Well, I was really not wishing for minimalistic to be voted as a theme for this Ludumdare but, well, C’est la vie. The way I see it, I can take one of the following routes:

• Minimal Graphics: Monochrome or simple geometric figures
• Minimal Gameplay: small set of goals and interaction options
• Have a character named “Malistic, Mini Malistic”

I decided to go with option number two and design a small “strategy game” with little to no interaction during game play. The basic idea is this: The player has a certain number of points at his disposal. By spending those points he can buy and deploy troops on the battlefield at the start of the game: Infantry, Rocketers, Tanks and Anti-infantry Vehicles. He must assess the situation and, based on the amount of points as his disposal, choose the best possible line-up. After he places his units and clicks start they will proceed to search for the enemy on the map.  At this point, the player will only be able to mark certain locations as important (and thus, a few units nearby will go towards that location) or drop Health Packs (to aid his units).  Here’s a screenshot featuring the current progress:

Minimal Interaction Warfare

That’s about it for now. I’m actually curious to where I can take this game.

My entry for MiniLD 39 has been posted http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/minild-39/?action=preview&uid=15656 The hindsight for this entry was what would I have done had a school shooting right before LD#25 had not happened and I went with my original idea for that theme instead of a non-violent game.

Zombie Forever level 1 game play

Well, yesterday I decided to do post-mortem work on my immune system game RTS game.

Currently, I have only one campaign level – but I did a lot of refactoring in the game logic code.
Let me know what you think about it, any hints appreciated

The first campaign level shows you how to use the immune team and the supporting leucocytes, so it’s more kind of a tutorial:

http://martens.ms/ludum-dare/ld23-immune/

The concept of the game:

You can either play the virus team or the immune system team. You (currently) have two Computer players taking part in the game. One is neutral and controlled passively by the Immune System. This neutral Computer is the one that controls the leucocytes that are controlled by the interleucines (produced by the immune’s globulines) and will attack the cells that are under control by the virus team. The viruses team advantage is that their spawn rate is higher than the spawn rate of the immune system and that they are much stronger than globulines (but weaker than leucocytes).

The immune system player is the one that is defensive, but he can also attack with “Blitzkrieg” strategy and making the virus team busy whilst using his leucocytes bonus.

The virus player is the one that is aggressive, he is the one that has to infect as much cells as possible. The more time he has, the stronger he gets and the harder it is for the counterpart to eliminate the virus player.

Taking further the concept:

What I wanted to achieve is a more realistic RTS game that is balanced and has a tech tree with different units. So, for example, the cell will have different “buildings” inside:
The nucleolus: This is the one that is producing the DNA, splitting and results in “more units” if upgraded
The cytoplasma: This is the part that is the shield of the nucleolus, it will upgrade the health of the cell so that it can take more damage until being captured.
The ribosomes: The research building. Use it to research DNA upgrades (mutations) for your team. For example, this is the place to equip leucocytes with better amino acids; the place to get T-killer or -helper cells as reinforcements. The counterpart (virus team) can research their own upgrades here. For example a by-strength upgrading until you reach Ebola.

(Doomsday) Super weapons:
The immune system team can have fever as a super weapon. It is limited by time (e.g. every 3 minutes) and has the capabilty of completely killing all cells at the game board (excluding the viruses that are currently produced inside the cells). It will also neutralize the immune’s captured cells and remove the leucocytes on the gameboard.

The virus team has the super weapon of upgrading to the T-virus (haha, resident evil and zombies! ) which is therefore able to attack t-helper cells (like HIV) AND to attack t-killer cells, which are the ones that can completely destroy cells like a “bomber” in a classic RTS game.

Let me know what you think about this concept… and if you have suggestions: They are very appreciated!

One of the only things I voted a -1 for. Oh, well!

I think that I do have an idea that will work for it.

Thoughts on “Tiny World”

• The world starts as tiny.
• The world can grow, but should optimally be small.
•  Size of “World” can be based on perception.

So, my idea is a semi-strategy game based on a mixture of these.

Tiny World- A War of Ideal

In the void there is an idea, one that to grow will need souls to believe in it. For souls to exist they must have a place to live. So an idea begets a world. Souls will come to world, will believe in the idea. But the power of an idea is limited and ideas have trouble coexisting in the same world.

I’ve been anxiously awaiting the October Challenge this year. I wanted to join in on the fun last year, but I was way too busy back then. But I’m hoping nothing is getting in the way this year. Also, as of today I’m a full-time indie developer.

Before I get into what my game is all about, here is some back-story: I’ve grown up with strategy and simulation games like Sim City, Caesar or The Settlers and they have been and still are my favorite game genre. What I want to create is a peaceful strategy game which is not too complex for newbies, but not too simple for veterans. I had several prototypes in mind with different gameplay mechanics and what I settled on was a scenario in where the player has to build a settlement on sky islands.

Interestingly enough, I came up with the original sky island idea for LD #20 and after playing around with the idea for a bit, I decided to create a small prototype while I was at BIGJAM in Berlin. While I was not as productive as I hoped to be, I got the basics done and decided to stick with the prototype. All in all, I worked about three weeks on this game so far. If you want to know what happened so far development-wise, click here to be redirected to the development blog.

If you liked the screenshot, I uploaded a very short gameplay video to Youtube last month if are interested in how the game looks like in motion. I also want to mention that I’m not working alone on this: Christian Storcks is doing the music (a short preview of that is in the video I linked in the last sentence) and Jesse, a friend of mine, is helping me with some coding, in particular scripting and some backend stuff.

The game is going to be released for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. I am planning on starting pre-orders by October 21st and I hope someone will buy the game.

UPDATE: Now with (spoilerific) screenshots after the break.

Since several people seemed to find The Triumph of Time pretty hard, I decided to give some pointers as to how to best play the game.

Let me describe the core mechanics of the game. As soon as you have built a pylon next to a star, it will extract particles from it at a fixed rate. The larger the star is, the more particles are extracted per time unit. Building several pylons next to a star will not increase this rate, the particles will just be randomly distributed over all pylons. The particles will then go on to more or less randomly distribute themselves along all barriers which extend from their current pylon.

At a fixed time interval (every two seconds, if I recall correctly), the cloud of antimatter will expand in every direction. It can only be blocked by having a barrier which is powered by particles in its way. However, for every grid cell along the barrier which the cloud tries to enter, one particle on this barrier will be destroyed; when all particles are destroyed, the barrier falls.

So here are some rules of thumb for successful play:

• Try to tap each star at your disposal as early as possible, especially the large ones.
• Try not to lose any stars to the cloud as that will severely cut your particle budget.
• Do not build any superfluous barriers within your territory. Every particle that swirls around on a barrier which is not at the frontier does not contribute to your defenses and is essentially useless. So, try to keep the paths which transport particles to the frontier as efficient and short as possible.
• Keep the frontier as small as possible. Every frontier tile (i.e., a cell on a barrier which delimits your territory from the cloud) will cost you a particle every two seconds, so minimize your surface. PRO TIP: It’s well known that the shape with the smallest ratio of circumference to area is a circle. It may help to keep your territory roughly circular.
• I’ve found that once a critical barrier has fallen, it’s often very difficult to recover. It’s better to stake out your territory on the conservative side rather than lose it all.

I hope this helps a bit. After the break (SPOILERS): screenshots on how to solve the first four levels.

(more…)

Finally, my game is finished. If I had more time, I would’ve added a lot more stuff. But I am too tired of this game, so I am just going to release it now. If you have any problems, comment!

Made by: Game Maker 7.0

Difficulty: Depends on how you play.

Length: I never finished it, but should take 30 minutes-1 hour.

Screenshots:

A battle:

A screenshot of the map screen, taken from the beginning of the game.

Game:

http://host-a.net/kaderli/Lost%20Roads%20Release.zip

Source Code:

http://host-a.net/kaderli/Lost%20Roads%20Source.gmk

Here’s the 1.0 version of The Chain Fight

The python only link: TheChainFight.zip — Unzip the file, and run ‘python main.py’

The Windows link: TheChainFight-Win.zip (Mirror) — Unzip the file, and run ‘main.exe’

Please find me on IRC, or leave a comment if you find anything wrong. Thanks! If the debug info from the AI bugs you, you can hit ‘D’ during gameplay.

As a note, notice that above, the python is 133 KB, and the Windows version is 2.6 MB. You’ll save yourself a lot of downloading for the python entries if you download and install python and pygame

Galcon cleaned up pretty well in the compo. Here are links to my post-mortem and history. Truth be told, I’ve been making versions of this game for about 15 years now. But this version almost didn’t happen – during the theme voting for this contest I was leading a large group of people to back a different theme from swarms – I had in mind to make an Adventure Game. But since swarms won, I figured I’d try re-making Galcon again for lack of a better thing to do.

On the tech side I realized I needed to up my production going beyond what can be done with pygame. I used pyplus and swig to build C extensions for my game so that I could do some cool graphic and swarming techniques not possible within python. However this caused some trouble, I was able to submit my linux source of the game for the deadline, but due to the craziness of python extensions for windows it took me another full day of work to get it ported to windows.

After the compo I made a shareware version of the game:

Check it out.