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New Game: Primeval

I just posted a small game I've been working on lightly since the Ludum Dare 24. The game, Primeval (not to be confused with Primeval Labs), is the second of the two ideas I was considering for the Ludum Dare. It's a rather mind-bending tile-swapper combining mechanics of Conway's Game of Life and Rock-Paper-Scissors. My goal in creating this game was to learn Flash and ActionScript 3 while experimenting with this idea. I had opted to create the more traditional and straightforward Primeval Labs for the Dare because I wasn't sure how well these mechanics would balance or whether the game would even be viable. After a few iterations in Flash, fortunately, it is, and now you can play it right here!

Here's a picture:

48 Hours Later

The game, entitled "Primeval Laboratories", is done as of 6:00 PM yesterday! I think it turned out well. I had a lot of fun making it and testing it, and seeing a genetic algorithm finally working is very satisfying.

I've always been decent at art for a programmer, and I guess I assumed that I'd be able to do music and sound as well. Well, not in 48 hours, at least. So I learned that I stink at that!

Check it out here. I'll probably be making a page for it on my site here as well.

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