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[LemonScented]

So, I'm having a motivation fail and I thought I'd throw it out to you guys to see if you can provide some inspirado.

The background: This whole thing we have with building games out of boxes and polygons and straight-edged things has bugged me for about 15 years now. The whole pixel-perfect thing displayed by games like Lemmings and Worms seemed like a revelation when I first encountered them, and I thought that all games would work like that in The Future (this was before games got sidetracked with the whole 3D fad). Turns out I was wrong.

The Now: I've been horribly lax with actually sitting down and coding indie game related stuff for a few months now. I had been working on something involving processor-intensive 2D fluid simulation, but the boxiness of the levels (amongst other things) was starting to get to me. Now that I have the time to get back into coding again, I'm thinking of ditching the boxiness (and possibly ditching the fluid, unless there's a way it'll work nicely with what I plan to build next) and to try a new thing. Namely, an engine that works on a pixel basis, like Worms and Lemmings, probably something procedurally generated. So, I guess, more like Worms than like Lemmings.

The thing is, although I reckon I can put together a super-nice engine that does all this stuff, I don't want to make a Worms clone. And without an idea of what sort of game I might want to build this technology for, I can't find the motivation to actually build it and have a play about.

So, I'm asking you. If you had access to a 2D engine that could procedurally generate interesting 2D environments with "pixel perfect" collision and destructible terrain, what would you do with it? I'm not looking to nick other peoples' ideas, but if I can get the seed I could make something new out of, I'll take the ball (which is in your court) and run with it until the ball metaphor stretches to breaking point. At which point there'd probably be a nice explosion which would destroy a bit of the terrain.

[Paint by Numbers]

A pixel-perfect procedural destructible terrain system is a fantastic thing. It must rock to be as clever as you.

What about a sort of Dwarf Fortress-like game set in space, where you land on a planet and must build a habitable and functioning base on it by digging tunnels? There would be great opportunity for getting into fights with aliens or space pirates or asteroid miners and stuff, with lots of explosive weapons to creatively destroy bits of your fortification.

[TheSpaceMan]

What I would do. Add a lot of canons and towers and spaceships. Add a lot of asteroids. Make it possible to create miners and resource gatherers that automaticaly farm asteroids in areas you mark and fly the resources back to the closes refinary, diffrent colors for values of minarals but just "one" resource like "material" to build from.

Tower auto track and fire against all enemy aircraft and debris that enter their range. Surface is a bit liquidy but hang together so they can be pushed around but can still represent stress and impacts, makes it possible to use explosions to push astreroids around or if you are not carfull, crack them and send debris around. And i know, making things rotate and have it pixel perfekt is a bitch.

Lastly add the rest or the rts controlls and make it possible to play in multiplayer.

[Zaphos]

Fluid simulation + destructible terrain -- pixeljunk shooter comes to mind ...

[Oddball]

Instead of concentrating on the destructible terrain aspect I'd focus more on the constructible terrain capabilities. Building bases and bunkers, towers and forts. Given an interesting enough goal, a construction themed pixel-perfect terrain game might have some scope.

[Türbo Bröther]

Artillery games have been done to death. I know what, an ESP-themed fighting game where you just make a hugs mess of things. Demolish cities with laser eyes, chuck buildings and oil tankers (which explode) and shit around and use rivers to form huge spheres of water in the air to drown opponents, set volcanoes off and a whole bunch of other fun.

[RCIX]

I'd make Cortex Command.

[TheSpaceMan]

A 2D populous?
A new interpetation of the old snes game king arthurs world?

Atleast something as previously mentioned, where you "build" things

[Sir Raptor]

Tower defense with terrain manipulation as a form of resistance force.

[Dacke]

Clonk (with all its different game modes) and Liero can perhaps give a bit of inspiration?

Games are simply better when based on engines like that.

[Pineapple]

Some sort of god game, maybe like the aforementioned Populous idea.

[SundownKid]

I would make some crazy Prototype-style sidescroller in a city where you can pretty much demolish everything in order to reach your goal, make buildings collapse by eroding their foundations and block tanks by blowing holes in the street.

Well, either that, or a gardening simulation where you can dig holes for flowers.

[IQpierce]

A game that's like a cross between Worms and Chaos: The Battle of the Wizards.

Two wizards (two players) are dueling; they can cast spells and summon creatures. The game plays for 30 seconds at a time, in a 2D platformer view; after 30 seconds, it pauses and lets the players decide on what they're going to try to do for their next turn. (See Steambirds or Flotilla.)

Among the wizards' spells are the ability to create and destroy terrain, bricks, walls, etc. How their spells (and the creatures they summon) interact with each other is chaotic and interesting. (A bit of a "Scribblenauts" element to this, especially if you go with the 2D side-scroller view I'm envisioning... although a top-down view might be simpler and interesting as well.)

(If you actually get a prototype of the basics of this sort of game up and running, send me a PM, I'd love to work on it.

[jotapeh]

The one thing that every 2D 'pixel perfect' destructible terrain engine suffers from is unpredictability. When you blow up a chunk of land, or little tiny bits in a noisy pattern, objects and characters often get stuck on them or within them.

Cortex Command suffers from this as do many others (I just recently played CC thanks to the Humble Indie Bundle.)

It's really frustrating and finicky and takes away from the REAL experience that it ought to be. This is why I think Minecraft is so well liked. The resolution of the terrain is such that there is no ambiguity even when odd patterns are destroyed.

That said back in 08 or so I started work on a destructible terrain engine for a game where the whole world was made of snow. The idea was that you could pick up snow and throw it or build it elsewhere to create forts and have snow fights. You can fiddle with it here: http://www.wegetsignal.ca/diggerdwarves/

space jumps, z throws snowballs, down arrow 'digs'

This engine loads a bitmap for terrain, although it does also have a procedural terrain generator (a la Worms) that I deactivated. It's fairly solid in terms of the 'physics' of things but ... I don't know. Anyway, the point is, if someone wants the source to a Flash destructible 2D terrain engine ... I'm happy to share

[LemonScented]

Wow! You guys really come up with the goods! Attempt at speedy replies:

A pixel-perfect procedural destructible terrain system is a fantastic thing. It must rock to be as clever as you.

What about a sort of Dwarf Fortress-like game set in space, where you land on a planet and must build a habitable and functioning base on it by digging tunnels?

Heh, I'm not clever, just old. I've picked up a few interesting tricks in my time
I like the space mining thing. Sci-fi asteroid mining seems like a nice setting that's not been done much (unless there's a whole pile of games I don't know about).

And i know, making things rotate and have it pixel perfekt is a bitch.

Yeah, that is a bitch... I'd try it if I thought the game really needed it but if I could get away without having bits of the terrain move and rotate, it would make life a lot easier. Worth bearing in mind, though.

Fluid simulation + destructible terrain -- pixeljunk shooter comes to mind ...

It occurred to me as well. I'm not sure I want to make a Pixeljunk Shooter clone, but some kind of interplay between solid and fluid might be nice - assuming I can adapt the fluid code to run at a framerate that's actually playable on a PC. The PS3 processor was basically built to do fluid sims. Current PC processors - not so much.

Instead of concentrating on the destructible terrain aspect I'd focus more on the constructible terrain capabilities.

Constructible terrain basically comes for free in a destructible terrain engine. It'd be nice to use both types of things, but yeah... Building stuff is at least as cool as blowing stuff up.

Artillery games have been done to death. I know what, an ESP-themed fighting game where you just make a hugs mess of things.

I would make some crazy Prototype-style sidescroller in a city where you can pretty much demolish everything in order to reach your goal, make buildings collapse by eroding their foundations and block tanks by blowing holes in the street.

Could work, but a game featuring Awesome Cosmic Destructive Power needs to work quite hard to not get old pretty quickly. Prototype is awesome for the first hour or two but gets pretty samey after that.

I'd make Cortex Command.

Someone's already made that I should look into Cortex Command more, but from what I've seen in videos and stuff, it's not a genre that sets my world on fire.

A 2D populous?

Populous was already basically 2D, wasn't it? God games are not really my thing, but I agree that building stuff is cool.

Clonk (with all its different game modes) and Liero can perhaps give a bit of inspiration?

I just did a bit of very rudimentary Googling, and those seem like good things for me to spend more time looking at. Clonk in particular sounds cool.

A game that's like a cross between Worms and Chaos: The Battle of the Wizards. ... (If you actually get a prototype of the basics of this sort of game up and running, send me a PM, I'd love to work on it.

You have excellent taste. Chaos is my favourite computer game ever. I tried a Worms/Chaos type game in 3D once, on a destructible heightmap. It was okay. It could be fun in 2D too, but I'm having a hard time working out how it would be anything other than "Worms but with different magical-type weapons".

The one thing that every 2D 'pixel perfect' destructible terrain engine suffers from is unpredictability.
...
Anyway, the point is, if someone wants the source to a Flash destructible 2D terrain engine ... I'm happy to share.

I guess the unpredictability might be part of the reason these sorts of engines didn't become more prevalent, but I kind of embraced the chaos. "Your cluster bomb blast left my Worm standing on a single floating pixel... Okay". Nice engine test, by the way. I'd be interested in seeing how you put that together, if you don't mind sharing.

[Landshark RAWR]

Artillery games have been done to death. I know what, an ESP-themed fighting game where you just make a hugs mess of things. Demolish cities with laser eyes, chuck buildings and oil tankers (which explode) and shit around and use rivers to form huge spheres of water in the air to drown opponents, set volcanoes off and a whole bunch of other fun.

do this using a kinect camera so you're using your hands to create this distruction

[DangerMomentum]

The one thing that always bugged me about this kind of engine was how static everything is. An explosion always seems to take out exactly one kind of pattern, whether it's dirt or steel. It'd be great to see pixels also have terrain types that get their own properties. It'd take more force to destroy a steel girder than a dirt hill.

[LemonScented]

I think that different materials could be totally doable, although there's potentially a bit of a memory overhead cost for it. From my understanding, most of these sorts of games essentially have something like a 1-bit alpha channel (so if a pixel's alpha is 0 it's open air, and if it's 1 then the pixel is solid). You could change that to use a byte or two per-pixel to get something like:

0 - air
1 - dirt
2 - steel
3 - diamond

etc.

I need to do the maths for that at some point, because although it's probably fine to do that on a PC, that technique might limit the maximum possible level size on a more limited platform like the iPhone. That said, I don't have any particular platform in mind right now, so perhaps it's not an issue anyway.

[Davioware]

I created a game with pixel perfect destruction for a competition at gamejolt.com a while ago, and I won first place (and got a game from steam).

It was made in around 3 days so it's not super fancy, but it was liked enough to merit the win. It's a metroidvania in space.

It's here if you want to try it:http://gamejolt.com/freeware/games/adventure/spectrum-wing/1058/

[jotapeh]

Ugh, I went poking through my old code and of course it was one of my first projects so it has horrendous code structure and (though it is apparent I had intentions to refactor) I must have gotten halfway through a change and abandoned it. Unfortunately it's pretty much toast. However there are specific bits which are intact, such as how to resolve a 'normal' to a pixellated surface and terrain generation. Much of this is adapted from various tutorials on the internet so it wouldn't really be anything new.