Crescent Loom Lands On Kickstarter
Joseph ‘Wick’ Perry has launched a Kickstarter campaign to develop a video game that teaches the science of neural circuits. Players in Crescent Loom are given a physics-based toolbox for basic bodies and neural circuits and then will be presented with a series of challenges. In finding solutions to these puzzles, Perry hopes that players will implicitly come to understand the basics of how their own brains work. You can check out the Kickstarter trailer for the game below.
The Kickstarter campaign has a goal of $20,000 to fund one year of full-time development. An online alpha demo is available that allows players to share their creatures via a link. Joseph ‘Wick’ Perry fell in love with the neural basis of behavior while getting his undergraduate degree in 2013, but struggled with getting an intuitive sense of how these circuits operated. Diagrams are not good at depicting dynamic systems, and scientific simulation software is impenetrably complex. Crescent Loom is designed to fill this gap; to be an accessible and interactive tool to create biologically-plausible artificial brains.
Crescent Loom is set to include a number of features once it’s developed, including:
- CREATURE EDITOR — A brain is pointless without a body, so a physics-based construction tool allows players to weld bones and stitch the muscles of their creature.
- NEURAL CIRCUITS — Connect neurons to coordinate muscles using an intuitive “loom” inspired by the diagrams in scientific publications on invertebrate nervous systems.
- COLLABORATION — Save, share, and modify creations online with a simple link.
- LEARN SCIENCE (accidentally) — Gradually learn the concepts underlying our ability to move by solving puzzles in an alien ocean.
The description of the game reads:
“Crescent Loom is Kerbal Space Program crossed with the cell stage of Spore; construct a body and wire up its neurons to solve puzzles and explore an alien world.”