FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD25 → Hero Must Die

Hero Must Die

By CireNeikual

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CategoryRankScoreCount
Innovation124.01
Coolness1100
Fun303.61
Overall303.76
Theme433.90
Humor1282.76
Mood1382.93
Audio2122.36
Graphics2332.73

Comments

connors 2012-12-18 02:45

awwww Windows

trigun7000 2012-12-18 04:25

This was a pretty cool game concept. I wish there were more levels, because I'm a villainous bastard.

gdateam 2012-12-18 04:35

when i run it all i get is a solid black window :(

teamtibbles 2012-12-18 04:36

Fits the theme perfectly! The Hero Must Die, says it all! Loved it!

xandy 2012-12-18 04:39

everything except some dots is black :(

aneeslol 2012-12-18 04:58

Really fun game!

CireNeikual 2012-12-18 05:03

@OU GDA and @xandy: Hmmm, that's very strange. Could you try updating your graphics drivers?

edocentrique 2012-12-18 12:01

Well done concept ! Sometimes the hero is cheating he's trying to go through walls but other than that no problem it's good !

crimsoneer 2012-12-18 15:25

Great! Clean, cute, fun. Doesn't feel very villainous, but I like it :)

zenmumbler 2012-12-18 15:35

Fun game. The AI sometimes got stuck in a tile but that was when it was UTTERLY DEFEATED anyway. BWUHAHA!! Simple but correct sound effects. Cool use of AI as a protagonist.

dadeyemi 2012-12-18 15:39

Nice graphics

eelfroth 2012-12-18 15:45

Good work on the AI! It can be quite difficult to trick sometimes.

dreamwalker 2012-12-18 16:17

> OU GDA says ...
> Dec 18, 2012 @ 4:35am
> when i run it all i get is a solid black window :(
That happened to me too. I run a Win8-x64 system.

grambler1 2012-12-18 16:21

Really really cool game, I love the planning aspect ;) The game lacks a really complex level though!

tumoxep 2012-12-18 16:43

Awesome idea.
As I understand I can only complete 7th level by cheating.

CireNeikual 2012-12-18 16:52

@tumoxep: Thanks for playing! How were you able to cheat? The last level can be done with only one item, since I made the spikes a bit too wide accidentally. But, it can also be beaten the way it was intended :)

swofl 2012-12-18 16:53

Pretty entertaining. It would be nice if the hero actually died though.

blockbrains 2012-12-18 17:13

Awesome puzzle game, challenging, and the graphics are simple but work perfectly, congrats!

CireNeikual 2012-12-18 17:13

@Swolf: He dies if you make him hit the spikes! Sometimes they will evolve to just give up though.

matx 2012-12-18 17:41

Neat idea!

sim 2012-12-18 17:49

Very cool use of NNs. I'll check out the paper at some point, but a comment/blog post about how you implemented this in the game would be great - what type of NN did you use and how was it structured? What did you use for inputs/outputs? How did you decide a sensible direction to move the weights, rather than "you died, try something else"?

The game itself is pretty fun, although the other aspects are nothing special - it's the technology that stands out here.

CireNeikual 2012-12-18 18:18

@Sim: The neural networks have 27 inputs. 2 of them are the x and y distances from the goal (signed), and the remaining 25 form a 5 by 5 grid around the bot that tell it what the tile types are (sort of like vision). There are 3 outputs: move left, move right, and jump. They are all boolean (true if neuron output > 0.5, false otherwise). The networks are recurrent. The structure is evolved as well, so it varies depending on the task. The weights are perturbed by a random amount in a random direction. The bots are evaluated based on how close they got to the princess. Death is not a cost. The version I uploaded ran for only 30 generations, although I should have probably made it go for longer. I was at first concerned about performance, but when I took it out of the IDE it ended up being pretty fast anyways. I chose a average species populations size of 40.

sim 2012-12-18 18:28

@CireNeikual: That's really helpful, I can understand what's happening now. Thanks a lot!

barigorokarl 2012-12-18 18:34

Really cool idea with very solid realization! :-)

tau7153 2012-12-18 21:07

Awesome graphics and good AI!

entity2d 2012-12-18 21:11

I'm just getting a black window when I try to run this (I'm using Windows 8)

master0010 2012-12-18 21:11

:) nice game, i want more :D (more levels with more powers)

sev_inf 2012-12-18 21:14

Very cool idea and a very cool game.

hexot 2012-12-18 21:16

I... I can't say how much I love this game.

It is so simple, but the AI make it so complicated and you can make so many puzzles with it...

zompi 2012-12-18 21:17

Fantastic AI, I'm always impressed when someone can make good AI, it's really difficult. Thanks to this idea can work and... Well, just a really good game!

blodyavenger 2012-12-18 21:19

Noooo...Princes was not saved :( Well played CireNeikual! Nice puzzle concept, I had fun. Graphics could use some tweaks - less visible grid and some tile variations, but that's just a minor complain. Good game, I would gladly play longer version of it.

beerman 2012-12-18 21:42

That was way better than the screenshots make it look. I was expecting Yet Another Platformer, but this is really clever :)
More levels please!

kevincorrigan 2012-12-19 00:09

Nice game, I like the idea!

meep 2012-12-19 01:29

I really like this! Neural networks are my favorite model for machine learning applications. :P Very well implemented into this theme-appropriate game. Great work!

eatenalive3 2012-12-19 02:27

Awesome use of AI! Some of the levels were a little too obvious, but it was pretty cool to see how the AI handled situations. It might be cool to have more blocks and see how the AI handles perhaps 6 different obstacle types.

faust 2012-12-19 07:29

Really cool idea, the AI is somehow slow, but still worth playing.

lanoiadimuu 2012-12-19 13:54

The AI plays its role really well, awesome. I had to think and retry a lot during some levels.

You could have named your zip/exe same as the entry, I got troubles finding it again through LD search.

starspell 2012-12-19 16:07

Unfortunately I get a black screen as well. Shame because I've worked with NNs before and I'm really interested in how you used them in this game.

I'll try again on a different computer when I can.

shaneshanekavanagh 2012-12-19 18:23

It works well. It does raise the discussion that there is never a bad guy, only level designers.

calzoneman 2012-12-19 19:54

I really like the concept! I was disappointed when I beat it because I wished there were more levels.

kgs0142 2012-12-20 02:12

Wow! Good idea.
A Puzzle game with cool AI!
It's fun to play, and I am still trying to pass the level 5 lol.
Good job!

flai 2012-12-20 16:37

Wow, this is probably the best I have played on this LD so far! Great job!

radmars 2012-12-21 20:50

Nice graphical style, too hard though T.T

ethankennerly 2012-12-22 05:57

I'd like to play, but I also receive a black screen on M11x AlienWare.

goerp 2012-12-22 12:18

This is an original gametype! And its fun as well.
Its a shame that when you have the right solution right away, you don't see the AI trying all these different tactics in vain. But I understand that just watching the AI for hours on end wouldn't be very fun.

norgg 2012-12-22 12:34

This is really cool, love the neural network use.

I ended up finding a one tile solution to the final level too, in a way that seems to have tricked the AI, but would otherwise be really easy to solve. SPOILER HERE: http://imgur.com/6MNhy

CireNeikual 2012-12-22 12:42

@ethankennerly That's really weird, I thought I fixed this problem. I will have to look into it further I guess.

@Norgg Yup, I found this one too after I submitted the game! The hit box for the spikes are a bit too large, and the AI has no sense of velocity, leading it to die there. Both of these things are fixed in the post-compo version though, check it out!

cwilloughby 2012-12-22 22:59

Very cool. Love that the AI tries to figure it out. Interesting approach to gameplay. Level start sound was pretty grating.

endesga 2012-12-23 23:32

nice!

blackbulletiv 2012-12-25 07:02

Wow, the AI was really good! I had a tonne of fun trying to outwit it.

On the negative side, the sound and graphics weren't very good, but the excellent AI makes up for it. I would've loved more levels too.

Overall, great job!

brighterorange 2012-12-25 19:26

This was great! This idea only works with a good AI, and yours was quite adequate. The only level that I found to be a puzzle was #5, but every one was fun. Gameplay wise, this is one of my favorite games of the compo so far.

van-merwan 2012-12-27 20:21

Very very fun, too bad the challenging levels are post compo.

ahm99 2013-01-01 19:40

That was pretty fun! You did a great job!

gungnir 2013-01-05 20:15

Interesting but I found it frustating to play.