FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD24 → AInts vs Robots

AInts vs Robots

By yselftool

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Coolness350
Graphics3123.09
Humor4731.80
Innovation5152.52
Audio5411.73
Overall6042.52
Theme6332.15
Mood6342.00
Fun6881.95

Comments

jprogman 2012-08-27 04:29

What program did you use to create this game? I'm unable to run the game as it kept on getting a critical error message before I even get the chance to play. I'm using windows 7.

geekygenius 2012-08-27 06:06

I tried playing, and it ran, but not very fast. My fps was less than 1. Win7 64Bit Ok graphics card. (Can run tf2 at 60fps)

jprogman 2012-08-27 06:42

Oops my bad. Finally figured out that I needed after skipping part of your note about XNA frontend.
I have horrible performance issues with this game. I'm using a Win7 64-bit OS with 2.3Ghz dual professor and 512mb GPU.

dredlockz 2012-08-27 08:11

I couldn't run it, I get that message about not having a suitable video card.
If your game doesn't strictly require it, you should change your XNA profile from hiDef to Reach, since hiDef isn't supported by a lot of devices. I'll check it later at my gaming computer :)

dvdking 2012-08-27 08:14

You should have done some performance optimizations. It's very slow. I have no more then one frame per three seconds.
My computer is not that bad...

yselftool 2012-08-27 16:18

"You should have done some performance optimizations. It's very slow. I have no more then one frame per three seconds.
My computer is not that bad..."

The computers are not the problem, my code is it. I have optimized some parts already, but it did not become faster.

I am taking look at it atm, the ants are definitely the problem, not graphics or robots (without ants it runs fine, with ants but without ant-drawing not fine).

yselftool 2012-08-27 17:29

Found the bug, was (as always) really stupid...
(spawned not one, but an infinite amount of ants).
Some other optimizations too, update will follow soon.

kevincorrigan 2012-08-28 20:59

I couldn't get it to run, and the controls sound confusing.

pitzik4 2012-08-28 21:14

I can't run it. When I run it from the command prompt it just prints a blank line and then exits. I'm using 64-bit Windows 7.

karel 2012-08-28 21:38

Ambitious, but I really couldn't get anywhere... The controls are too difficult.

desiquintans 2012-08-29 04:40

I had absolutely no idea of what I was meant to be doing. I tried playing with your instructions on one screen and your game in the other, but it didn't awfully help.

yselftool 2012-08-29 15:13

The game seems to be a little bit too difficult atm, now that the ants spawn in huge amounts.

Your goal is to kill all of them, and sorry, I did not have the time for good controls.

evilseanbot 2012-08-30 10:38

Some interesting ideas, but the interface definitely needed some work.

davedobson 2012-08-30 22:10

This looks interesting and complex, but the controls were very difficult to understand - a lot of them, and not included in the game interface, and the art (though in a cool blackline style) was too abstract for me to know what the different buildings and resources were. I tried a couple of times, built some cubes, and wandered around the map, but eventually an ant I didn't see came and ate my robot, and I seemed to be done. I really like the ambition and the overhead view, and the coding seems pretty solid, but I think you might need to give users a little more onscreen help (and fewer options, like maybe a single build key) to help them out. Good luck with it if you decide to work more on it - I think there's some potential here.

imef 2012-08-30 22:42

The game worked fine up to a point when it crashed...

vilya 2012-08-30 22:57

This is hugely ambitious, but I think it suffers from the extremely complex controls. You really need to streamline them for this to be playable. I'd suggest something like (for example) left-click and drag to move the cursor, right-click and drag to move the camera, plus some clickable on-screen icons for each of the different things you can build.

I hope you do a post-compo version of this with better controls - I think it's got some great potential.

yselftool 2012-08-31 18:45

Yes, I really want to keep this project running and am already working on a post-ld version. Controls and GUI is what I really want to change nearly completely, the current are far to complex (and not what I wanted them to be).
@DaveDobson: It was inconvenient to create the models, currently I am working on a blender export script.

cipher 2012-09-02 01:50

No suitable graphics card found...cant run

beanalby 2012-09-02 03:56

Sounds like it could be interesting, it's way to complex for what little user interface is provided. Even with referring back to the mass of text, I couldn't figure out what was going on or how I was supposed to go about accomplishing anything.

paulsb 2012-09-04 22:28

It ran fine for me and looks good, but man I had no idea what to do and failed to make any sort of progress. But good effort, keep at it :)

mohammad 2012-09-07 21:31

Dude XML is one of the main internet scripting languages!
Make it a web!

mohammad 2012-09-07 21:53

Liked it!

cracky 2012-09-08 02:52

Game is just really confusing, I have no clue what's going on or what I'm supposed to do.

aaronyip 2012-09-10 20:02

I applaud your ambition, but perhaps too many features (and the pretty extensive control panel to operate them) ultimately didn't quite work out for the better. Because there's over a thousand games to play, players can only afford to spend a few minutes on most games--or only a few seconds if controls don't make sense. Good games try to make that count: the few minutes isn't spent reading up on controls or features and instead spent diving in and having fun.

I would have really enjoyed a version of your game simplified to just robots and only constructing buildings (just 5 buttons on screen, one for each building, no other controls except a mouse click). Everything else--where the building gets built, creating/equipping/moving robots, etc--happens automatically. I liked your idea and it has a lot of potential to be really cool, but atm I'm unfortunately not really sure what to do or how to do it...