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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

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.