HEADS UP: FOR SOME REASON UNBEKNOWNST TO ME, THE WEB BUILD RUNS INFINITELY FASTER IN FIREFOX - EVEN FASTER THAN THE DESKTOP BUILDS!
With one week left till school (starting high school!!!), I decided that a partaking in this game jam would be the perfect way to ease myself back into the pressure and general sleeplessness that accompanies school life. Thus I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, a beautiful ragdoll-and-blood-filled game featuring a genetic algorithm, a reference to 'The Killers' and my amazing piano arranging skills (as always, made in much less than 48 hours).
The "game" is a simulation of the development of (killing) technology - from ancient stuff (chucking bricks and rocks) to excitingly complex things like guns that fire guns.
What you have to do is simply to answer the questions at the start (these act as parameters for the simulation) and enjoy the ensuing carnage. The machines get pretty good at taking out entire crowds of ragdolls at about generation 5 so be patient.
Also, if any of you guys feel like building the game in Unity Pro and making it into a screensaver, hmu because that would be fab.
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THE ALGORITHM: I've used a genetic algorithm which basically means that the first generation is randomly generated. Then the most murderous of the first generation are bred together to produce a second even more murderous generation. It's basically natural selection on a computer!
Downloads and Links
Comments
it was only a brick, it was only a brick!
yeah, for some reason its slow in chrome, very nice take of the theme, very nice execution as well
anyway, that voice at the beggining really crack me up, and you piano skill is on point bruh :D
The piano score was great! I wish there was more interactivity though (maybe a give the player some control over the fitness function?)
@t3h_3lyk The fitness function parameters are derived from the quiz :P
Although it's more an interactive movie than a game, still made me smile and the music is great! Thumbs up!
It feels like it's going way too slow. It's generation 12 and there are still a considerable amount of members that don't hit the walls at all.
Those who do however are very satisfying to watch
nice to look at would have been fun with a little more inreactivity but cool with the physics and stuff
@peterthehe: I'm aware of that. I was thinking something along the lines of a Thumbs Up/Down to alter the fitness of a given candidate.
Fun little experiment, more interaction would've been nice though :)
Who could have defined the learning parameters with humor. LOL
The only detail I would change is the speed, would be funnier and dynamic.
That jokes made me laugh a lot!
Great game.
I could watch this play out over and over and over and over again, It seems to favour the wall as the preferred way once it hits generation 14 and I think I spotted throwing knives at one point which was a nice touch :D
Nice one there :D A bit macabre maybe, but I love it! The piano music also fits beautifully. Not much in terms of gameplay, but entertaining nonetheless.
The quiz alone was brilliant, and then the evolution algorithm was really enjoyable to watch as well.
Maybe needs some more player input to avoid it being a movie, but impressive work regardless.
What... What is this game?
What.. What is my life???
All jokes aside, very strange thing you've produced here. The music fits the carnage in an oddly sadistic way. Though I have no idea what's going on, it seems that it is simulating destruction of ragdoll people and is storing the most "successful" scenarios? Odd. Very odd.
There is no interaction at all, but physics calculated violence is always funny.
"do you like babys ?" :D it a really weird game but yeah that is sad that it lags in chrome and pc
Second LD entry I've seen in the first day that's not a game.
Regardless, very fun to watch. Music's fabulous, graphics are clean, the carnage is beautiful
If I have an issue with the mechanics, it's that the bricks the walls are made out of are far too deadly. In a couple games I ran, the algorithm was using them as weapons. As much as particle effects are fun to watch, it gets boring watching simple bricks drop from various points to optimize splash. Crossbows and cannons are far more exciting and I wish I could see more of them.
As a mode of interactivity, it might be interesting to let the player upvote/downvote various ideas to discourage this sort of repetition.
Interesting setup :) I do like simulated evolution.
The suggestion above about letting the player influence the scoring sounds neat as well.
haha it is a very interesting and fun to watch "game". Great piano music!
My entire life, up to this point, led up to your game. At least I had a laught and listened to some good piano tunes:). Kinda fun to watch!:)
Yeah I'm going to go with, some kind of interaction during the carnage would go a long way, even if it is superficial.
Haha the best part was the sliding scale between YES and NOT YES for Do you like babies? It was cool and the music was nice. Well done!
lol Love the music and the ragdolls and wacky physics. Great job!
Haha that was quite entertaining. The music, the ragdolling, the questions (without a negative which was a pretty good design choice, I think) in the beginning.
Probably shouldn't tell you this, but you should drink more and jam more. Good stuff happens
A wierd but fun game! I just wish there were something to do while watching like i could do something. but i guess its a simulations so.
overall a fun game
It's pretty awesome that you made this! Music was great although I got bored of it pretty fast:/
Some interactivity would be awesome - letting the player change the scene would be cool (but it might take quite some time to do :/ )
Funny premisse, nice non-interactive simulation!
Nice piano too!
Should add some more interactivity and sound effects.
Hahaha, my bricks keep jumping into walls to kill everyone with a spray of micro cubes :D
I think that there should be a bit more possibilities to control the generations - or maybe see a list of the fitness scores at least?
Still, it makes for a cool cinematic with playful music together with just about the funniest way to test GA. Very well done!
Very good physics and stuff. But am I supposed to watch the whole simulation, is it interactive or something? :/ I couldn't figure out what to do after answer the quiz.
@sakaki The simulation is endless (as is evolution).
@everyone Yup, I'll look into adding some interaction later
It's entertaining! My simulation decided that smashing the columns was the best bet, which led to some relatively boring weapons.
Not a game, per se, but it WAS rather therapeutic to watch things fall on the ragdolls and send them flying.
Haha, this is hilarious. Not a "game", per se, but very entertaining all the same.
I've always been a fan of watching genetic algorithms in action, and this is no exception. It does seem like the winning strategy is to smash the walls in such a way that the bits go flying across the people, taking them all out - that showed up in generation 2 or 3 in my game and by generation 12 was pretty much universal.
Good stuff!
Haha that was a lot of fun! Maybe to add some "gameplay" elements, you could rate the state of the machine and incorporate this for the next iteration. My machine ended up just grinding the left pillar, killing everyone with the debries :-)
Loved the music, and it was strangely hypnotic to watch the algorithm learn the best ways of killing. I'm really really curious about how the algorithm works behind the hood, would love more details about how it merges the various generations of killers.
Nice music, and its really impressive to get a solid genetic algorithm for a jam. Definitely needs some interaction though, it's just not really a game atm.
Hi, nice game and congratulations ! Simple mechanics that still offered a decent amount of challenge.We're realizing a video with several games of the Ludum Dare #36. We made the same thing at the previous jam.
Can you add your game on indiexpo.net ? (it's free)
So we can include also your game in the video ;)
p.s. write #LDJAM in the game's description.
Haha this game was amazing. It was really funny to look at all the ways those little puppets were destroyed.
Wait... now I sound like a psychopath.
Anyway amazing entry!
I love those types of evolution games, I really do. Its so interesting to watch those machines grow. And ... evolve.
And now? When you add gore, murder and destructible enviroment ... WOHOOOOOO GAME ON!
Interesting game! I included it in my compilation video series of Ludum Dare 36 games, if you’d like to take a look :) https://youtu.be/hC8B45eG0n0
Great simulation but not much of a game. Keep up the good work.
Whoa! Nice simulation there, and good way to play around with genetic algorithms and that jazz. Good piano music, though with the slow Chromium I run on my Ubuntu machine, it does get repetitive on the way to ever more destructive means of death. It did feel like the "brick" reached extremely efficient ways of killing within one generation (an entire column being smashed into a scream-inducing wave of general unpleasantness), but maybe I just answered the quiz questions well. Who knows? Good work, regardless.
(And I didn't even know Unity Pro could build projects into screensavers, even if only with an add-on, that's pretty wild)
Really cool little simulation!
The score was amazing too, props to you for your piano method!
Only issue I had (if you can call it that) was that the most common top evolution (i did multiple runs to 15th generation) by generation 4 was members that simply spawned in or above the walls and killed with shrapnel from that.
Very nice music, the simulation using genetic algorithms was really clever. I kinda felt bad about those stickmen lol
I really like physics simulation, so I liked your game :D! Was nice know the performance of Chrome and Firefox :P.
I could play for hours if it had some interaction. Maybe a drag of the people or the bricks.
Nice work. Keep going!
I think you may like mine too :P
Oh, hey, Steven Hawking's sound-a-like-voice is back! Good memories!
Unfortunately performs very poorly on my computer while hooked to a projector and streaming to Twitch, all at the same time. OK, almost nothing runs on my computer, but still, maybe make it less performance killing next time?
I didn't really understand what was going on, but the music was nice.
I still wish I had some idea of what the "generation" and "member" number means, exactly...
Interesting game, liked how you had to answer questions at the start to set the perimeters. Did have moments where the brick landed off to the side and missed everything. Simple art also worked well with the game.
Would definitely make a good screen saver. Nice music. Would have liked some sort of interactive element, even if it's just a score board telling me which member in the generation has the highest fitness ("score").
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Bro! This is fokin cuul. Thanks 4 the laughs haha. It's something original and quite beautiful. Good job . Also nice piano skilz