August 24th-27th 2012 :: Theme: Evolution
Omega Architecture is a science-fiction base-planning and general strategy game.
You were launched to Mars, your original mission being to study microbes believed to be in hibernation underneath the polar ice caps.
However, contact with Earth ceased abruptly. You have no idea what's happening there. To make matters worse, in 500,000 years an asteroid will most likely impact Mars and destroy everything on the surface, including you.
You must evolve life from tiny microbes into sentient beings capable of doing something to avoid the impact and sending you home.
Note: in order to win, make sure species in your ecosystem survive long enough to evolve and that there is enough breed variety for evolution to occur. To access Ecosystem screen, press "e" or click the second button in the lower left part of the screen.
Downloads and Links
Ratings
 | Coolness | 100% |
| #8 | Audio(Jam) | 4.09 |
| #36 | Theme(Jam) | 3.56 |
| #44 | Overall(Jam) | 3.54 |
| #54 | Mood(Jam) | 3.28 |
| #83 | Humor(Jam) | 2.76 |
| #97 | Graphics(Jam) | 3.50 |
| #100 | Innovation(Jam) | 3.04 |
| #107 | Fun(Jam) | 3.00 |
Comments
Very nice, little tricky to pickup from the beginning but overall very nice.
Took a lot of effort to figure out and when I did it seems to crash:
java.lang.NullPointerException
at transientlibs.preui.grid.Map.blocked(Map.java:302)
at org.newdawn.slick.util.pathfinding.AStarPathFinder.findPath(AStarPathFinder.java:90)
at transientlibs.preui.grid.PathFinder.updatePath(PathFinder.java:82)
at omega.Task.calculateMovementCoords(Task.java:63)
at omega.MinionAI.process(MinionAI.java:59)
at omega.OmegaAIProcessor.process(OmegaAIProcessor.java:117)
at transientlibs.preui.agents.InternalTimeGuard.checkProcessor(InternalTimeGuard.java:45)
at omega.states.OmegaTiledMapState.update(OmegaTiledMapState.java:275)
at org.newdawn.slick.state.StateBasedGame.update(StateBasedGame.java:266)
at org.newdawn.slick.GameContainer.updateAndRender(GameContainer.java:663)
at org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer.gameLoop(AppGameContainer.java:411)
at org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer.start(AppGameContainer.java:321)
at omega.Omega.main(Omega.java:66)
865549 [main] ERROR transientlibs.preui.objects.general.Logs -
org.newdawn.slick.SlickException: Game.update() failure - check the game code.
at org.newdawn.slick.GameContainer.updateAndRender(GameContainer.java:669)
at org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer.gameLoop(AppGameContainer.java:411)
at org.newdawn.slick.AppGameContainer.start(AppGameContainer.java:321)
at omega.Omega.main(Omega.java:66)
Now that is interesting, never happened during development or testing. Have you tried tunnelling on the border of map, by any chance?..
Crash when tunnelling on the border of map confirmed, will fix - thankfully, rules allow to update games for crashbugs! Will post when issue is resolved.
The intro is pretty neat! I'm happy to see there's at least one RTS-ish game in the contest!
It's good to see an RTS here :-) I like the music and the graph, but I didn't understand the gameplay :-(
Yakka: sorry to hear that. Anything in particular that was puzzling and could use an additional explanation, other than what already is in tutorial?..
The music is utterly brilliant, the best I've heard so far, great work! The intro is also a work of genius, and the game is fun to play. A couple of slight niggles; the text doesn't update during the intro and it started playing again for me as I hadn't clicked. I also missed most of the tutorial as as soon as it gave me my first instruction I started clicking, which skipped the rest of the instructions. Anyway great work.
The audio was my favorite part of this game. The voice overs, the music, the sound effects, everything. It was very well done. GJ
I love this kind of games! I wish I could make one as good as this. I'm not good designing RTS/resources gestioning games. I really liked the audio, humor and mood of this entry.
However, After 20 minutes playing, I asked myself... wtf am I doing? xD Can't figure out the main objective. I built every type of building but nothing evolved. Some hint here would be useful :P
BTW, since you asked, here is the site of my team. http://www.deconstructeam.com/en/ you'll find there our past and future games :P You can also follow us on twitter @Deconstructeam
thanks for the interest!
Aha, probably you have missed the ecosystem screen :). I guess that's one crucial part missing from the map screen tutorial... Will expand game description and clarify tutorial in post-compo version, thanks!
This felt like quite a well-polished game, great sound and graphics (and quite amusing audio). The R&D screens could have done with some more polish a bit more explanation: I managed to start making progress and could just about see how it all fit together, but there was generally a lot of information without much explanation. Also, at the rate the counter was going down, the game would have taken hours to complete.
Thanks for your comments! Yes, specially evolution could really use more information - we definitely should expand documentation for post-compo.
Regarding the counter - it's the loss ounter (asteroid impact), not the evolution one - evolution happens much faster, you win at reaching 51 evolution points with any species.
I couldn't get the Linux version to run properly on Ubuntu 12.04, so I didn't leave a rating. It's missing the log4j.properties file, which I had to copy from the Windows one. Then I had to run it as root. After that, it seemed to start - I saw the splash screen - but it crashed with a NullPointerException. Here's the log: http://pastebin.com/rpRpRLRC
Not sure what's going on - your game looks really neat, I want to play! :)
I love 'Harmonica Robot"! It says something when even the credit screen of a game is entertaining!
mdkess: thanks for the info, please try the updated build! We would be extra grateful if you let us know if it works now :).
Sounds interesting but I get the following error on OS X 10.6.8 when trying to run launch.sh:
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: omega/Omega : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClassCond(ClassLoader.java:631)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:615)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:141)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:283)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(URLClassLoader.java:58)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:197)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247)
No idea what version of Java I'm running...
More explanation would have been greatly appreciated, but after fiddling around and getting some stuff built it became a lot more fun. The intro was hilarious and the voices throughout were darned amusing.
Great work!
Certainly an interesting and well made game... only issue is that I spent the entire time just randomly pressing strange buttons. I eventually won, somehow, but it wasn't really clear what I was doing...
I got so obsessed with my economy that I forgot about the microbes... I think they all die :'( Nice to see a strategy/management game for a change! I also really like the music and voice-acting, fantastic stuff.
Cant run it. I get the same error as stoo using java 1.6 in Linux (64-bit).
someone -> you need Java 7 (e. g. OpenJDK)
SusanTheCat -> There is no separate R & D screen, you can access research panel via flash icon.
Error log (Linux):
sh launch.sh
Exception in thread "main" java.lang.UnsupportedClassVersionError: omega/Omega : Unsupported major.minor version 51.0
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass1(Native Method)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClassCond(ClassLoader.java:631)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.defineClass(ClassLoader.java:615)
at java.security.SecureClassLoader.defineClass(SecureClassLoader.java:141)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.defineClass(URLClassLoader.java:283)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.access$000(URLClassLoader.java:58)
at java.net.URLClassLoader$1.run(URLClassLoader.java:197)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at java.net.URLClassLoader.findClass(URLClassLoader.java:190)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:306)
at sun.misc.Launcher$AppClassLoader.loadClass(Launcher.java:301)
at java.lang.ClassLoader.loadClass(ClassLoader.java:247)
Could not find the main class: omega.Omega. Program will exit.
It is maybe because my Java version is outdated.
Wow wow wow. It's got a good story, well introduced, good voice acting. Funny sounds from all the factories and robots and the best music I've heard so far. Its got so much.
The only thing that might be better, is that it's not very clear what to do and what the consequences are. for instance :it wasn't always clear that the option you chose (like building a certain kind of building). And for a game that takes this long a save option might be welcome too (I clicked the x by accident, which was end of game). Something for a future release?
goerp: thanks for playing! Actually, game doesn't take so long so we didn't think a save feature is necessary - but, apparrently, it is, so we'll add it in the post-compo version. And yes, better documentation and tutorials are definitely needed - also on our ToDo list...
I also got a "Could not find the main class: omega.Omega. Program will exit." error in Linux. I'm pretty sure my version of Java is current.
Looking into the problem right now, thanks for the reporting! Hopefully will upload a fixed build real soon.
Fixed version uploaded, please let us know if it works for you!
There is a lot of information on the economics screen I can't understand - so badly that I didn't see the 'Get Sample' action there.
Why can't you select the spieces on the genetics screen? And it needs a lot of explanation too!
Not only you can click through the display at the bottom but the playfield is higher priority. So if there is something under then you can not click on anything on the display.
The whole thing is too complicated for me it may e good for manager simulator lovers but it's just so slow it's getting on my nervs. And I don't have hours to play. Especially in an LD you need to concentrate on showing everithing you want in 10 minutes at most.
But anyway this concept is a good idea! Gfx and Music is okay too.
"Not only you can click through the display at the bottom but the playfield is higher priority. So if there is something under then you can not click on anything on the display" - that's a bug, thanks for reporting, will fix in post-compo version!
Really great job.
I didn't really get the evolution strategy... it seemed like I pretty much evolved stuff at random, and eventually I won. I never figured out how to put points into Heat/Cold resistance or any other changes/upgrades, but apparently it didn't matter that much. Overall, the strategy aspect seemed pretty half-baked, but there is definitely some potential here.
Love the music and story.
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Pretty fun game! the controls should be explained better though :)