Deadrock

I took a month out from Deadrock to participate in TIGSource’s procedurally generated content competition.

I teamed up with a good friend of mine and we are quite proud of what we ended up with.

Dyson is a kind of RTS about taking over an asteroid belt. There’s even some procedural content in there that may be useful for Deadrock, so the time taken to write the game was definitely not wasted in Deadrock terms.

Here are a few screenshots:

You can download the game here.

All feedback gratefully received!

The official competition thread is here.

I’ve been working on town generation for a while now, since the last update. I did a bunch of internet research and I have a bunch of links to throw up on the blog here but I haven’t written it up yet. So here’s an update of what’s been going on.

A week ago:

And today:

What you are looking at is a broad plan of the town - these are large lots into which smaller building lots will be placed. The generation process is fairly simple and goes like this: first I generate a population density map, which is a combination of a cloud of points with an area effect and Perlin noise. Next I distribute some road seeds across the map. These grow outward and branch into smaller roads if they don’t collide with another road. I then distribute building lot seeds over that and grow those at different rates until they can’t grow any more.

Next stage is to put some lots inside the lots I have already made, and then move on to building generation, which I reckon is going to be much harder :)

I’ve made a little progress on the video game. A lot of it has been structural changes to include some features now viewed as important. I’ve recorded a video that exhibits these features.

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I’ve collected a bunch of stuff relating to the fluid dynamics work I did with Hardcore Computer Simulator, and from previously when I was working on a water game prototype. The end of the story was that I didn’t implement a new version of any of this, but the links are cool and I reckon that it’s only a matter of time until there are games with proper fluid dynamics that aren’t just a bunch of particles or the sand algorithm. I’ve collected them all here both for future reference and for anyone else who’s interested in this topic.
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In the aftermath of Hardcore Computer Simulator’s canning, I’ve been working on some fine code for Deadrock - proper camera frustum culling, for a start. But I thought I’d post a few things I’ve been looking at that are related to HCS. In this post you can see some games where the main gameplay interface is a programming language. I haven’t tried any of these games, but some of them look terrific.

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I didn’t finish Hardcore Computer Simulator in time for the deadline of the competition. I ran a small post-mortem on the game and posted it at TIGSource, and I’ve reproduced it “after the jump”.

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I recently finished Patapon and decided to employ the new review style in reviewing it. The review contains some minor spoilers and also assumes that you know a little about the game and maybe even have played the demo.

Creativity
Some nice creativity in here. One is encouraged to experiment with different army configurations, and different sets of weapons / hats / pies / whatever. It can make the difference between passing a level without even breaking a sweat and losing a few caps and coming home with only 4 surviving patapons. Blending different materials to find new types of rare patapons is fun. Grinding to build up the army, which you’ll do a lot (there’s even an advice screen telling you to grind if you can’t pass a level), detracts somewhat from this creativity. The mini-games you have to do to get the good stuff become extremely tiresome after only a few goes; some are downright unfair.

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I’m taking two weeks out to make a game for the TIGSource VGNG competition.

I’m starting up a mailing list for important Deadrock news. If you’d like to be added to the list, please drop a mail to and I’ll add you to the mailing list.

If you’d like to keep up to date with the blog, you should consider adding the RSS feed to your bookmarks.

Also, I’ll be posting thoughts and updates and various other stuff to the forum.