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dislekcia
18-03-2008, 09:56 PM
Inspired (read: badgered) by Fengol, I went through some of my old ideas and things, seeing what I could put up here... There's a lot, even though I couldn't go through all the GM5.3 and earlier source (some of that is totally loony, anyone remember the Wiener?) but here are the first 5 things from my GM6 work:

Copter test (http://www.gamedotdev.co.za/files/examples/copter01.zip)
http://www.gamedotdev.co.za/images/examples/copter.jpg
I was trying to see if the Desert Combat (original BattleField 1942 mod) helicopter flying could be replicated in 2D. Then I added in insects that I'd doodled for no good reason, I think I was experimenting with scanned art... If you're perceptive you can see the beginnings of the "fake 3D" that was later used in Monochrome.
Controls: A/D rotate heli, W auto-rotates heli to face mouse cursor, S leans heli forward to make it go fater... Heli tries to balance itself out and will tilt towards mouse cursor.

Catalyst - Alchemy (http://www.gamedotdev.co.za/files/examples/catalyst02.zip)
http://www.gamedotdev.co.za/images/examples/catalyst.jpg
This is actually a surprisingly neat little puzzle game idea that I completely forgot about. I think I wrote it for a NAG article, way before I started the In-Pictures series, but never ended up going with it for some reason... Anyway, the aim of the game is to make as much gold as possible. You move around using the arrow keys, shifting blocks as you go (replacement puzzle/slide style), you can't move gold, it's too heavy! If you hit spacebar, you charge a transmute which will begin a chain reaction next time you move. The transmuted block will turn to sand, but any blocks of the same type that it touches will turn to gold. If you transmute gold you get a pile of sand, but at least you can then move...

As a puzzle dynamic goes it's surprisingly simple, yet can lead to some complex stuff later. I might play around with this some more.

Debris (http://www.gamedotdev.co.za/files/examples/Debris01.zip)
http://www.gamedotdev.co.za/images/examples/debris.jpg
This is a little idea for a puzzle game where you would have had to repair holes in spaceship hulls and do other space-constructiony things by bashing hunks of space-junk onto welding spots and having nanomachines convert the junk into hull-metal... It uses a variant of the Verlet-integration system I spent ages randomly beating my head against as a physics system. It's kinda stable, heh.

Left click to accelerate one of the little green spots towards your mouse cursor (it could do with a trail, I know) and then smack that into the tetris-like hunks of crap to move the crap over to one of the grey squares with little dots on the corners. Those corners are weld-points, space-junk corners will stick here. Collect as much junk in place as you want and then hit spacebar to run the nano-coversion process to get hull with more welding spots... Alternatively, you can "cheat" and use the right mouse button to hold onto individual vertices and move those around. I suggest doing that with the green thing that doesn't move to the mouse cursor and messing around... Warning, you will have shapes that go wonko and you can sometimes fly through shapes at their edges, that's one of the reasons I never took this approach to physics much further.

Disjoint (http://www.gamedotdev.co.za/files/examples/disjoint_02.zip)
http://www.gamedotdev.co.za/images/examples/disjoint.jpg
More loony Verlet-integrated physics stuff. The idea.txt I have for this game is crazy and goes on about feeding creatures different ways of moving around... See? Crazy.

Anyway, sticky constraints! Kinda buggy, but fun to play with. Left click, right click, experiment - you'll figure it out.

Ex-Vitro (http://www.gamedotdev.co.za/files/examples/exVitro_01.zip)
http://www.gamedotdev.co.za/images/examples/ex-vitro.jpg
This was a lot of fun to make. Contains a rather strange way to use GM's objects that often confuses the crap out of people... The system is there to let you play with different types of biological process and their orders/applications within organisms. The nifty part is the way that organisms have a sort of DNA that can mutate when they reproduce and controls the performance of individual processes.

Hit S or left click the Process Sequencer bar to start editing creatures. Add processes, change them (sorry, that's not very good design, I know) and shift their order around. I suggest giving everything a Metabolism and at least Miosis so that they can reproduce. Hit spacebar to spawn critters on your mouse cursor (space + drag is often a good idea). Right mouse button poisons critters under your cursor... Each process uses a certain fraction of energy, creatures will start digesting themselves if they are running low on energy, this damages them. If they have too much energy they start poisoning themselves. Creatures are the same colour as their parents, so you can eventually see a single genetic line dominate the world ;)

This was made long before Spore. I've always meant to come back and populate this, maybe with a mechanic that unlocks new processes as your critters evolve over time. The sliders are a mystery!

-D

Afflict
19-03-2008, 01:53 AM
Let me be the first to say I think you and Fengol are onto something here. :)

Fengol
19-03-2008, 07:25 AM
There's no mystery, Dislekcia has shared these games before at devLANs and I don't hold with the idea of keeping a game a secret until it's complete. The more people providing feedback on your games the better it grows and get debugged.

What silly ideas and game concept do you have hiding on your dev machine?

Gazza_N
19-03-2008, 07:45 AM
What silly ideas and game concept do you have hiding on your dev machine?
I tried writing a raytracer in GM once. It failed miserably, naturally.

What Fengol and Dis are doing here is great. It not only gives everyone (mostly) working code to work with and learn from, but also gets some great ideas out there for us to play with.

Squid
19-03-2008, 02:03 PM
I demand a download to the sausage game.

edg3
19-03-2008, 02:15 PM
I demand a download to the sausage game.
Im interested in how it works :)

I quite like all the gmphysics using games (including fengol's ones), and Im going to look over them thoroughly and learn ;)

Afflict
19-03-2008, 03:07 PM
Theres a sausage game?

01DT!m3r
19-03-2008, 04:16 PM
OWNAGE!!!!! I LOVE YOU GUYS! nice ideas dis and fengol,this definetly helps alot.thanks

Thaumaturge
20-03-2008, 02:43 AM
Those are cool prototypes, dislekcia - thank you for sharing them. ^_^

I rather like the helicopter movement - I can see that making for a fun vehicle to manoeuvre in a larger game.

When I imagine using it in a combat situation, however, envisaging the guns facing forwards, I find it difficult to adapt away from using the mouse to aim and the keys to move - but then, I may well adapt better with levels that include player training in their design to ease me into it.

The physics games are very cool (although it didn't take me long to create an aberrant "star" construct in Disjoint, which I don't think that it liked much ;P). I really like the physical reactions of your objects.

Catalyst is a neat concept - if you do return to it, then I look forward to what you come up with. ^_^

Ex Vitro is also pretty cool - I'm rather fond of artificial life simulators.

Does the order of processes in the sequencer have any effect, by the way?

I would really like to see this developed, I think, especially with the ability to view the genetic properties of a given creature, and of course with more processes and potential creature complexity available. ^_^


What silly ideas and game concept do you have hiding on your dev machine?

I have the beginnings of an abandoned random-dungeon exploration game, with a little minimap overview and passageways connecting rooms, I suppose. :/

(There is, at this point, no actual gameplay - there isn't even collision detection. You can, however, wander about the little set of square rooms and right-angled passages generated. ^^; )

Fengol
20-03-2008, 07:16 AM
so post it!

Thaumaturge
20-03-2008, 07:27 AM
If others concur, I might. But I'm first removing the normal visualisation that I had included for testing purposes, if I do. :P

Gazza_N
20-03-2008, 07:34 AM
I will concur. I will concur nine times.

FuzzYspo0N
20-03-2008, 11:17 AM
lol yea. concur

Afflict
20-03-2008, 11:20 AM
Same here, post it ;)

Tr00jg
20-03-2008, 08:16 PM
Theres a sausage game?

I still think the sausage game can become a cult-ish hit. How, I don't quite know. I just love a sausage as the protagonist.

dislekcia
20-03-2008, 08:42 PM
The sausage game (http://www.gamedotdev.co.za/files/examples/Collaborative_Wiener.zip) ;)

If someone could post a nice screenshot, I'll edit my first post.

WASD + mouse.
Spacebar (I think), Left and Right Mouse Buttons.

The sausage in the game is the result of a dare at the end of a very, very long day of lanning: Miktar and Antioch bet me that I couldn't do something useful with the physics stuff I was messing with, not a sausage!

So the next morning I had a fully IK sausage flopping about. There was much giggling.

-D

Gazza_N
20-03-2008, 08:52 PM
It seems that the life of a ninja-roping, grease-spewing IK sausage is rife with dangerous enemies. Like bouncing fatties. And MIBs. And axes. And whirling blades of dooooom...

http://i261.photobucket.com/albums/ii48/Gazza_N/Sausage.jpg

Thaumaturge
21-03-2008, 04:50 PM
Dislekcia, that is very cool. ^_^

I really like the strangeness of the scenario, and the sausage moves very nicely indeed - it's a clever application of the physics, and a nice twisting of the nay-sayers' words. ^_^

And ninja-roping, if halfway-decently implemented, is generally fun. ^_^

(I didn't find space to do anything, by the way, although I may have missed something.)