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(http://www.ivansafrin.com/crap3/biocosm.png)


Biocosm for Windows (http://www.ivansafrin.com/games/Biocosm_win32.zip)

Biocosm for OSX (http://www.ivansafrin.com/games/Biocosm_OSX.zip)

DISCLAIMER: It's super buggy and there are some severe memory leaks. Also there are no loading screens, so be patient. I'll try to patch this stuff up tonight.

Unfortunately I had no time to finish what I wanted to do, so this is more like a demo. Hope it's still fun though!

Sorry there are no ingame instructions, so here they are.

Use left and right arrows to navigate your specimen collection unit.
Hold spacebar to close the specimen holding pincer.
Collect specimen and bring them to the extraction beam.


Code by yours truly
Music by my friend Mike (http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=184264126)

Oh my. That's pretty.

Yeah simple but nice.

 :-*

mmmmferny goodness

Very, very pretty.

is that a model of the two bain cells i have left ?  Very nice L-system,. can we see some deranged onse with screwy branches please,. .

More please  :-*

Just a keepalive. I've been working all weekend on this, so some tasty screenshots and actual game details soon.

Here are some of the random locales you will be visiting:
(these are actual ingame shots of the procedural engine, not a mockup like the first one was  :-[ )

(http://www.ivansafrin.com/crap3/bc1.png)
(http://www.ivansafrin.com/crap3/bc2.png)
(http://www.ivansafrin.com/crap3/bc3.png)
(http://www.ivansafrin.com/crap3/bc4.png)
(http://www.ivansafrin.com/crap3/bc5.png)
(http://www.ivansafrin.com/crap3/bc6.png)
(http://www.ivansafrin.com/crap3/bc7.png)

That's HOT man! for serious!

Looks amazing!

Lovely!

ditto ditto ditto

Woot! I really like the visual aesthetics so far. So, what's the gameplay going to be, or do you want to keep us in anxious suspension?

will there be parallax in the bg?

Is it a sim?  kinda like spore?  or a side-scroller?  or what?

Looks awesome, but I am having a hard time visualizing the gameplay.

I approve heartily. Looks great!  ;D

I want to have sex with your game :-*

The reason I haven't posted any gameplay details is that my current idea is riding pretty heavily on a technically complicated (though not at all complex) idea. I will work on it this week and if i can pull it off, I'll post the details and screenshots right away, if not, I'll have to modify it a bit. I'm pretty sure I can do it though :)

Will this even run on my computer? :(

It should if you have a 3d card. So far it's just a few polygons and no shaders, so it should be ok. Not sure how CPU intensive the other stuff is going to be, but graphics-wise it wont be too much more complex.

Awesomesaucer.

Yes, that looks seriously sexy!

I am looking forward for this

Another weekend, another free day to work on this :)

New screenshots later tonight.

Do you guys need music?  Your game looks really cool, and I'd love to do a couple ambient tracks for it, if you guys don't have anything else.

Sorry, Paul, but someone is working on music already :(
I'd love to collaborate on something later on though!

Also, what is this crawling around?  ::)

(http://www.ivansafrin.com/crap3/biocosmlife2.png)

 :-*

phyyysiccs

God I love this compo.

(http://www.ivansafrin.com/crap3/biocosmlife3.png)

Something howls in the alien woods.

Looks like some sort of wave form of evil.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vv00qTC1Bvg

EVERY SECOND I LIVE IS AGONY!

Procedural walking?  Oh fuck you, man.

I love you.

This fucking wins.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuhsTvEFQqs

Struggle for life  :o

Very cool.

 :(

This looks very interesting, although I'm struggling to see the 'game' aspect.  I guess the user will be involved in the creation of these creatures?  Kinda like a spore-ish thing?  Will the user control the creature?

It looks good, but I hope that the gameplay is as strong as the concept.

I hope so too :) Though I think I got some solid ideas. I just hope I'll have the time to implement them.

Yeah, I was wondering how this would turn into a game.

You are a freshly hired specimen retrieval specialist working for the Biocosm Interplanetary Biological Research Corporation. You have the wet and dirty job of going to different planets to retrieve specimen DNA samples. Have you ever dreamed of spending your day under the acidic downpour of planet X'quak'uak 5X trying to get a giant two-headed centipede onto the scan bed using all manner of tools at your disposal?  If so, this job might be for you!

Fuck yes.

one of the most depressing things I have ever seen.

But hey, having a wang that could bend like that would sure be handy. Like, you could tie a duster to it to clean that impossible to get to place behind the fridge.

Player could inject adrenaline shots into various parts of the organism to make them move more cheerfully  :P

Truly disturbing and cool at the same time.
I once saw a documentary where similar looking creatures evolved based on selection against simple parrameters like reaching a cube before others etc. the creaures evolves into very interesting shapes.

I am liking this a 8)lot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRFCxKgvKe0


...

Bow chicka wow wow?

Oh baby baby, oh baby baby

Oh baby baby, how was I supposed to know
That something wasnt right here
Oh baby baby, I shouldnt have let you go
And now youre out of sight, yeah
Show me how you want it to be
Tell me baby cuz I need to know now, oh because

What have you brought into this earth!

Advert for abortion right there.

"We're sorry, this video is no longer available."


:<

I am going to do my best to release something tonight.

I can't wait ;D

Same here but I am not sure if I should be happy or frightened :-D

Running late as always, but it's on it's way. Trying to compile it in windows.

Well, pending some technical problems, the windows version is delayed till tomorrow morning as I am falling asleep at the keyboard. I am posting the OSX version for now.

The link to the OSX version is extremely typoed.  :(

Here's a fixed link to the OS X build (http://www.ivansafrin.com/games/Biocosm_OSX.zip), just in case toastie has gone to bed.

Thank you, mewse, I think i'm slowly losing my mind. And with that, im off to bed! :)

I don't know whether or not it's running slowly on my computer, but the acceleration is painfully slow. :( 

Edit: hmm; it does seem to slow down a lot in some places.   It looks good, and sounds good, and moves well, and might play good, but due to the slowdown the gameplay is pretty frustrating :(

Okay; I just gave it another try; thought I should at least try to finish a leve.  But, erm, I got tightly attached to one of my creatures, and ended up falling from a height, the result being the attached picture, where I could still move, but couldn't pick up the last creature ( who was also, for some reason or other, partially immersed in the ground)  :(

Ok, win32 version compiled!

Behold the buggy incompletess that is Biocosm!

Looks excellent, my good sir. I don't care if it's buggy, by the way. It's just too pretty for me to care about that.

(http://c418.c4.ohost.de/host/images/opt1212526972t.PNG)

Dammit.

I think this game will be worthwile if you add more stuff (outside the compo of course)

Thank you, reetva!

Yeah, as with my last compo entry, I basically wrote most of the actual game stuff hours before the deadline. I gotta stop doing that :P

Well, first of all, the menu didn't show text, only white boxes.

When I got into the game, my truck got thrown into the stratosphere by some random spastic thing. Then I saw one of the creatures.

It had a lot of atmosphere in terms of graphics and sound, but I couldn't really play it. Also ran very slowly. Might be a problem with my graphics card.

Which card do you have, Melly?

All I get is a title screen which doesn't seem to respond to input.  After a while it exited.

NVidia GeForce 4 MX 4000

Woah. I was trying to grab a medium-sized...thing that was garbled up in some kind of mush with other smaller things and suddenly the whole thing just fritzed out and shot into the sky. There they disappeared and got counted towards my score.

Haha yeah, the constraints in the physics engine bug out once in awhile and go completely crazy. Just pretend that didn't happen :P

I kept feeling like I wanted to hear the little things walking around screaming. Nice.

I dunno what to say - I really liked a lot of things about this game, but it's way too buggy for me to really judge yet. I get the same "white box" thing Melly does (I've got an old laptop integrated ATI card), and the very first thing I did in the game sent my little car flying in the air never to return :(

I hope you can fix some of the bugs soon! I really want to play this properly :)

I found no bugs at all. The PG content is amazing and the creatures are damn spooky!

The game, though, I found quite annoying. Sorry. It's very hard to grab the creatures; I found it much easier to just run over them and go backwards so that they're pushed in the right way. This doesn't always work, though.

You have a fantastic framework there, but right now it's lacking good gameplay. I'm looking forward to seeing any development ;D

Aww MAN! Toastie. Look, the creatures? They're awesome. Eerie and organic and cute and bewildering.I love seeing them in action.

But, ze game, she is broke. Scratch the forklift- it's slow, and finicky, and dull. Replace it with a UFO. With a tractor beam. Or a mutate ray. Or a grabby arm. Something which allows exploration and observation over... gameplay? It doesn't even have to control particularly well, just enough to let one zip over the creatures and get a good look.

(http://realnoyb.googlepages.com/BiocosmBug.jpg)
One of my specimens refused to be beamed up. :(

I love the atmosphere. When the physics engine works well, the feeling of dragging these tortured, insane creature unwillingly to their doom is amazing. But there's too many times when it feels like the claw didn't have enough friction, nor the wheels enough torque to handle all the creatures.

This can happen to :)

(http://data.fuskbugg.se/skalman01/----------------------------------------hehe.JPG)

Otherwise it was fun, I liked the physics and how when I tried to pull a big one towards the beam he struggled to get loose. Felt kinda guilty, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

I like the idea. It looks sweet, the creatures are cool, but he game seems fundamentally broken. I either end up with a creature that is impossible to grab, or I get flipped over by some creature bugging out. I bet it'd be hard to fix, too. Great concept though  :P

I tried playing this on two different computers, and neither worked very well. The first computer has a fairly decent ATI Radeon 9600 with up-to-date drivers, 1GB of RAM and some sort of AMD Athlon processor that runs at like 1.6 or 1.8 MHz. The game loaded up fine and I could see the menu. However, once I started, the game consistently ran about a tenth of a frame per second. The second computer has an Intel 82865 Graphics Controller with only 64 MB of video memory, only 240MB of RAM, and a Pentium 4 processor, 2.4 GHz. When I started the game on this computer, the menus had the feared white blocks about them. After starting, the game actually ran at a pretty decent framerate. Eventually I ran into memory problems though, and had to put her down when I tried opening up the thread to get game instructions.

What a shame... the game looks so great! :-[

Wow! Thank you for your feedback, guys!! The game IS broken, unforunately as I had very little time to work on it after writing the creature code, most of which was spent balancing the forklift's torque, friction and speed parameters to a point where you can actually drag them around. I will definitely make updates to it when I have some free time.


The original idea actually was a UFO, but a car was actually easier to implement using the physics engine and I also thought that it might be more fun to have physical interactions with the creatures. I think in the end it might be cool to have both options. If I finish this, i'd probably make you a humanoid and make you able to get into the car or the UFO.

I'm sorry it doesn't work on my computer :'(
The opening screen takes two minutes to display anything, then I see a menu but nothing happens when I click "new game"
I have vista and a shitty integrated graphic cards (ATI x1250).
That might be the reason. Or maybe you used some old red army punchcards to code the game?

[EDIT] Okay, the playing screen finally appears but it's frozen, what are the controls anyway?

Got another small feedback; wouldn't be easy to add some extra blocks to the arms so that the creatures will be easier to catch?

so instead of:
-----.
      |
      ===
      |
-----'

it looks like:

  -----.
 /      |
        ===
 \      |
  -----'

Doesn't work well for me either, with a Radeon x1400 Mobility, 1.83Ghz Core 2 Duo and 3GB ram. Getting a really slow frame rate, far below 1FPS.

Ive got basically the same stuff as seregrail7, cept 1gb ram & 2ghz core duo. The game is incredibly slow. A shame too, I wanted to try it out.

The game runs at a decent rate on my PC
(3ghz Pentium D, 2gb RAM, VistaHP32)
But I also think the forklift is a little flawed. I'd like to see a flying vehicle with an altitude-adjustable grabber, like one of those toy-grabbing machines in arcades (and Toy Story)
But loved the creatures. Reminded me of Soda constructor. And the background visuals are Lush, but occassionally a little too sparse.

Oh, and I get the white boxes >_<

I made a little update to it, so it should run better and hopefully this will get rid of the white boxes issue

It gets my vote just because I love seeing those Karl Simsesque creatures struggle so desperately against my manly pincers.

I kinda wish there were more per level, and that the terrain were a bit more varied.

Impressive aesthetics. I really got into the game because of that.

The controls felt a little awkward, but not frustrating in some physics-based games. Good job on that.

I didn't feel very compelled to pick all of them though...felt like hard work :).

The creatures twitching feels disturbing... nice job!

Very atmospheric!  I like the soundscape that accompanies the game and the thick feeling of the atmosphere.  I had quite a bit of difficulty with collecting specimens, though.  My cart got upended when I didn't release one of the specimens from my grasp and I couldn't seem to get some of them to catch with the pincers because they were so large and kept their moving bits low to the ground.  Still, a very interesting concept with great visual and audio design!
Cheers,
--Zack

I really hope you keep working on this. It's a really nice idea with a lovely aesthetic, and the creatures are genuinely creepy in the way that they move. It's a shame that the buggy doesn't really work, and is too easy to up-end, requiring a restart.

I don't know how viable this is, but how about turning into a kind of creature-collecting game? Change the creature generation slightly so that whey always have two arms to grasp with, and allow the player to switch to any of the creatures they've captured.

Not only did my second to last specimen fail to beam up, I had a previous creature that took a while to beam up. When it finally got high enough to count toward the total collected, one of it's legs was permanently frozen at the top of the teleport sector.

Because of this and other gameplay issues posted by others, I haven't been able to collect all the required creatures to complete the game, first level, or whatever else the game's goal is based on.

Sure, it's known that the game is broken, but I was so close.

The atmosphere, however, is good.