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[William Broom]

Diaspora is a game about clicking on things until they're all gone.

Post-post-final FINAL MIX + now available:
http://www.filedropper.com/diaspora_3
alternate mirror:
http://www.mediafire.com/?jmdyodlsmgh
Feedback still appreciated, but I don't expect to make any major changes at this point.

Known issues: - Crashes if you enter a seed with more than 10 characters.
- If a spore/spores is at the far edge of the screen, it may occasionally become invincible. To overcome this for now, you can get it by clicking on the opposite edge of the screen. This might be fixed now, I haven't seen it for ages.

Additions to FINAL MIX +:
- Each level now has a randomly generated height and width.
- Clicking constantly will now produce no bombs at all, encouraging a more measured approach.

Recommended seeds:

None right now, since I just released a new build.

Please feel free to post your own recommended seeds, but I won't post any that were recommended before the second demo, since they will probably produce something completely different in the new build.


New OUTLINES EDITION screenshot:

[Melly]

I have only one question for you.

Will they taste of strawberries?

[PHeMoX]

You should make a timed puzzle out of it and let the player click away the dots in the correct order according to it's size or something. I of course haven't quite got a good idea of what you are planning for gameplay, but perhaps clicking them away for no reason would be no fun?

Anyways, just my 2cents on this very very early concept.

[William Broom]

I have only one question for you.

Will they taste of strawberries?

The taste is procedurally generated so it's possible, but not likely.

[Al King]

I have only one question for you.

Will they taste of strawberries?

The strawberries taste like strawberries! The snozberries taste like snozberries!

Fix'd.

Your screenshot is indeed mysterious. Good luck!

[skrew]

its funny. i went to a psy trance bush rave full moon party a few weeks ago called diaspora

[William Broom]

Updated with demo on first post.

[Melly]

Played around with it a bit. Unfortunately using my handle as a seed leads to a very boring pattern.

I like the movement of the dots, but maybe you should flesh out the gameplay more. Right now it's just not very fun to just pop dots.

Also, the bright red dots can either blend with the random background a bit or contrast to the point of being painful to look at. A solution I can thing of for this is to give them a black outline. In GM what I do is just draw a black circle with a radius around 2 points higher first, then draw the coloured circle with the intended radius on top.

[Pacian]

Will the same seed produce the same results on different computers?  I found that 'tigsource' and 'hello' gave good results for me, although the latter gives me motion sickness.

One thing I miss in this is sound.  If you could come up with some compelling sound effects for catching spores, you might have quite the randomly generated bubble wrap...

[Benza]

I can't help but think this would be awsome for a shooting game. Put a little player controlled ship in the middle and try and kill as many dots without being touched.

[Chaoseed]

It looks good, but...how the heck is the score calculated?

[Caio]

I think I found a bug - sometimes, when dots are close to the edge of the screen, they can't be destroyed. They just go right through the black circle.

[Sar]

Man, pretty interesting...


I get the impression score is something along the lines of:
- score constantly decrements
- score increases for removing dots
- increases more for dots colliding with extant 'blast' than for dots caught in original blast
- increases more for more dots simultaneously caught

?

I like the way that the behaviour of the dots changes as well. The first time I played I got a thoroughly uninteresting set and wondered where the game was - playing again and again with various different words changed my mind, though. ;-)

(Could I suggest telling the player what the seed word was at the end of the game, and/or displaying it on the high-score table? I forgot at least one of the ones I might have liked to go back to...)

[lucaskt]

its funny. i went to a psy trance bush rave full moon party a few weeks ago called diaspora

Diaspora = "the movement, migration or scattering of people from their original homelands" usually used refering to the "Jewish Diaspora" where they left what is today Israel LONG ago

So I get the "spore" and perhaps the idea that they'd be scattering, but I definatedely don't get the party.

[William Broom]

Hmmm... I do like the idea of giving the player an actual presence on the screen. Maybe the player's bullet patterns could also be proc-generated? Sometimes he could drop bombs like I have already, sometimes shoot projectiles, sometimes do a Clean Asia dash attack.
Actually, that might work really well. Because right now, the scoring system is weighted heavily towards seeds with large numbers, but if the player also had to dodge spores, he would have to find seeds with a balance between high scores and survivability.
I'll try it out after I've done some more spore patterns and sounds.