http://cogsci.mcmaster.ca/~peter/ludumdare/midwinter_ld13.zip (Windows/DirectX 8/VC6)

Bullrushes is a pretty game in the artistic style of Okami (a PS2 title), where everything is drawn with a brush.  The player creates paths of light to guide little fireflies by illuminating bullrushes.  When fireflies come close together, they excitedly mate and burst away, leaving a new firefly in their wake.  Once enough fireflies have been born, the player must help guide them back to their tree stump hollow.

Artistically, I wanted to do something very different this time, taking a minimalist and abstract light on the theme (roads/paths).  I wish I had more time to add a japanese-themed simple score (maybe I’ll add one later).  An interesting fact — the game was created over about 26 hours, instead of the normal 48.

I’m very happy with how it turned out, and had loads of fun doing it.

(Quick edit:  I nearly forgot to mention, the bullrushes will only attract nearby fireflies — those that are about 150 pixels away.  If the fireflies aren’t moving towards the bullrush, you’ll have to find a closer one to light their path!  Similarly, the fireflies will have to be guided very close to the middle of their tree stump nest before resting inside).

I’ve added the fireflies, and alpha blending!

I really have to get the ‘paths’ that the fireflies form, to make a (road-like) game!

Fireflies

Features added:

- Mouse and keyboard support, mouse cursor

- Ability to highlight bullrushes, move one with a click (just a test)

- Animated background, swaying water… kind of soothing (or nauseating, depending on your preferences)

- Depth-sorted drawing, so ones farther back are drawn first.  Looks not too bad

(Download this test for Windows/DirectX  

Screenshot:

Here’s my first screenshot:

I know there aren’t a great deal of roads yet — I’m thinking the concept will be that the roads are more of ‘path’s, where the bullrushes and other plants will be much more dense to clearly mark them.  I think the game will have something to do with fireflies, but I’m not really sure what the mechanics will be yet.  It’s been a very late start this year!  But the alpha blending seems to be working, and displays the fancy bullrush plant pretty well! :) 

Since Paramecium is a bit abstract, I hope this quick explanation can help you get into the swing of things:

The goal of the game is for one team to collect enough food vacuoles that they have 25 paramecia on their team. After collecting 6 vacuoles, a paramecium will split into 2 paramecia, and each of those will go on and collect food vacuoles and split, etc., until the team size reaches it’s goal.

The computer starts off with between 3 and 8 paramecia, where you start off with only one. This helps keep it challenging and interesting. Instead of just running around and collecting vacuoles, one has to make a strategy in order to replicate faster than the computer. For instance, if you eat an area to exhaustion, you may replicate lots, but those new paramecia won’t have much to eat… so you’re team won’t grow as quickly. You can also use this to your advantage if you follow the other team’s paramecia around… (although I’m in no way trying to promote paramecia competition… make paramecia love, not competition!)

The coloured markers at the top of the screen represent the score. The larger the marker (and more it turns), the more paramecia that team has. Once a team reaches 25 paramecia, a screen will come up to show which team has won (the coloured marker screen), and the game will reset with random parameters after a couple seconds.

… and to those who doubt it can be done, winning is tricky but not impossible:

Paramecium is a monocellular love story, in which the protagonist (you) must collect food vacuoles in order to replicate. You play on a team versus an a.i. opponent, and the first to collect enough vacuoles to replicate 25 times wins the round. Some of the game’s parameters are randomized at the start of each round, so it’s quite replayable.

Features artsy graphics, intuitive mouse control, and a looping ambient soundtrack.

Screenshots:

Download Paramecium Game and Source

Here’s the next screenshot of my paramecium game. A microscope-slide-type background has been added, the animation has been fixed, multiple cells can exist, the mouse now works, and there’s a neat new mouse pointer graphic!

The paramecium you play follows the mouse pointer, and ’swims’ when you move it or click the left mouse button (”swim”).

Time to add some gameplay… but before or after sleep?

I decided before hand that I really liked the idea of putting the game setting in a microbial environment, and generating the graphics procedurally — using bitmaps as little as possible.  I think I’d like something like a simple 2D version of the tidepool phase of Spore, with the Chain Reaction theme in place.  I think the player will play the part of the single celled organizm that progressively grows and gets more complex by either gathering protien chains, which (when you have enough) react and make a more complex creature…  I’m not sure if this will also involve ‘mating’ with other similar looking creatures.

So far I have the initial cell body done with the shading.  So far both the shape and colour are functionally generated with alpha blending.  I hope to add some organelles (sp?) and other such things tomorrow, as well as some other shapes for the other microbes that you coexist with.  Since the shape and everything is generated through a function, the entire cell is animated quite easily and gives a ’squishing itself through the water’ look as it progresses through the animation sequence. 

This is a kinda neat experiment, so far.  I’m usng Visual C++ 6.0 and DirectX 8.