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[dontkickpenguins]

A Bit Of Garden

Lofi Gardening Sim. A game about gardening. Place plants and import or remove creatures. Watch how the little ecosystem grows. Make adjustments. Repeat. Observe. The gameplay involve manipulating flowers, bees and other organisms in order to protect your flowers and select for nice looking flowers rather than the dull looking wild flowers. Unless you like wild flowers. It hasn't turned out that well. Sorry. However, it does include the source code under the X11 license if you are some sort of programming masochist.		Inspired by

Final Version Download

[s0]

I really like the idea of this. I'm a sucker for toying with systems. Looking forward to see what you'll come up with. 

[dontkickpenguins]

We now have a program that generates a field of procedurally generated flowers.




Not very pretty right now, but it's something. The each flower has a little pretend genetic code inside of it, so I'm planning on having them be able to pass on traits to their offspring, and in this way the player can select what kind of flowers they want to grow.

[Spross]

Looks compelling so far.  I like the idea of a genetic code for each flower.  I'm a sucker for procedurally generated content.    

I went to a lecture by Ken Perlin from NYU about procedural animation this past semester.  He had some pretty cool insights about how important "noise" is to making procedural animation.  One example he gave was this http://mrl.nyu.edu/~perlin/experiments/facedemo/.  It's amazing how it goes from lifelike to lifeless when you turn off the noise button in the upper left corner. It looks like you have good "noise" visually with the variety of colors, sizes and shapes.  I can just imagine how cool these would look with a sort of animated swaying in the breeze.  A random tangent but those screen shots made me think of it.

Look forward to seeing more.

[Melly]

Don't save screenshots as compressed JPG's, it looks awful. Try to export them as high quality, or just use PNG's.

[dontkickpenguins]

I am pleased to report some progress! There now exists a bee who pollinates the flowers. Right now, the bee just picks the closest flower, visits it, goes back to the hive and then visits another flower, but I may make it so that different types of bee look for different things in flowers, as otherwise the flowers always end up looking the same.

I've also changed the way that flower's are drawn, although I haven't fixed the draw order yet so after a while the bee is hidden behind the flowers that sprout up around him like a every flowery tumour.

The screenshots below were taken by over a course of about 5-15 mins (I wasn't counting.) Note that flowers unvisited die off and flowers visited thrive (to say the least). Also, I've changed from imgur to photobucket as imgur was messing up the images, turning them into jpgs.

[dontkickpenguins]

I have an alpha version up here. It's not finished yet but it's vaguly playable and I promised myself that I'd release something by today.

Right now, all you can do is place flowers, bees, aphids and beetles and watch as they interact. The only finished mode is sandbox mode, but when it's finished I plan on having modes where the player must construct a garden according to my bizzare whims. Source code is included just in case someone cares to attempt to follow my fevered mind processes.

Also, have another screenshot.

[Melly]

Well, that's certainly interesting so far, and amusing to play with and watch it grow over time.

Here is some feedback on it:

The main menu text blends heavily with the busy background, and is very hard to read. You should make it a more contrasting color, and maybe a thicker font.

It's nice to watch everything interact, but beetles and aphids seems difficult to maintain sustainable. I think they each far too often. Maybe you should make them resist longer without food and have them eat only when they start getting hungry.

The game would benefit from some gentle sounds and an atmospheric music.

[dontkickpenguins]

Running out of time so here is the final version (barring an extension).

Download link here.

To be honest, I'm not really happy with how it's turned out, but I've gained some experience with pygame, so that's cool.

[dontkickpenguins]

I doubt anyone is reading this, but I'm using the extention to add better sound effects and levels which will require the player to produce certain types of flowers in the garden. Should have that done by the 7th.

[increpare]

I'll hold off playing until then, so - best of luck : )

[Chubysnow]

Could you implement it so that left click deletes an object?

[dontkickpenguins]

Could you implement it so that left click deletes an object?

I've added a right click as a kill button as left is already used to move things. Is that ok?

I've also found some creative commons background sound which I have to turn into an mp3 and use as background sound and got some the first hardcoded level pretty much done. My main fear with this is that I'm just adding the levels on top of the already done engine, so I'll probably run out of fun tasks to give the player soon.

[Chubysnow]

Yeah, my left and right clicks get messed up, thank you.

[dontkickpenguins]

Ran out of time and didn't add as much as I wanted, but it is done. Download here. Source code if you want it is here.

[guille]

I'm having some problems running this. It starts up ok but if I select Basic Flower Breeding after a couple of movements it will just shut itself down.

Then if I select Sandbox I get horroble beeps from my computer and some error messsage on the console saying something like "Deprecation Warning: integer argument expected, got float" and the game shuts down.

So, unplayable for me so far.

[Oddball]

I'm not sure what is going on in this game, even after reading the instructions. Also the game quits whenever I loose a level, is that intentional? I'd much prefer it to take me back to the menu screen.

[deathtotheweird]

crashes randomly for me, and always too fast for me to catch what the error is in the console window

[Darkebrz]

Start up. First level, bees touch flower, crash.

[belbeeno]

I also get a crash.  To reproduce, just go into Basic Flower Breeding and wait a bit.  Here's what I could print screen with my ninja keyboard skills:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\cx_Freeze\initscripts\Console.py", line 27, in <module>
  File "bitofgarden.py", line 844, in <module>
  File "bitofgarden.py", line 537, in main
  File "C:\Python26\lib\random.py", line 261, in choice
IndexError: list index out of range