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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 (http://www.filedropper.com/diaspora_3)
alternate mirror:
http://www.mediafire.com/?jmdyodlsmgh (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:
(http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/9413/dipic3er5.png)

I have only one question for you.

Will they taste of strawberries?

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. :)

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

Fix'd.

Your screenshot is indeed mysterious. Good luck!

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

Updated with demo on first post.

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

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.

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...

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.

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

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.

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...)

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.

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.

I need another mirror or something. It refuses to download.

Alternate mirror now available.

"~~~~~~~~~~" was a really boring level.

"Hideous" gave me almost 5000 points though :D

Hypnotic.

I would hazard a guess that it's a sort of escape theme present in a ton of these kinds of party. People giving up normal society's rules and stuff and meeting like minds out in the desert.

I've done some more work on the game, it now has quite a few new movement styles and events, the spores might follow each other, turn invisible, level up and more. I also have a more balanced scoring system that divides the score by the time spent instead of subtracting. It's still weighted towards seeds that produce lots of spores, but not as much as it used to be.

Next I'm going to implement planetoids with spherical gravity, and then maybe released an updated demo.

Also, I thought about giving the player a ship that can be hit by spores, but I decided against it, since it would make the game a lot less unique. Also, some seeds would be almost impossible to dodge while others would be pushovers.

yeah diaspora is form 'scattering of seeds',. and the current usage of 'scatterings of peoples' seems to lend it self to a psy-trance rave,. . people come together for a pary and then take the seeds of culture with them and spread it!

found a cool blog searcing the term: http://beatdiaspora.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html 

Woah that is a good one

this game plays really well I think :)  you going to add many more types of particle dynamics you think?

New demo on first post  ;D

It's pretty cool. It's pretty cool, figuring out the physics behind each level. I got a score of 412 on "argh", which is deceptively easy.

Only problem is that I didn't see gravity wells very often. Maybe more elements like that would be cool.

Yeah I do find that gravity wells don't crop up as much as I'd like. That's easy to fix though.

Also: the box asking for the name at the end of the level defaults to the value of the seed... couldn't it default to whatever you used as your name last time?

While a couple of the new behaviours are fun, I find that more of the seeds I try this time result in un-fun games than with the first demo, and in its current state that's the main undoing of the game. Chasing down the last couple of tiny dots just gets tedious.

So I tried something else, instead. 'hello' as a seed gets you a good point-scoring opportunity; I can usually get 4000 points without trying. I notice with this second demo, that some of the time, if you leave the dots long enough they grow into bigger dots. So I tried leaving a few dots alive on 'hello', and letting them grow into bigger dots, and then breaking them down into the smallest dots, letting them grow into bigger dots... my score peaked around 1.5million, by which point I couldn't actually clear the screen 'cause one of the gravity wells had helpfully wandered off the side of the screen so the dots were flailing wildly all over the place and reproducing like crazy.

So I tried again, being a little more conservative this time and letting only a couple of small dots grow again at a time, and by the time I cleared the last dot I was on a healthy 60k... only the game didn't end (http://www.eviscerate.net/scraps/20080512a.jpg). I sat there and watched it until it got down to double-digit points just in case there were some of those flashing-in-and-out dots for some reason, but no - nothing.

On the other hand, I'd be a little worried about the growing-the-dots mechanic. I found one seed ('Bichatse') which had growing-the-dots and just simple gravity towards the bottom of the screen... so I could pop them all to small dots, wait for them to grow to medium dots, pop them all to small dots again, repeat ad nauseum. I got my score up to 80k in a couple of rounds, before deciding I'd proved my point (and being annoyed at the slowdown that thousands of the little balls on the screen at once brought) and cleared them, and... again, the game didn't end (http://www.eviscerate.net/scraps/20080512b.jpg). If there's some mechanic which causes that then I'd decribe that as terrible, 'cause from the user's point of view the game appears broken. :/

Personally, I'd be tempted to remove the growing-dots entirely. It's kind of cool, in that it allows for runaway scenes like I had the first time I tried it on 'hello', with so many large dots on-screen I couldn't hope to clear them all... but it seems it also opens the door to patience-rather-than-skill highscore climbing. :/

I liked the multiple backgrounds, dot colors, and movement patterns.  Some of the backgrounds worked better than others, though.  With a seed of "foo", the background was pretty painful to look at and I had a hard time tracking the dots against it.  Perhaps using slightly more muted colors for the background would help in some cases.  An interesting use of PCG, though!
Cheers,
--Zack

From near the start, I never expected the scoring system to be balanced. Some seeds are better than others, and (now) some seeds can be farmed for potentially infinite scores.
However, the other problems, like the gravity wells leaving the screen and the spores doing likewise (I assume this is why the game didn't end) are a real problem that I'll try to fix soon.
As for the level-up power, I might scrap it or make it so that they will only ever level up once per game.
The backgrounds I will also try to make easier on the eyes.
One more thing, Sar - when you say that less enjoyable games have become more likely in the second demo, which ones do you mean exactly? Any styles that people don't enjoy, I can remove or make less frequent.

It would seem rather unreasonable to expect the scoring system to be balanced! It just seems a little silly to have seeds which could potentially have infinitely-high scores, when most seeds have a theoretical maximum.

(Although realistically I kind of suspect the exponential rate score degradation combined with the fixed-max-period player shot probably result in a theoretical maximum score even with as many dots on-screen as you like. For example, I couldn't get significantly more than (IIRC) 1.8 million when I had a screen packed with big dots on 'hello', running at one or two frames per second 'cause of the sheer number of dots, and the final score would have dropped below that by the time I cleaned everything up anyway, if I'd managed to and it worked.)


Well. It might be somewhat subjective; I found the following things 'fun':
- Large numbers of small dots
- Predictable but not straightforward dot behaviours (e.g. gravity, oscillations)
- Patterns which don't scatter too widely

Basically I get the idea that a good way to score points is to catch dots which move into the area you've 'shot' after your shot-area is already extant, so that's what I try to do... and the above make it possible but also not straightforward to do that, so I can have the reinforcing encouragement that I can do better by better predicting the dot paths, and give me a nice lot of dots to do so with.

I find the following things 'not fun':
- Small numbers of small dots
- Unpredictable or hard-to-predict dot behaviours
- Cleaning up small numbers of dots which have flung themselves so widely it's not possible to catch more than one or two at a time

Small numbers of dots mean that the stage is over very quickly and there are very few opportunities to score points, meaning in turn that there's less variation in score between a 'good' run and an 'excellent' run. Hard-to-predict behaviours (e.g. the ones which suddenly radically change direction) mean I'm wasting too many shots placing it in the path of dots which suddenly stop going in that direction. Cleaning up the scattered remnants is just generally boring.

It just seemed that with this latest demo, more of the seeds I tried ended up with a small number of widely-scattered dots, meaning few opportunities to score and thus a small range of scores, and thus no real feel that playing the level again and again I'm improving. Also a higher number of the erratic-movement dots, which feel 'unfair' the first couple of times - I'll line up shots which look like they should score well when I click the mouse button which end up getting 0 because all the dots have suddenly switched direction.

I can't help but think that even just changing the colours of stuff would make the game look a lot better. The idea is cool it's just kinda ugly at the moment.

I DO NOT APPROVE OF GROWING SEEDS

(cf level "fringe"  :-X  )

:)

One thing that might make the game a little more directed is if your net area was to increase in size with each catch.  Just a thought.

Also, the regrowth feature might have something to do with this bug

Thanks for the feedback everyone, it's really useful. I've started making changes based on it, and discovered a whopping big problem that I'm surprised nobody mentioned: Due to my switching around of sprites and such, the spores actually orbited around a point that was down and to the left of the gravity wells.  :-X I guess nobody noticed because they never found any gravity wells anyway.

Still, I've fixed it now, and you can expect another build fairly soon.

EDIT: Wow, lol... 'Hello' is a horribly overpowered seed, even when I made it so it would only ever level up once. I left it running for at least 10 minutes while I was talking on the phone, and still ended up with a score of 4307  :o. I think I'll have to scrap the levelup mechanic entirely, which is a pity because I still like it in theory  :(

EDIT AGAIN: No, actually, I'll keep it. 'Hello' may not be balanced with other seeds, but it's balanced within itself, in that a player with skill and timing can triumph over one with patience.

Final or not-so-final version in first post. Please keep reporting any bugs or inconsistencies you find. :)

have you considered the possibility of making large seeds gravity wells in some cases? (or, indeed, to make large seeds repulse eachother).  Just an (easy-to-program) idea.

I really rekon you should get rid of the randomised colours and shit.

I just got a level with a pale yellow background and yellow seeds.
Not fun.

Or one could just outline the seeds with a colour complementary to the background...

well something, because I just got a pale green background with green seeds.

Create a black outline for the seeds.

Damn, I should have listened to Melly the first time he said this, but I didn't want to because I thought black outlines would look ugly. Doesn't matter, though, it's easy to fix.

Make them very thin. Or you could use a different color than black, just one that contrasts with the actual color of the seed, but not fully contrasting as to not become unconfortable looking at them.

AT&T/SBC Global has decided that I will not download this file.
(http://i117.photobucket.com/albums/o67/MCBooga/sbcattsaysno.jpg)

Network neutrality is a beautiful thing.

Yet another version released... I got the registered version of GM7 and the first thing I did with it was make random height and width for the levels in Diaspora. Also I had to draw all the outlines again because last time I did it, I just exported it as a .exe and forgot to save the editable file  :-X

Played it again. It got more interesting. Nice work.

I liked some of the changes you made. Still fun, though I have some more comments.

On the latest one, is randomly disappearing circles an intended effect? It was pretty annoying on the seed "electronic".

Would it be possible to make the collection circle wrap like some of moving circles or is that supposed to be part of the challenge?

Also, it might be good to be able to reset the high score (mine has been kept since the less-balanced earlier builds), store the high score table name separately from the seed (it displays the seed when asking for a name), and not ask for a name if you don't actually have a high score.

You might also want to have some sort of visual indicator of what explosion frequency disables clicking, since on levels like "329" the small dots move left fast at constant speed, so there's no strategy in waiting at that point. There was another situation (forgot the seed) which was very dense with spores that multiplied every twenty seconds or so. That situation would be difficult enough to end without the limited explosion frequency, but it became impossible with it.

You can reset the highscores by pressing 'K' on the highscore screen. I put it in as a dev tool but now I'm passing the savings on to you!

The multiplying dots I shall have to look into. They shouldn't go so fast that it's impossible to clear them. And the disappearing ones are supposed to do that. They're still there, just invisible, so you can get them if you predict their motion.

As for the various problems with the high score table, I'm afraid to say I just don't know how to do that  :(