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
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