[Release] Signature Moves - A Nonviolent (Dynamical) Systems Game

[ratamero]

The final (for now) version of this thing is now online! Go to https://itch.io/jam/wizard-jam-4/rate/100396 and let me know if you find any nasty bugs.

 

 

 

Hello, Thumbs! I am 100% new to making games and I'll try to create one completely by myself in a tool that I barely understand. Welp.

 

I have a very vague idea and a proof of concept for Signature Moves - A Nonviolent (Dynamical) Systems Game. It will involve cool chaotic dynamical systems and the ways of visualising them. My minimum idea for a deliverable is a nice interactive art generator/visualisation tool and anything over that will depend a lot on my free time and inspiration for possible gameplay mechanics. 

 

In preparation for the jam I have spent about 3h on Unity getting a ball to roll and a couple more hours getting it to render a simple chaotic attractor with a bunch of small spheres going around, something like the picture somewhere under this:

 

 

 

I am very excited to actually get to work on something like that for the very first time and a bit apprehensive about what I can actually get done in two weeks. 

 

The diversifiers I am considering: Mainstream Thumbs, Game Ideas from the Cast, Learn By Doing, maybe Box Art if I find the time.

[coughlinjon]

Wow, this is a front runner for Title of the Jam  

[TopFish]

I don't think I entirely understand what this is, but I'm definitely looking forward to finding out. 

[Nappi]

Sounds like this could produce some pretty cool wallpapers!

[Travis]

I love things like this. Looking forward to it!

[ratamero]

So I've decided it might be a good idea to document my very first time making a game as well as possible - so I'll try to keep this topic updated during development.

 

This is what I have on day 0:

 

1) A proof-of-concept prototype showing that it is possible to do what I want to do in Unity (the terrible framerate and resolution are from the video capture, not from the Unity program)

 

 

2) A github repository where you can watch live how horrible my code looks

 

3) a kanban board that I hope to keep up to date as much as possible at taiga.io

 

 

[gerbilsinspace]

ooh, nice kanban board. is it publicly viewable?

 

[ratamero]

it turns out that it is! I've updated the previous post.

[watermelon]

could work as a simple audio game like soundvoyager. when you succeed the visualisation progresses into a different behaviour or colour.

[ratamero]

1 hour ago, watermelon said:

could work as a simple audio game like soundvoyager. when you succeed the visualisation progresses into a different behaviour or colour.

 

Yeah, some interplay with audio is definitely a possibility.

 

So I'm signing off for the night - ran into a bunch of numerical instabilities with some of the systems, others were stable when they shouldn't be, lots of weirdness. I'm planning on implementing a proper equation solver tomorrow (RK4 will do just fine) to get rid of numerical problems.

 

Rossler attractor worked just fine!

 

 

Chen attractor collapsed to a single point even though it shouldn't:

 

 

And something called the Thomas attractor (I had never heard of this one) was probably the coolest thing I've done so far:

 

 

 

 

[Nappi]

Nice and trippy!

 

19 hours ago, ratamero said:

 

 

 

 I'm pretty sure this is just a picture of a chameleon. 

[dibs]

so pretty!

[ratamero]

So the good news is that I didn't need to implement an equation solver - the weird Fabrikant system that had instabilities is supposed to have instabilities. I'm just moving elements that go too far from the origin back to the middle and that's the best I can do.

 

Trying to implement quadratic maps was the task for the day - they're tricky because the cool shapes they make come from the individual positions an object can occupy, rather than by their trajectory, which means that the Trail Renderer I use for all the other systems is useless. It took me most of the day, but I solved the problem of how to display those systems without creating a bunch of GameObjects - point clouds on a mesh! 

 

 

 

Now I need to implement that solution into my main project (which should be quick and I might still do today), but otherwise I'm moving to creating a rudimentary UI and some camera control to play with these weird guys and look around them.

 

(this is what the shape from the video looks like when "complete":)

 

[ratamero]

Working sliders! Camera Control! It's been a very productive 2 hours. 

 

Also, I volunteered to give a talk to an audience of PhD students in Physics about this thing. On Thursday. Gulp.

 

 

[BluShine]

Looking great so far. I really want to see the lines be more colorful! Maybe use Color.Lerp to make all the colors of the points/trails slowly change? Very curious to see what the gameplay will be (personally, I'd be perfectly happy to just have a fancy visualizer). 

[ratamero]

5 hours ago, BluShine said:

Looking great so far. I really want to see the lines be more colorful! Maybe use Color.Lerp to make all the colors of the points/trails slowly change? Very curious to see what the gameplay will be (personally, I'd be perfectly happy to just have a fancy visualizer). 

 

Yeah, as soon as I have the basic visualization tools in place I'm moving towards making it look cooler, and when it looks cool enough I'll try to think what to do with it. A simple idea is to have mouse clicks generate new particles, so you could see how the trajectories evolve from anywhere. Still not much "gameplay", though.

[ratamero]

On 21/11/2016 at 10:14 PM, ratamero said:

Also, I volunteered to give a talk to an audience of PhD students in Physics about this thing. On Thursday. Gulp.

 

 

This was literally the only thing I had time to do during this week. It seemed to go quite well! It was a 20-min live demo where I started from an empty project and showed how you can plot trajectories and point clouds in Unity and how easy it is. I'm glad with the results.

 

So yesterday I was going to spend a lot of time on this but didn't because reasons - I did manage to add my point cloud code to the main project. On today's menu: UI. If everything goes according to plan, I'll have a pre-pre-alpha early access version on itch later today!

[ratamero]

Alright, this is still a buggy mess, but I have decided to release it into the world and fix on the fly. There's still work to be done on writing some very basic help text on each attractor, adding sounds, making colours more dynamic and just bugfixing in general. Known bugs are mostly related to Hindmarsh and Quadratic Map attractors, so use those with parsimony and don't expect to be able to go back to some of the other ones from them.

 

https://itch.io/jam/wizard-jam-4/rate/100396 

[ratamero]

I think I have reached the "1.0"  point I can achieve before the deadline. Bugs seem to have been squashed, there is sound, there are credits, there are help texts, everything looks more polished and beautiful than it did. There's even a screenshot button!

 

I am still not super happy with the camera control (you need to press SPACE to lock/unlock the mouse cursor and change options), there are some other things I would have liked to implement (ANY gameplay, to be fair) and memory management is pretty bad at the moment, but I don't think I can feasibly get them done until tomorrow evening due to the fact that I should be writing my thesis. I still want to come back to this and add more stuff to it in the future!

 

[Ben X]

This is lovely, very atmospheric and relaxing. It's a great feeling when you change something and suddenly the entity spreads out around you.

 

It sounds like you were thinking of all this stuff already, but I'd really like to see this get more organic controls for the adjustments, some different colours, and perhaps a more floaty and slow control system - like you're in a little pod controlling yourself with small jets and you've come into contact with something beautiful in space.

[ratamero]

Thanks! I like the idea of thruster-based controls for the camera - maybe even add an actual small pod that you can look around and rig the dropdown/sliders to buttons to avoid the issue with having to lock/unlock the mouse cursor to deal with them. 

[Ben X]

I was thinking since I posted, a pod is too removed. Maybe a spacesuit with thrusters? Wouldn't want to cut off most of the view or make you feel too safe. You could have controls on a sci-fi cuff panel or something...

[Patrick R]

This was pretty but I had no idea what I was doing or if I was having an effect. I wish when you pressed space It locked the camera. I would frame up the artwork in my sights and want to mess around with the sliders, but as soon as I moved my mouse to them my view would turn away, so I didn't ever get good feedback as to what changes I made were doing.

[ratamero]

That should be solved on my next build! My local copy is working this way already (locked camera when cursor is unlocked). I'm adding an important easter egg this weekend and generating a new build then. 

[ratamero]

Build 1.1 is up! Camera issues should be solved (it locks when cursor is unlocked) and a very special guest drifts in space now.