This Alien Does Not Exist - Devlog 8

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Better creatures

I’ve spent a lot of time making the generator produce creatures that make more biological sense.

Instead of every value being generated independently, more of the genome is now constrained by the rest of the creature. Large heads need thicker necks, heavier creatures get proportionally stronger limbs, tails are limited by body size, and posture now affects how the whole body is built rather than just changing a few numbers.

I also added several posture types like upright, forward-leaning, arched, slouched and coiled. They all change the way the spine, shoulders, hips and tail are generated, which makes creatures feel much less repetitive.

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Similar creature search

I finally started building the registry side of the project.

Every creature already stores a deterministic generation trace, but now that information is actually being used.

Each alien gets converted into physical and behavioural vectors which can be compared against every other creature. The registry can now find the most similar alien based on body structure, behaviour, or an overall weighted similarity score.

I also spent quite a while refining the comparison logic so it isn’t just comparing raw numbers anymore. Behaviour vectors are aligned automatically, similarity is calculated using both Euclidean distance and cosine similarity, and the weighting system is much more stable now.

This is eventually going to power species grouping, reverse lookups and the registry website I’m planning.

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Observation engine

The information panel also got a pretty big upgrade.

Instead of only showing generated facts like diet or locomotion, the engine now generates observations written from the perspective of an automated survey system.

These aren’t random sentences. They come directly from the generated anatomy and registry values, so every observation is deterministic for that seed.

The idea is to make every creature feel less like a render and more like something that has actually been catalogued.

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UI improvements

The website changed quite a bit too.

The biggest headache was making the information panel scale as more systems were added. It was becoming difficult to navigate once the registry and observations were included.

I ended up reorganising everything into collapsible sections, improved the responsive layout, added seed copying, better sharing, smarter canvas padding for different body shapes, and cleaned up a lot of the navigation code.

It feels much easier to explore creatures now instead of just generating one and moving on.

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Next

The renderer is still the weakest part of the project.

Large body parts can still merge together because everything is rendered as one continuous SDF surface. The next thing I want to work on is adding proper depth ordering and occlusion so limbs, necks and snouts separate naturally when they overlap.

After that, it’ll be time to start building the online registry.