This post is my declaration to compete in Ludum Dare 22.

I have never competed before, and this is my first project of this type. It is going to be a grand adventure.

I plan on basing my project on pygame, likely using the pygames utilities library http://code.google.com/p/pgu/.

No matter what the eventual theme is, I know I want to explore NPC interaction and storytelling.

I am being inspired by demos by Martin Magnusson about natural language processing.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ0juIliwL8

 

Another one of my inspirations is Douglas Adam’s Starship Titanic, an older game but the only of it’s kind to incorporate a chat based interface.

I want to try add story and dynamic needs to NPCs in a way mainstream games have not tried yet. It is an idea I have been playing with in my head for about a year now, but I have not put any code down on paper so to speak and I am excited about finally getting an excuse (and time now that finals are just over) to do so.

So, I have never used Pygame before, and I think that it is a silly idea to use code I have never used before in Ludum Dare. So I am a bit late to the warmup part, but I am setting up to do my warmup game. I love AI algorithms, and I like applying them to video games, so I want to try and apply a genetic algorithm to a really simple geometry wars clone, so hopefully, with each level the enemies will get more adjusted to killing the player.

Quick, tell me why this is a crazy idea and I might listen (or I might ignore you, I do my best work when doing crazy ideas)

I am already having fun!

–Lesson Learned–

I have forgotten on of my core mantras “you are not a graphics programmer”

Time to add PygCurses to my tools list. http://inventwithpython.com/pygcurse

 

Here is for the truth any theme can be made into a rougelike

So, to get deeper into pygame and now pygcurses I have been doing some playing around with it, not making a game per say, but fun toys none the less.

I made the mistake of hanging out on the IRC (a great place full of fun people!) and iFire trolled me into a challenge of writing a genetic algorithm to solve the Traveling Sales person problem in half an hour from scratch. Needless to say I failed; it took me 38 minutes to make a working algorithm. It was so much fun, it was the first time I had ever speed run coding before.

So, whenever I do an new thing, I have to combine it with my old things, so here is TSP hopefully shortest path map, calculated with a genetic algorithm, and rendered in ncurses.

#gallery-1 { margin: auto; } #gallery-1 .gallery-item { float: left; margin-top: 10px; text-align: center; width: 33%; } #gallery-1 img { border: 2px solid #cfcfcf; } #gallery-1 .gallery-caption { margin-left: 0; } /* see gallery_shortcode() in wp-includes/media.php */

Here is the source: http://pastebin.com/WjSUB4Cz (it is just a script file at this point, sorry)

Thank you Ludum Dare, for a fun time already!

Save the kingdoms, or destroy it. Either way, just get those annoying kings out of your cave!

As you can see, I have a concept, and a decent chunk of work done. The basic idea is that you are a wise old sage (optional undecided dragon) whom the kings of 3 nations keep coming and bugging for advice. You goal is to get them out of your cave by learning their problems and then advising them. The faster you do this, the better your score. I am sure that good advice is not necessarily, its the score that matters right? Not the consequences of your advice. This scenario will happen 3 or 4 times, each time the kings bring news from the outside and their problems. I expect the solution to the fastest game will be to get them to kill each other (and thus stop bugging you). I wonder how many people will solve it that way.

 

So, I have gone from concept, to basic framework. I have my graphics laid down mostly.  I live life by the mantra “I don’t do graphics”, so curses it was:

This is me putting the bot engine thought its paces, it has markups for optional and required keywords and short term and long term memory. Chat bots are a hobby of mine and this only took an hour or so. Truthfully it will be a game of “find the right chain of keywords to trigger the victory message” but each conflict will have at least 2 possible solutions, each with consequences for that (or another) king, likely effecting next set of problems.

Now for the long haul of content generation.

Having fun!

-Brendan