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.

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

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

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.