Late post ahoy! We've not managed yo get together for another BSOD hackday (aiming at Tuesday), but we have been working on things. Battery's infiltrating the competition, Propellor is taking photos and refining an idea for a new game (just a P game, though), and I've been playing with OpenGL trying to remake
Life.
Since I don't have much to post about it yet, I've decided to put the original Life up for download. Source, plus Mac binary; I looked into compiling an exe, but it wouldn't work because of a missing font dll. All you need to run it is python and pygame, which both have straightforward installers on windows. Don't talk to Prop about the Mac pygame installer.
A warning: I left in the console spam that I habitually add to games. And there is bad language in it. Don't run it from source with children watching the screen, or show them the console log if you run it from binary!
Green blocks are grass, brown is dirt. Critters eat grass, which fills their belly (b/B); then, they go to sleep, and belly is turned into energy.
It takes energy to move, and eat, and sex (e/E).
There's also a wepon stat (W), which is more or less dormant here. Critters can breed with other critters if their wepon stats are close together; otherwise they run away from ahigher one or towards a lower one. Eventually, they'll eat each other, but this is a vegetarian download.
XY is their location, and was mostly used for debug.
L is their Life stat. They're born with 500, and it ticks down until 0, when they die. Sexing makes it tick down faster, as do negative energy and negative belly.
!! will appear in front of the critter's stat entry when a stat goes into negatives; a =D will appear when it is sexing. Critters are hermaphroditic.
There are no controls; if you mouse over the map, you get a close-up. That's the limit of interaction. It's not really a game, more of a simulation, and an experiment in AI. When the number of critters rises, though, it starts being quite hypnotic to watch.
Downloads:
Life is release under the
CC by-nc-sa licence.
We'll probably post the hackday results Tuesday or Wednesday, so see you then!
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