Lafe Compton

While, since experemental gameplay is online again, and it currently lacks a forum of any kind, i figured i mind as well make a little topic for it. talk about your game development, ideas, blaah blaah blaah, here. please try not to flame or steal ideas, this is for feedback/freindly discusion only. BE CONSTRUCTIVE!

Here, ill get it started:

my origional idea for my entrey was to make a revamp of astroids, but make it so that instead of having a gun, things rotated you because of gravty. i was at a game development camp at the time, and the computer i was on was only equiped with Gamemaker & FPSC.

Gm is limeted by my standereds, and FPSC is right out, so i had no choice, gm it was.

i then began work.

after about a half hour, i had the mechanics down, but the graphics were but ugly, not to mention the ungodly amount of difficulty, have you ever tried to move at just the right velocty to fling one astroid at an enemy, and avoid hitting a diffrent astroid? it was almost impossable to get 1 kill.

i spent about five to seven hours redoing the game entirely, despite the ultra simple feeling,

but overall, i had a good time.

hi all, and thanks Lafe for putting this together.  I submitted mine just now so you can all see it soon.  

The basic premise was to have an old-school shooter like Asteroids or Space Wars, but with AI that adjusted based on your actions.  The game has some instructions and hopefully it is interesting for you all.  I will post some thoughts on the rest of the web submissions when I am finished with them all.  

at 12:52AM on Aug 01, 2009

hi all, and thanks Lafe for putting this together.  I submitted mine just now so you can all see it soon.  

The basic premise was to have an old-school shooter like Asteroids or Space Wars, but with AI that adjusted based on your actions.  The game has some instructions and hopefully it is interesting for you all.  I will post some thoughts on the rest of the web submissions when I am finished with them all.  

Hello vazor, i cant wait to see your game. adaptive ais are always interesting, i once made one in gm, but mine was pretty bad. it was a circle that learned to navigate to a goal through a maze. it was origionaly realy stuped, but through natrual selection style proccesses, it got good enough to make it in under 1 minute. but it never could have been good enough to beat a human player through the maze. anyways, how did you feel while making your game? How long did you spend coming up with your idea? was it easyer or harder than expected?

at 09:55AM on Aug 01, 2009

at 12:52AM on Aug 01, 2009

hi all, and thanks Lafe for putting this together.  I submitted mine just now so you can all see it soon.  

The basic premise was to have an old-school shooter like Asteroids or Space Wars, but with AI that adjusted based on your actions.  The game has some instructions and hopefully it is interesting for you all.  I will post some thoughts on the rest of the web submissions when I am finished with them all.  

Hello vazor, i cant wait to see your game. adaptive ais are always interesting, i once made one in gm, but mine was pretty bad. it was a circle that learned to navigate to a goal through a maze. it was origionaly realy stuped, but through natrual selection style proccesses, it got good enough to make it in under 1 minute. but it never could have been good enough to beat a human player through the maze. anyways, how did you feel while making your game? How long did you spend coming up with your idea? was it easyer or harder than expected?

Obsessive Nuclear Testing Disorder

Nice straightforward concept and gameplay. I was easily engaged in the concept and felt it was pretty fun.


The Socratic Method

I was amused by the background story, at the intro screen. Proceeding into the game it was easy to pick up and play, and there were lots of engaging and interesting elements to the game. It felt more polished than an experimental game usually does. I liked the spawning cloud effect and the varied monsters to deal with. I will have to check out your other games!


Metro Shooter

Wow, you wouldn't think that combining a rhythm mechanic to a shooter would have such an interesting result. I'm glad someone did it because it really is something different. I thought the frontend was great and the main game was engaging (indeed I could not stop until I finally beat it on my 5th try). For some reason I could not win unless I only fired on every other beat. Part of me wondered if the rhythm was causing interference with the natural rhythm of a shooter which comes from the speed and motion of the player, the bullets, and the enemies. I'm glad you didn't have the enemies firing anything at you, it would have been even harder.


Unexperimental Slimes

ROFL at the rick roll. The concept sounds interesting and seems like it would do a nice job of keeping the enemies varied. Unfortunately I could not get the game to run on my (somewhat outdated) machine. I tried various combinations of the .net framework but no luck.


CrytorYan

A beautifully mad game. There are some brilliant things about this interaction and I think it deserves to be reused or rehashed as part of a new experiment at some point. It was very fun getting tons of copies of myself and it did quickly turn into madness. At one point it even felt like I was migrating across the screen as one herd would die right after spawning the next group, haha. Some people might want to see the WASD+mouse style controls but I felt right at home with the arrow keys.


BubbleBee

Beautiful. I have the game up with three primary colored balls and a couple small balls and it is like any of your favorite relaxing music randomly remixed. Great work on the design. I wanted to click on the balls to kill ones I didn't like, but I guess you can't do that. I also wasn't sure what duration meant- and then I found out you can click the shooter- nice add on. Also, my wife says it's cute.


Second Shooter

Nice. A well-built game, though I couldn't bring myself to finish it, at least for now. Nothing wrong with it, plenty engaging, but like you said, hard. And not really that hard either, just would take some time and moderate skill. Everything looked cool and each obstacle/goal was interesting and they meshed well.



Kosmosis

Interesting. The gameplay was nice and smooth and the osmosis features were put to good use. It was interesting to play once or twice like normal and have a pretty good time, then play to find out how the difficulty changes (simple but effective), then find myself being smashed into an enemy by my own wandering swarm, die, and then still win later after a few other swarms band together and beat the enemy on their own. Perfect!


Zombies!!!

The faces and matching them to the right weapon was a cool idea. A good new twist on the survival horror theme. You seem to match Kyle Gabler's stylistic tastes.


Single Serving

The basic controls are a little rough but the concept is interesting and the design is nice. As I tried to figure out what to do I did everything from hide off the edge of the map to kill myself on the 'bullets' on purpose. Finally I found out about the triangle and the other enemies. At one point I had them stuck on top of each other and I could just sit there and get points until someone else came along, haha. I think the strong points were the element of fun, and the design was a good match for the theme.



I guess I didn't make the cut or maybe my submission email got missed, but anyway here is the post and link to my game.
blog entry:
http://vazor222.livejournal.com/15348.html
direct link:
http://www.angelfire.com/psy/vazor/kiten/kiten.html

Your maze-navigation AI sounds like fun. I think AIs still have a lot of potential.

I had a good time making my game. I had sworn off experimental games in an attempt to focus on building my coding skills, but in the end I couldn't help it and I ended up submitting something. I was driven with passion to create my idea, and filled with excitement when I would make some milestone of progress.

I had been thinking about machine-learning AIs to help create a unique play experience for a while, and I wasn't sure what form it would take. Then of course it ended up being a shooter.

It was hard to get myself to do the parts that I thought would be hard. Then when I finished them, I looked back on it and thought to myself, "why did I think that would be so hard?" Haha.