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Genetic Algorithms are Interesting

The game is looking pretty cool, by the way, at least in my opinion. Maybe I've just overly fascinated with this genetic thing.

I'm not quite convinced that it's working correctly, though. One trial run I did thought it would be a good idea to breed out every single weapon gene except for a single (rather mediocre) lime-green laser beam. To make matters worse, the children kept wasting their mutations on stupid things like turning the laser hot pink. I'm bumping up the importance of dealing damage to try to tackle this. It's possible that we're just suffering from an extremely small sample size.

Particles

They make everything better.

I think this will work

I had a moment just now that greatly reassured me with this game's design. I just finished implementing the basic enemy logic - shooting, dying, and finally moving. The game, as I mentioned, is about randomly generated enemies that evolve with genetics (i.e. the ones that do well get to reproduce and make new enemies).

After several of the enemies bobbed around shooting me, all of a sudden one popped out of the spawner, dove to within 20 pixels of me, and starting circling and bobbing really fast. It proceeded to destroy my face.

Here are some pictures, but I think I need a video or demo to really show it off.

A big fat enemy

Enemies can have three types of weapons - lasers, bullets, and missiles

Ludum Dare #24 Is Fun

As expected, I wishy-washied over my game ideas some more and finally settled back on the shootemup with evolving enemies. I've started writing code now, so what's done is done as far as that goes. The skeleton code for genome selection, crossover, and mutation is all in place, and I've working on fleshing out the actually movement and firing code for both the play and the bots - that's going pretty well.

The plan is for the game to spawn little evo-bots at a rapidfire pace to try to kill you. They'll be ranked based on how long they live and how much damage they do to you. After a certain number of spawns, the best ones will be picked and crossover and mutation will occur. Repeat. The "genes" that will get messed around with include stat boosts, weapons (and their individual stats), other gadgets like armor plates, and such.

Also, it's a bit late for my brain. In case you were wondering.

Ludum Dare #24 Game Jam

A few days ago I heard from a friend about a competition for crazy people. Its creators would have you, given nothing but 48 hours and a theme, make a complete game. Naturally, this sounded like a pretty worthy use of 48 hours to me, so this is what I am doing as of about an hour ago.

The required theme this weekend is "evolution". I was got pretty attached to the first idea that popped into my head, which was a shmup where the enemies come in waves, each with a variety of features like armor and shields and unique guns and stats like attack speed and power. Each successive wave would be born from the most successful enemies of the previous wave - the enemies gradually becoming more and more deadly. It took some doing, but I managed to convince myself to think through some other ideas. Here I am about a (rather emotionally trying) hour later, with a different, rather simpler idea that's going to look more like the puzzle game offspring of Rock-Paper-Scissors and Conway's Game of Life. It would take far too long to explain it now, and I'll probably change it all anyway, but that's where it stands. More as it happens!

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/