Hello everyone!

So, some of you may know we created Cubic Explorer, our Ludumdare 38 Game. Right now we need more votes to complete our 20 votes quota. So I think I will be playing a lot of games tonight so I can give feedback and also hopefully receive more :smiley:. I hope we can receive feedback in return as well.

Check out our game here, with source code, WebGL play and all that good stuff:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/cubic-explorer

If you decide to leave a comment and also review our game, I promise you will get also feedback and a vote from mew. I guarantee that I will comply with this agreement :handshake:

MaruGen what's that?

Some of you may not know, but we used a custom framework for Unity called MaruGen.

The main concept is that you take a start graph, then some basic rules on how this graph "expands", and after some random iterations and generations, you will get a more complex graph that will represent your space (or game mechanic)

I personally created this framework for my master's thesis, using elements from another framework created by Joris Dormans, named Machinations, Mission-Space and Micro-Machinations.

You may want to read about it in his free doctoral dissertation "Engineering Emergence":

https://www.illc.uva.nl/Research/Publications/Dissertations/DS-2012-12.text.pdf

Some of you may know him for a game he recently created called Unexplored on Steam. I believe he uses some of these concepts in his game. And, of course, I want to be able to get his main ideas of how to generate spaces and mechanics and apply them into a useful, computational tool.

So, what about it? What's the future of MaruGen?

After I finish my master's thesis (I have to present it in about two weeks :fearful:), I want to to keep working on this tool. Now, you can get the initial implementation of for Cubic Explorer by visiting the source code in the LDJam page. But I want to actually use it in a more professional way, so I plan to use it in a project Glitchy Pixel is currently making (check out http://www.glitchypixel.com.co for more info :wink:). Hopefully the tool will improve and get better.

In the near future I plan to put it somewhere more visible, like in Github and maybe an asset in the Unity asset store? It would be a free tool of course, but I need to get my head around it so it can work ok and maybe people can use it as well.

In any case, I hope that I can make it more stable and usable in the near future, and maybe a true game concept can help it develop further. I've already fixed many things in the tool, and also tried to make it less arcana in the code os its easier to understand.

Well, if you got through all of this, thanks for reading! And I hope I got your attention on the tool. And I would thank you even more if you could play our game here:

https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/38/cubic-explorer

Cheers, and have a good one!