Offspring Roundup
August 31st, 2011
A number of odd entries this month mostly involving bunnies, balloons, abstract population control, and one very literal interpretation of the Offspring Theme.
All and all 12 games this month:
bheyvr, by ALEJANDRO ECHEVERRÍA
A game about attraction and repulsion dealing with different relationships starting with mating.
Experimental ammo-splitting game with orbiting. Would love to see this concept expanded.
Evolve your frog by collecting blue orbs and dodging red ones in this fl0w like game.
Definitely the most literal interpretation of the game. Saucy! There’s also a Mac Version.
Feed on those smaller than you to get bigger. Reminded me of Osmos.
The Baby Balloon, by JANNE ZABOBIN
Inflate your baby’s head enough to avoid a spikey demise.
Ecosygulator, by Patai Gergely
An abstract species balancing act – make sure no one goes extinct.
Largomorph Reversal, by Sam Garcia
Shoot baby bunnies with left mouse button, right to command them to destroy robots.
Inflate balloons to feed your hungry rabbit. Huh.
A bullet hell shooter. Kill anything that moves!
Thank God It’s Growing, by Vamsi Krishna
Grow a line to deflect balls – a very challenging game.
A strategic genetic pollinating game. Indirectly control bees to breed the most attractive flowers.
We're a group of indie game developers, running a friendly competition every month. The rules: Make a game based on the month's theme, and don't spend more than 7 days. New games posted at the end of every month.
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Ok, here’s my game. It’s called Biodiversity, and it’s an exploration of genetics. Special keys: f to toggle fullscreen, v to toggle videomode, and m to toggle a mouse pointer bug workaround. (you may not need ‘m’).
Instructions:
The bee follows the pointer. However, if you hold down CTRL , then the bee will not follow the pointer. You can point at FLOWERS and inspect their genes. If the bee is carrying pollen, the genes of the pollen are shown beside the bee.
That’s essentially it. (I’ll put more instructions on my website shortly!)
Note the metric, “Biodiversity”, is broken down by gene type, and counts the number of UNIQUE genes in the population currently. Total Biodiversity is the sum across all genes; Peak Biodiversity is the best Total you’ve got in the current level (when plants die, Total Biodiversity may go down, but Peak will not). But there’s not really any scoring, just get the best you can!
Let me know if any showstopping bugs please!
http://www.beermex.com/Biodiversity.love
NB you may need to install love (love2d.org) if you haven’t already. I’ll package this for Windows shortly. website will be:
http://www.beermex.com/Biodiversity
August 31st, 2011
Alternative link as above server is currently down! :-(
http://love2d.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3563
September 1st, 2011
Here is my entry for the August 2011 Experimental Gameplay Project who subject was Offspring. I have called this entry Survival of the Fittest.
All in all full development took about 28 hours of actual work put in over a week’s time.
http://www.sleepy-genius.com/2011/09/03/experimental-gameplay-project-offspring/
September 3rd, 2011
tgif+ is nice, but it’s “challenging” only because it defies the intuitive law of reflection :/
September 6th, 2011
I’m noticing a worrying trend of games that are completely unplayable on netbooks.. In particular, most of the games this month have fixed window sizes (for example), meaning that they cannot be played properly on netbook screen resolutions (e.g. 1024×600). Capitali$m in particular is unplayable, and I assume that’s because there is a “click here to play button” that is below the bottom of the screen. The Baby Balloon is also unplayable as I have no idea what is at the bottom of the screen (spikes? a hedgehog maybe?), and the initial start screen looks like it has text that I can’t read below the bottom margin of the laptop..
The exceptions are the ones that run in browser windows; and endogame and biodiversity which run fullscreen. However even tgif+ is practically impossible to play in a browser, without continually scrolling the screen up and down, or as the play area doesn’t fit the natural screen.
PyGame seems to be the worst here, but that could be a coincidence (both The Baby Balloon and Feeding Balloons are PyGame, and have a window size that is too large for the netbook display). Does PyGame not allow you to change the window size?
Hopefully the Story Games month won’t have the same kinds of limitations.
September 6th, 2011
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