Game 9: A Kind of a Sim Thing

Next on the hit list for game genres is a more serious simulation sort of thing - I have a background in business and technical simulations for education and am looking to develop a framework in which such ideas could be rapidly prototyped. In preparation for that long-term project I wanted to do a fun, quick concrete example of such a game as one of my twelve games.

One of my favourite business associates has a game idea around a complex and technical large scale engineering project simulation; her idea also encompasses the social and economic changes and pressures such a project is associated with. That idea is very exciting to me but the part about modelling the process in such a way that people would find it 'realistic' seems really boring.

So I was looking for an engineering project in a fantasy domain that was famous enough that most people would easily grok. So I thought of Noah's ark - it seems to fill all the criteria and some vast portion of the world would know what I was going on about (seems like as much as 50% of peeps are born into Abrahamic traditions). A bit of investigation suggests that the story is much older than our bible and extends to the very earliest written records.

So the plan is to play as Noah as the project manager on the most outrageous project ever (build an ark to save to world from a flood that no one else believes in). Given the inevitable rains the game will be about managing the resources you need to equip for the flood, build the ark and collect the animals.The old testament provides surprising detail as to the technical specification of the ark and the personages involved although fails to list a complete set of of animal species in sufficient detail.

Part of the experiment must be to present this simulation across a broad range of devices using local device storage to save and retrieve simulations.

js13k - Release Day

The js13k contest finishes tomorrow at 2pm and I have a busy day so I have just submitted my final version of which I am very proud.

I have used 12 400 bytes of the 13 416 available and a lot of programming time.

You can play the game here.

This is the original list of features I wanted in my first post with my comments about how it went in bold

• old-school arcade game feel - I am really happy with the moon patrol vibes; not so close to the old games as to be called a copy but very reminiscent.
• subtle narrative - This part worked out really well for me - I like the use of the generated but structured levels and the techno-babble text to tell the story. This is the first game I've made with a proper narrative and I'm very satisfied with the way it came out.
• over and under the sea - both looks very cool as I hoped it would and adds a lot more game play because of the different handling of the avatar
• ascii art -  This worked out well - I especially love the cows.
• chip-tunes - Never got to this, I seriously doubt given more time I could have packed it into the 13k - but I'm still so keen to write a chip tunes generator.
• sound effects  - Got engine noises and lots of cool retro jump and explosion noises. Also the sound on the ticker tape text console is really cool.
• type out mission control texty stuff with good copy  - This feature turned into almost all the interface; inter-level screens; title screens and its use during game play. Similarly the techy language worked really well.
• analytics - I wrote this feature (and got it to repress browser console errors if offline) but after querying it with the contest organisers I had to take it out as they consider this an external dependency (and thus illegal).

As ever source is available and free in both senses here.

js13k - a week to go..

More or less now is a week before the js13k deadline. My cargo-72 is coming along looking along.
I currently have the first 5 levels working pretty well - it has cows and jellyfish; and some rolling hills. I have also implemented touch screen controls which although currently not working well enough to play with are a good start and enough to at least let me test that the game is playable on my mid-range phone and low-powered tablet.

So excepting sound and music the game is mostly feature complete, mostly it needs levels and narrative content - the current zipped size is ~8500 bytes so I'm still doing okay.

Here is my latest demo. it isn't really mobile device ready yet but it kind of works.

js13k - Day 20 - Is it a game?

I've been working hard on my creation and at the moment the to do list looks very long but at least I have something sort of playable with an interface that I am pretty happy with (for desktop anyway).

You can play the first two levels of cargo-72 here.