The Button After Feeding

One design decision I obsessed over in Species Zero was embarrassingly small.

Not the creature evolution. Not the payments. Not the prestige ranks. Not even the strange little dream system I wanted to add later.

It was this: after you feed your creature, what happens next?

That sounds obvious, I know. If you have played games your whole life, maybe it is obvious. You tap a button, a number goes up, another button lights up, and off you go.

But I am 50, building this with AI, and I do not have a lifetime of making games behind me. I am not a game designer. I am a person trying to make a little world where odd creatures can grow and change.

At one point I found myself staring at the screen thinking, “I don’t understand what is next after feeding.”

That was not a tiny problem. That was the whole problem.

Because if I, the person making the thing, could get lost inside it, what chance did anyone else have?

Species Zero started as Genesis Beasts. The idea was simple in my head: raise unique AI-generated creatures, feed them, watch them change, maybe discover rare forms, maybe feel a little attached to them.

But ideas are always clean in your head. Once they become screens and buttons, they get messy fast.

The creature had stats. It had feeding. It had evolution. It had account creation. It had cloud storage. Later it had Stripe payments for people who wanted to speed things up, and Discoverer Ranks as a kind of prestige system.

All of that sounds like progress.

But progress can also bury the player.

The first version had that feeling of “here are some features.” It did not yet have the feeling of “come this way.” There is a difference.

So I became oddly fixated on adding a simple helper, which became the NextStepHint component. That is a fancy name for a very plain thing: a little nudge that tells you what to do next.

Not a tutorial that scolds you. Not a wall of instructions. Just a quiet signpost.

Because feeding a creature should not feel like doing your taxes.

This mattered to me because I know what it feels like to be the person who doesn’t know where to click. I have been that person many times. I have opened software, looked at a screen full of options, and felt my confidence drain out of my body.

When you are younger, maybe you blame the app.

When you are older, sometimes you blame yourself.

That is the part I did not want in my game.

I did not want someone to feed their creature and then sit there thinking, “Am I missing something? Did I do it wrong? Is this broken?”

And to be fair, sometimes things really were broken. Account creation looked like it had failed, even though it had actually succeeded. A missing bit of code with a name I could barely pronounce caused ugly 504 errors. Later, preview loading got tangled up with re-optimization issues and a drift calculation that seemed to hang.

There were plenty of moments where I thought, “Maybe this whole thing is beyond me.”

But this design decision was different. It was not just a bug. It was about kindness.

A good next step is a kindness.

It tells the player, “You’re okay. You’re still in the loop. Here is the next small thing.”

Later, when I admitted to myself, “This game is not good,” I ended up thinking about the same issue in a larger way. The creature needed more life. That led to ideas like first-person creature thoughts, overnight dreams, evolution drift, random events, social pieces, and better art.

But underneath all of that was the same obsession: don’t make the player work too hard to care.

If the creature has a voice, the player understands it better. If it dreams overnight, the player has a reason to come back. If evolution drifts a little, the world feels alive. If the next step is clear, the player does not feel stupid.

That last one may be the least glamorous, but it might be the most important.

I used to think building software was mostly about making things possible. Now I think it is also about making things understandable.

Especially for people like me, who did not grow up inside this world.

Small takeaway: if someone gets lost after one click, the next feature can wait.