Hi,
was really happy to see this compo, and happened to work on a little toy thing on some evenings so got something together .. not a game, so am not participating really, but posting anyway in case someone finds this interesting. Didn't have much time, just a couple of hours in the evenings now and then, 'cause am working (making games
and have family etc. But was fun enough, the little that could do, and this will probably continue to be a free time toy project .. so any feedback / ideas are welcome.
It features an apple tree, which is actually what you control: arrow-up adds branches, untill it's grown enough to produce fruits (still with arrow-up). You can also revert the growth by pressing arrow down. Arrows sideways rotate the tree.
When you grow some apples to the tree, hungry birds start to fly towards them. As the birds eat them, the effect on the bird depends on the type of the fruit - now there are just two: one that makes the head of the bird grow, and another which fertilizes the bird so that it heads down to the ground to give bird to a little baby bird
After breeding the new mother goes to get food for the chick, which then grows if the parent succeeds in getting some food.
If you stop adding apples to the tree, the birds can not get food here anymore and fly away (and if there were poor chicks they just stay on the ground waiting for mom to feed them..)
The big heads don't have any functional effect yet - I had the idea that it would improve sight or memory or something, and that also wings and the tail could grow and affect other things, but haven't had time to implement any of that nor come up with game mechanics / scoring / goal / anything that would make this a game. I'm sure there are possibilities though, and am open to ideas
This is written in Python, using the Soya3d engine, and is just very simple lines & spheres & triangles all procedural graphics -- there are no gfx files, just the .py code and the engine is needed.
Am on a mac now (and my son is sleeping in the room where my win laptop is) so can't make an exe, so am just putting the source on-line so if anyone bothers There is a windows executable now at
http://www.kyperjokki.fi/an.org/tree_birds_01.zipFor other platforms / to be able to run own modifications of the code you can install Soya3d from
http://home.gna.org/oomadness/en/soya3d/download_______/index.html .. a not-most-recent but enough to run this binary package for windows is available from
http://thomas.paviot.free.fr/soya/ .. Linux distros like Debian have soya3d in the distro so you can just install it from there.
http://an.org/programming/appletree_birds.zip is a pack of the source, with these files:
It's all pretty nicely modular (OO), so would be easy to add several trees, different birds, different foods .. and earlier was thinking of perhaps making this competitive by adding other animals, like monkeys or worms or something. Of course making the birds shit after eating to distribute seeds might be interesting .. and to not overpopulate some means of death should be introduced. Or all that could be scrapped to make a game in another way, like shooting with the mouse, instead of continuing in the simulation vain .. dunno, but anyhow did not have time to do those now, sorry.
A screenshot where birds have eaten some fruit, one already had a child and is going to get food for it .. one is going down as it was fertilized to give birth, and one is easting happily by itself.
Have been toying with ideas around food and eating otherwise recently too, like wrote unit tests for the logics of mother and father when they have hungry children and limited food .. that's in
http://an.org/programming/food.py and
http://an.org/programming/human.py and more notes&links in
http://www.playsign.net/FirstAndLast/FoodWorldThanks for the cool submissions, am certainly looking forward to getting to play some of those that are actual games (didn't have time for that either yet though but am not without hope..)
cheers,
~Toni (first post here..)