Having played Niche as a teen when it was still in its early developmental stages and having since gone on to study biology, it's super special to me and I would love to see it expanded or a sequel! I'm a bit late to this post and stumbled across it by accident, but many of the following ideas have lived in my mind since forever and saw some of them had already been brought up. I saw some mention of seasons, I think it would be really nice to also include hibernation as a survival tactic for the winter months.
I would love to see the underwater scene expanded more! I've been missing water based predators. There were already some suggestions on underwater "islands" or biomes and thought this could even go as far as making a deep sea location with limited/no light and a bunch of traits to adapt to this (bioluminescence, angler fish light to attract prey, tentacles for detection instead of vision, water filtering for food like baleen whales, mollusc body to deal with the pressure etc.). One thing I was missing a lot in water Nichelings was electro receptors. Many underwater species make use of these (including platypus) and for that to allow underwater detection of fish outside of sight range or to detect the digging spots for platypus would be great. Or even an extra sense being added to water body, as the lateral line in fish can detect water movement and this would allow for muddy water to exist with limited sight visibility.
Since the addition of birds and them being able to sit in trees, I thought arboreal traits would have gone real well as an alternative to getting your Nichelings take to the trees. The bugs and seeds of trees can now only be exploited by birds and having a prehensile tail or climbing paw/hindlegs would be a great addition to expanding this mechanic.
On the opposite end I would also love to see a (semi) fossorial system included, it's quite a common tactic in animals and to be able to make burrows to escape predators would be great! I believe there was already some mention of dens. I could imagine it as premade burrowing spots that your Nicheling needs digging trait to make a burrow, or even fallen logs or tree hollows. What would be really cool but maybe more difficult to implement would be to allow Nichelings to create burrows and expand them to any tile and make several entrances (could be restricted to meadow or sand tiles).
I couldn't have agreed more with the posts about traits evolving on a scale, this would be super exciting! It could even go as far as to have intermediate stages between wing development from paws or even hip morphology changes to allow for an upright stance, to mimic the main evolutionary pathways that we see in paleontological/evolutionary studies. Ideally the intermediate stages would already have some advantage, as otherwise they wouldn't stay in the population for long enough to progress.
The 50% mutation rate that the player can implement for two genes in the current Niche makes it a bit too easy in my opinion. Ideally this could be adjustable by the player depending on how easy or difficult they want to make it to themselves. Useful mutations are quite rare in nature and most of the mutations occurring tend to be detrimental. Although theoretically one mutation in one gene can do the trick, often an accumulation of a bunch of mutations is necessary to really create a phenotypic change. I'm not sure how this could be implemented in underlying game mechanics, but to see a more realistic approach to the genes and mutating traits would be really cool. Although the idea of having a photosynthesising Nicheling also gets me quite excited, but it's a bit further from realistic systems.
Last point I'll bring up for now, would be to implement herbivores, omnivores and carnivores (etc.), Nichelings being able or unable to digest certain foods would be really interesting. As example omnivores could be able to eat everything but get less nutrients out of both, whilst the more specialised diets would allow maximum nutrient uptake. Overall I would generally like to see a lot more variety and widespread traits, genes and survival tactics, so that there is more to discover and explore. There are is so much inspiration to take from all the different species out there! But of course this would make the game a lot bigger, which also comes with a developmental cost. I think even the current Niche still has a lot of space for new cool traits and interactable creatures to be added. I still had a few more trait ideas, but this has become lengthy enough already
