"I made these guys get sad, for a good reason. I'm making a game where you study an alien species, and grow their colony to discover all of their behaviors. They do some weird things, like exploding, creating bone sculptures, and turning into crabs. But there's something missing. They don't socialize. Implementing this might be difficult, as everything in the game needs to be legible from a bird's eye view. So how can I do it? I gave the aliens a social need based on a timer, and when it hits, they find a good open spot and sit down, sending out invitations to the tiles around them. When other aliens want to socialize, they'll prioritize going to these open invitation tiles before making their own spot. Also, these pink squares in debug view, they are reserved tiles, which are to avoid aliens overlapping when performing specific actions, which ruins legibility. It's used for this socializing system and other behaviors like nesting and drinking. So when aliens socialize, they interface with each other for a short time, satisfying their need, and they can both move on. But if no one comes, they become catatonic, switching to a similar but sadder animation. Other aliens can rescue them by socializing with them before they starve in this state. Observing the colony feels different now. There is a tug in my chest as I see aliens go catatonic, with their colonies still busy around them. So I guess it's legible enough. If this intrigues you, you can play Tenebrarium for free on itch.io, and you can press all the buttons below."