Tuesday 28 October 2014

Still Life

Play it here.

A quick attempt to turn yesterday's experiment into a game.  It's a series of puzzles where your aim in each is to eradicate the life form without letting any of it reach the edge of the map.

I've tweaked the rules slightly since yesterday.  Moving into slime will now destroy it and diagonal movement (numpad/vi-keys) is allowed.

If you beat all five, your can click on tiles to make your own (type 'C' to clear)



It is too complex to be a fun game in my opinion.  I found it easier to solve each one with brute force rather that trying to calculate how my movement would affect the slime creature.

I was shown Dungeon Janitor yesterday.  Your aim is also to remove slime but with a slime behaviour that is much easier to understand making for a much better game.

Conway's Game of Slime Creatures

Play it here

A cross between Conway's Game of Life and the classic slime monster.

You (the "@") count as a "lit" cell for the purpose of the simulation.



I set myself a target of 42 minutes to make this, from creating a new project to having it published online and writing this blog post.

A bug in my life algorithm caused me to go a little over schedule but still, not bad for about an hour I think.

I find it satisfying to be able to walk over to and mess up those still lifes.

Monday 27 October 2014

Minehunter

Play it here.

A kind of minesweeper-like game where you're trying to catch a single mine.



Day 4.

There are a couple of "tricks" to catching it quickly that aren't explained in the intro message.

The mine's movement is somewhat deterministic.  Stop reading now if you want to try it first without being spoiled.

It'll always try to move away from the tile you scan if possible.

Initially, the mine moved randomly but I found this lead to a fairly tedious exercise in removing most of the water in order to corner it after you'd used your first few turns to triangulate the mine's position.

The spawn location of the mine is entirely deterministic based on which tile you scan first.  Once you've tried starting in the same spot a couple of times, you can figure out exactly where it spawns for that seed.

Let me know if you can find a five turn win.


Saturday 25 October 2014

The Battlestar Encyclopedia

Read it here

A guide to procedurally generated battleships of the future.


Day 3 of #30daydev.

I had a lot of fun making this one.  The original plan was to just focus on procedurally generating spaceship pixel art but I felt like the images could use some back story to help bring them to life.

The ship names are generated by a Markov chain, which uses all the ships from Eve Online as input.

Friday 24 October 2014

Horse Simulator

Play it here

A very basic text adventure game where there is only one input and you always win.


Inspired by the South Park episode, "Guitar Queer-O" or more specifically the game "Heroine Hero" that Stan gets hooked on in that episode.  (youtube link)

This is the result of day two in #30daydev.  See my previous post for more details.

Spoiler alert

I tried to have some consistency throughout the text by keeping track of how fast your herd is moving internally and having messages be related to that.  It could definitely use more of this but I feel like I've spent enough time on this one already.

I tried to make it somewhat procedurally generated too but I'm not sure it was worth the effort when you never get to make your own choices.

Mandelbrot: The Game

Play it here

You will automatically zoom in on the area clicked.  If you reach an area where the edge of the set is no longer visible, the game is over.

See how far you can get in a single click or see how few clicks it takes you to reach the maximum zoom (around e-14).


This is the first in what I plan to be a series of mini games inspired by #30daydev.

I'm treating this an exercise to practise, experiment and have fun.

I intend these releases to be rough prototypes at best, focusing on a single gameplay mechanic or idea that I want to explore.

I wasn't really expecting today's game to end up as a game at all but I got a bit carried away.