational, artistic, non-intrusive. Still though, we feel like something is missing from it, and if you will excuse the wording, still has room to grow. This is a new app though, and we are going to keep our eyes on it and on developer Ralph Haygood. You can add this to your profile for free by obtaining it here.
9/10 Still Room To Grow
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