FoonLudum Dare ExplorerLD49 → ecosystem except there is no equilibrium and everyone dies probably

ecosystem except there is no equilibrium and everyone dies probably

By parafactual

View on ldjam.com

CategoryRankScoreCount
Overall5332.5928
Fun5312.3827
Innovation1593.6627
Theme4952.6827
Graphics5282.1027
Humor3602.3424
Mood4552.5425

Comments

z0rly 2021-10-03 23:52

I'm having trouble running this either in cmd.exe or powershell on Windows bc it's conflicting with my other Python installations.

One of the errors is

"Poetry could not find a pyproject.toml file in ........ or its parents"

the other is "No python at $myOtherPythoninstall" with cmd.exe

parafactual 2021-10-03 23:56

@z0rly, thank you for trying out my game!

When you unzip the file, is a pyproject.toml not one of the extracted files? If it is, what directory are you running the commands from?

I'm not running Windows, so I don't know how much I can help you

z0rly 2021-10-03 23:59

Ah never mind I was actually not running it from the right dir there last time, but once I do run it from the correct dir, it runs into my other python installation again. So the pyproject.toml isn't really an issue, but the other python install is.

parafactual 2021-10-04 00:03

@z0rly, that's strange... if you use `poetry run` then Poetry is supposed to run in its own venv, I think.

If you want to manually install the dependencies with pip, you should just need blessings, lark, numpy and rich.

jellybean 2021-10-04 00:04

now I want to go play dwarf fortress, this is a awesome, I had to run it on linux though

parafactual 2021-10-04 00:06

yay! glad you enjoy it @jellybean; i was playing dwarf fortress recently so it might have been inspiration on some level :)

rory-kaufmann 2021-10-04 00:59

This one didn't really do it for me. I bounced off the controls pretty hard. Putting the examples on the same page as the input and slowing down the simulation would go a long way towards making it more understandable. Heroic first commit though!

parafactual 2021-10-04 01:13

lmfao, i know right

retrisma 2021-10-04 01:14

Cool idea, but I wish the controls were on the same screen as the gameplay. I always love console games, though. Gameplay loop felt fun, but was hard to get the hang of

parafactual 2021-10-04 01:20

yeah, i added the controls/examples last-minute so i also left out a good few features. thanks for playing @retrisma!

chris-dirkis 2021-10-04 02:06

It was hard to tell what was going on in the simulation, so I didn't try very hard to make more bots to do things. It'd be neat to see the AI of the enemy bots written in the same psuedocode, or to be able to seed multiple bots and watch them play out against each other, I think.

ixchow 2021-10-04 04:41

Working well for me in-browser (had to press the "play" button in the lower right). Was helpful to open up the source code in the other window so I could look at the grammar while trying to make little bots. Speaking of, the example code was *very* useful.

Is it the case that every new bot gets added and then re-run from tick zero? Would be nice to have things work on their own timelines so they aren't (e.g.) constantly resetting to (0,0).

`move find dead -> eat` was a useful scavenger to have around, maybe without the `dup random` though (okay, `dup random` does seem to slow down the web version a fair bit).

Would be useful to have some way to introspect on the agents in the field -- who is actually succeeding?

Might be nice to have some sort of speed limit on the agents, since they sort of just warp around.

Fun next step: generating random programs and playing them in a tournament against each-other, mutating the winners, and repeating to "evolve" good agents.

parafactual 2021-10-04 04:47

thanks so much for the feedback @ixchow! you mentioned quite a few things i wanted to do but didn't have time for (speed limits kept coming up... `move find dead -> eat` is too easy); maybe i'll flesh out the game post-ludum dare

i especially really wanted to generate random programs. the tournament idea is very good

qthree 2021-10-04 06:15

It would be great to have "help" command in game loop. But @ixchow gave me better idea (to open example/sources in different tab/window).

the-jahn 2021-10-04 06:29

Interesting idea. A bit hard to wrap your head around. I somehow got up to like 250 points writing little programs, but I still don't know exactly what I did? :sweat_smile:

Not east writing programming languages though, so props for having a go at that during a game jam!

zarkonnen 2021-10-04 06:43

This is such a cool concept and such a frustrating execution!

candlesan 2021-10-04 06:55

Thanks to the other comments I knew that I would want the controls up so I took a screenshot of the controls and put them up on a second monitor. Not sure if it actually helped me do much better at the game but definitely recommended for anybody else giving the game a try!

r3l0ad1 2021-10-04 15:38

Hi, the web version of the game seems to be broken. it errors with 'could not find module blessings'.

parafactual 2021-10-04 15:48

@r3l0ad1 that's strange...it even works for me in a private window. you may want to run it yourself or, i don't know, clear your cookies in case you altered replit state

r3l0ad1 2021-10-04 15:54

@parafactual i tried downloading it and i installed blessings and poetry, but now it gives me this error unknown.png

parafactual 2021-10-04 15:58

@r3l0ad1 try `pip install windows-curses` if you're running windows

r3l0ad1 2021-10-04 16:04

@parafactual that worked, but now im getting errors about 'fcntl' which is apparently a UNIX only module. I would like to test this game but having to set it up like this from python is quite frustrating, I would suggest next time (if you make another python game) to use something like py-installer to package it to a .exe

parafactual 2021-10-04 16:07

yeah, i agree @r3l0ad1, i'd just run out of time. i'm not sure pyinstaller would allow fcntl to run though

r3l0ad1 2021-10-04 16:11

@parafactual ive never worked with fcntl before but yeah it might not

mikoziq 2021-10-04 16:12

holy shit, I am either stupid, or can't properly play this game or both :joy:

Anyway, Pros:

- I think I actually understand the concept behind it, which is quite clever - This game is a perfect representation of a programmers life. Do some shit you don't understand in the console and get paid for it :joy: - I like the simple visuals - Quite bold to get a Python in Ludum Dare. Rare to see! - Not really catching a theme here... wait a minute...

Cons:

- My code works, I have no idea why :joy:

Clever concept!

parafactual 2021-10-04 16:27

lmao @mikoziq you're probably not alone in being unable to properly play it

i almost went with haskell or rust but decided against it

ty!

dekajoo 2021-10-04 19:04

What the hell did I just play 😂

foursay 2021-10-05 02:24

This is the most unique ld game I have ever played lol, could not imagine still need to do code work here

fakefirefly 2021-10-05 16:13

A neat idea to make a programming game for the `unstable` theme. I can definitely say that the code that I wrote was unstable.

I managed to get a negative score by running:

`dup find enemy - (1, 0) -> shoot right -> move right -> eat`

which is neat.

I feel like having a resource counter so you can't infinitely dup/overload the game would be good. I suppose infinitely duping causes the program to become unstable, so that might be intentional.

Overall, a very original take on the theme.

parafactual 2021-10-05 18:48

thank you @fakefirefly :); and indeed, overusing dup will probably hurt you more than it helps

itzemii 2021-10-05 21:15

Interesting idea! Back to the roots :-)

xlambein 2021-10-07 10:53

Cool idea :0 when I saw a `dup` command I thought this was a weird flavour of Forth, but nope.

I don't really have new things to say about it: would be great to have some docs and more explanations :D Still, there's something fun about tinkering around and trying to figure out how things work. Kinda like poking around at a library or system you don't know, trying to reverse-engineer it.

A nice entry overall :>

tigerfinch 2021-10-07 21:20

Definitely a little challenging to get to grips with but looks cool and an interesting idea, I had some fun.

raphiell 2021-10-08 12:52

Very innovate, but as other have said, difficult to parse. Nice attempt for sure, it reminds of me of Rogue. I think having you and the enemies move slower would help, it was hard to keep track of what was happening.

Well done!

xpoho 2021-10-08 15:04

Весьма, весьма неплохое начало. Так держать! Я думаю, это можно развить во что-то необычное.

recher 2021-10-09 14:34

I love the concept, and I also love all the clues revealing that you may have realized the game in a sort of urge :

- the main title - the url of the game : "i-cant-think-of-a-name" - the ludum description : "…actually that tagline doesn’t really make sense anymore." - the in-game description : "I didn't have time to write a good tutorial, but I do have examples"

This game is totally experimental and raw, which I love too.

In case you do not know it, you should visit the site codingame.com, where you will find plenty of bot-coding games, to compete against other people. And maybe you should also test the old text-mode video game ZZT, which has its own level editor and its own programming language.

`dup random` is scary. Don't do it.

Thank you, and keep up experimenting !

gustavo-christino 2021-10-20 21:55

I finally managed to finish the gameplays and uploaded the game session for this game. I hope you like it and that my comments can be understood as those most interested in enabling improvements to the project.

Thank you for requesting this gameplay!

https://youtu.be/8mzlnT7WVCg