This is somewhat of a crosspost from:
http://tmblr.co/ZzzqIt1HdlvzGHere's a screen capture of my running game server where I'm using Conway's Game of Life as an area attack. (Note that this is nothing at all like the final gameplay!)
Here's another video of three dozen monsters scattering after I move out of their detection range. (I should be able to support 200 simultaneous without straining the user's browser and home network by going beyond 1200 bytes in a packet.)
Really, my project is only a pseudo-Roguelike because it’s not turn based, being an MMO. (The technically correct term would be a PDJMMO game: a Procedural Death Jam Massively Multiplayer Online fame.) It’s called, “Raiders of the Computronium Sphere.” The wisecrack name for my project: “An MMO for Intelligent People, for a change.” This is not to say that MMO players are unintelligent; I am one of that group, after all. However, I find MMOs as they are typically structured to be more like resort casinos where you are distracted by pretty spectacles while the designers conspire to hook you through variable schedule of reward, which leaves a lot to be desired for me. To this end, I have started a project to construct an MMO where we take every known technique for fostering emergence in games and throw them all in at once.
There is a persistent procedurally generated map that has as many locations as the number of grains of sand on the Earth, squared. (2^120) The vast world is there to supply diversity and variation for a vast procedurally generated tech-tree based on “Minecraft style” crafting. This crafting will be the only way you can make your character more powerful. No xp = no mindless grinding! To advance your character, you have to engage in active evaluation, construction, and design. Also, the player will cast spells by looking at the (lispy) source code of the monsters and executing regular expression substitutions against it. (With the caveat that when one causes syntax and runtime errors, the “spell” reflects damage back on the player and the code is rolled back.) Players will also be able to craft and script their own minions, or write scripts and license them to other players for in-game money. Also, I’m going to use John Koza’s techniques for taking the s-expressions controlling the monsters and subjecting them to genetic algorithms. Basically, there will be hive-queen monsters that spawn worker/soldier minions, which should provide for phenotypes of sufficient complexity and capability to make things interesting. To overcome the challenge that it’s really hard to write fitness functions for nebulous things like game balance and fun, I’m taking a “free market” approach with Genetic Algorithms to solve this problem. Though it’s very hard to write a fitness function for nebulous things, it’s much easier to write fitness functions for things like “Survive or Kill the %&# out of the Player!” So I’m going to make the leaderboard based on how far away from the center of the world you can get, and the difficulty will ramp according to that distance. Basically, you’ll go as far as you can, so long as you can hack it.
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