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Here is the finished entry attached below; artifical_nature_63.zip.  Got the .exe down to 64kb! 
NOW w/ Linux and Mac OS X versions (Intel-based MacOS supported only.);

http://iterationgames.com/artifical_nature_63__linux.zip (http://iterationgames.com/artifical_nature_63__linux.zip) [ 92k linux ]
http://iterationgames.com/artifical_nature_63_OSXmac.zip (http://iterationgames.com/artifical_nature_63_OSXmac.zip) [ 113k osx mac ]

http://iterationgames.com/artifical_nature_63.zip (http://iterationgames.com/artifical_nature_63.zip) [ 62k win ]

NEW 6/4/08: here is a lowPoly/tinnyTexture ver. for ppl with very old vid-cards or laptops, may better performance. I just reduced the poly counts and texture sizes to the lowest reasonable settings and changed the rendering to flat.  If you dig the  gritty/low-fi  aesthetics you may actually prefer this ver. http://iterationgames.com/artifical_nature_63_lowPoly.zip (http://iterationgames.com/artifical_nature_63_lowPoly.zip) [ 62k win ]

This is a single self-contained executable you may run it directly from the zipped folder, as it does not generate any files.

(http://iterationgames.com/ArtificialNature_menu.jpg)
(http://iterationgames.com/ArtificialNature_pauseScreen.jpg)
(http://iterationgames.com/ArtificialNature_gameplay.jpg)
(http://iterationgames.com/ArtificialNature_gameplay2.jpg)

The game is an abstract, organic themed, arena shooter. There is a 'base' in the center of the arena where the player spawns. When the badguys are destroyed they will often drop STARS. The player can collect a limited number or these and should deposit them to the central base,. when the base is 100 PERCENT FULL the game is won. However if the player is hit when not holding any stars the game is over. Balance is key. The AIs are a bit aggressive at times,. however once you learn their movement styles the game can be played to the end in a few minuets. The camera follows the player and when not fireing the player will move sorta' quickly, do be carefull not to go running into deadly creatures. It is often better to move slower and let the camera catch up and re-center. You may also use the pause screen to look around from higher up, this helps to plot your attack route. You can kill the Big Moma Bug but it is not easy.

There is a dialog at start-up that lets you set the res. as well as the  fullscreen/windowed mode.  The game supports 640x480, 800x600, 1024x768, 1280x800 or 1280x1024.
 
Controls are MOUSE to aim and ARROW or WASD to move about.  LMB is fire and RMB will depost a STAR into the 'base'.

Big huge THANKS goes out the Ville K. for making the ZGameEditor!  A very procedural generation oriented system,. and a danm fine game engine.  ;D

a short low-fi video;
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ma9G5M3nvE

Gameplay HINTs: 

-don't drop of ALL your STARS keep at least a few so you don't lose the game on a single hit!
-do drop of SOME STARS whenever you can!  If you get hit you lose 40 percent of what you are holding.  If STARS are in the base they stay there, safe, but you can not get them back.
-watch the screen edges,. try to keep track of what direction the spawning BIG MOMMA BUG is, as other bugs originate from there,. Use the SPACE BAR to PAUSE and relocate her if you are lost!
-hide behind trees but don't get caught up on them!
-if the 'dun dun dun' base sound is fast and bugging you shoot the BIG MOMMA BUG and it will reset,. .

That looks trippin' awesome! Keep going with it, dude.

Looking mighty fine. Can't wait to see some gameplay come out of those trippy procedural patterns.

I'm interested to see how this will develop...

thanks guys., here is an update of sorts., actually i got to play EverydayShooter for the first time yesterday when it came out on Steam,. and was intriged by the neet-o box towers in the backgound on the frist level,. so I started hackin in ZGE and came up with this.,  not sure how it will apply to my entry,. perhaps im just starting to design a positronic brain ?  AIs need new hardware options,. silicon is so uncomforatable you know. ichy..,

1280x1024 fullscreen,. i would post a screen image but it would be larger than this demo!  ;D

That demo is brilliant. I still have no idea how your game will play but if all else fails, it will always be damn pretty to look at. Keep up the good work!

I was really impressed with both demos, 'specially the first, which I found a bit scary actually...

ooh, scarry. not sure what is scarry about it?  but I have been accused of being 'dark' befor, so whatever,. i am not going to tell ppl how to feal about stuff, I just don't really intend it that way. oh well,.

here is an update!  I have been working with that grid of boxes bit from my last demo,. and instead of, as I first thought, making it some funky background, I am using it as the game field.  Still don't have a firm grasp on what the gameplay will eventually become,. however I am currently likeing its direction at this point.  I really need to get outside and catch some sun,. so I am going to bike over the the liquor store for some sake or perhaps a bottle of tequila,. is all dry here.   

-this demo is 1024x768 windowed by defult, but you can get it fullscreen if you run it with -f 
-the only controls are the mouse and the LMB and RMB to manipulate some stuff,. also pressing the SPACE bar will regenerate the level,. it uses 3d perlin noise so it gives a nice organic layout each time,. and seems to produce nicely ballanced levels.
-my thinking on the gameplay is that it will be a 'light' stratagy game,. I am seeing a mix of action collecting of the red 'berries' for a resource.., with a stratagy managment element of the player growth of units,. or pieces (these are not present as of yet,. ) to take over the 'board'.

The atmosphere of the latest demo is awesome.

Evil-Ville - thanks, we all about atmosphere! actually some fun gameplay will emerge,. or i keep tellin myself that,. I do like the feel of it so far, .  and it's early still.  ,see what tomorrow brings.

ps; I lov your avitar is that yours,. or a rip from some game i dont remember ?

Ok here is a little update,. it don't look like much, however a lot has been worked out under the screen level of it,. . i.e i have reworked and organised the code and now have a good base to work forward.  As well it is now a 'playable' game ;)

 -you can place your own objects (green) with the LMB,.
 -the RMB still zooms out (for no other reason than i thought it was cool, could be of future useage..,) 
 -and SPACE will reset the game, generating a new random/organic field.
 -press Z key to deleat stuff,. but thats cheating!  ???

you can try to overtake the dark in-organics with your green organic pieces,. the next step in dev.ing this will be to devise a limit to your seed supplies and a way to generate more,. as well as some limits for the other side.  I am happy with it so far, as I din't really have a design when i started and am just leting the game emerge from experimentation it is interesting to work with,..

Already it's pretty neat and has made it's way onto my list of "games to look out for from the PG comp." The ambiance was really cool, as was the way the collection of seeds had an "organic" feel to them. They're growth patterns weren't rigid calculated ones; in addition, you could see the particles moving between the blocks, giving the impression that more was going on and increasing the "organic" feeling of the game.

Oh, yeah, the effect as you look around is really cool.


Next are some things that are in need of improvement. I'd say that, at its current state, it's begging for a fast forward key. That would make it easier to try new stuff and probably speed testing for you, once it was consistent.

In terms of the way the seeds currently battle for territory, it seems to resolve in a stalemate too often. It takes a lot of particles (I counted around 10, could easily be wrong though) to make it a productive seed, but only a couple enemy particles to destroy it. This makes the gameplay get stuck at certain points.

As a final tip, the game window went offscreen for me and I couldn't move it or resize it - thus, I was stuck with an invisible row of dark blocks. Oh well.



Great project so far, I'll be watching this one. Code on! :)

well I had to trash that first attempt and fell back on my old fav. the arena shooter.  I think it came out quite nicely,. even though I lost the first week working on a game that was totaly different,. perhaps I will get back to that one later and finnish it. 

I rewrote the top post and the finnal game is attached there.

Well, it's certainly really interesting and quite challenging. I still haven't been able to beat it, but the game as a whole is pretty solid.

However, besides the graphical and sound resources, how exactly did you make use of procedural generation? Every round was pretty much alike, and I think a bit of variation on the types of enemies or the arena you face each time could have improved it.

Still, a very nice game overall. Looks damn pretty too.

Ending was a bit of an anticlimax ("d" isn't in that word...), but it kept my interest enough to play it three times until I beat it. I liked the mechanics, especially the Sonic-like collectibles as health, and how you reward concentrated fire on those medium-sized enemies. I was going to complain about the camera but checking the game again it seems like the camera only works well on the default 800x600 resolution. On a higher resolution, the camera constantly centered my on the edges of the screen. Impressive filesize.

Melly- the whole thing is proceduraly generated,. excepting the font.
that is to say, no bitmaps where created by hand and imported,. they are drawn using functions at the start. No sounds are static .wav files, they are based on synth perameters and sysnthesised in real time., and the 'music/noises' react in ways caned mp3s can't,. the models are all created as the game executes by iterating transformations of primitives "after the software executes, rather than before."  The level is a generated pattern, of generated trees, on a generated background. 
 No there is no vast generate maze, or thousands of random string names for NPCs,. those just didn't fit this games style and design.  Yes you COULD use PCG to make the creatures different each instance,. however I liked the ones I designed and choose to focus on refining the gameplay to something I enjoy.  As far as variations I was planing to do a few levels such as this one,. each with different creatures, backgrounds, and play styles. sorta everyday shooter style but with my own art astetic.  Not sure I will have time to do more on it for a while though.

Noyb- glad you had some fun with it,. I think i will leave the typo in!  thanks for ponting it out though., im an awfull speller and my fingers have a tendency twords randomness at times,. . must be the mad cow,.
 I am not sure what you are saying about the camera?  the resolution don't have much to do with it, I designed it in 1280x1024,. I am actually quite suprised it works well in all those rez. as the aspect ratios are not the same,. the mouse is always limited to 4x3,.  there is a bit of random movement to the camera as well, and if you move too quickly you will indeed have a tougher view (be closer to the screen edge -dangerous!) as the camera re-centers slower,.. I was trying to balance a scrolling view with the mouse aiming,. while not having the camera directly conected to the player,. as that is too stiff.

Great! I also liked the stars acting as shields, and the enemies are really hot. The first few times I played I actually thought they were different each time, but that was purely because I died before I saw the big thing with the shield :)

Thanks Shrimp. I think there is enouph randomness in it to keep it fun,. more in the emergent style of gameplay with the AIs,.  I had planed on actualy adding the 'sonic' style stars flying out of the player when hit,. however in the end I thought it would make the game to easy,. and time just ran out! 3 week aint' a long production run eh. perhaps I will try adding it later and see,. . sometimes you gotta try things to know for sure how well they will work. peace.

Addicting game, though kinda tough :)

Very cool. It sorta reminds me of screenshots of Spore.

I think this is the first game I tried that used fully generated art assets. The irony is, the better that your art generation algorithm is, the less likely anyone will notice how clever it is.

And you easily win the "most intense main menu" award.

I like this quite a lot. It was hard at first, but once I got the hang of it I was shootan like a pro. I do agree that the ending is a tad anticlimactic though.

Thanks guys,. The 'ending' is just there for the compo. added so the game had some form of closure. It was just as it looks, tacked on, literally at the last min. Time just ran out on this,. and I wanted to have a ver. that was somehow 'done' or at least had and end point, where I would have liked to have the next section.  I may go on with this and do several more 'levels' with different backgrounds, creatures, and various gameplay,. Currently I'm doing some tests to generate more interesting soundscapes,. and generative music, however time is always an issue.

Very nice entry, and very good use of PGC.
I didn't see the difference with reseeding but it wasn't really necessary anyway, as the "procedurally generation" part of the contract is already achieved.
A technical achievement here.
And seeing the rest of your games on your page, it seems that this competition was what you had been waiting for a long time :D

0rel - thanks for the feedback and insights! Yup its all just 2 meshes for everything, a thing I call a 'pod' that is just a 21x2 tiangle mesh that forms to two points and a 5x2 sided tree trunk one that is warped so one point is farther from the center,. i.e it is taller,.  I just used iterators, or loops, in the rendering to do transformations of these,. changing colors and warping the meshes as needed,. from a distance it could look like sprites if you wanted,. as for the collitions everything in this game is done with sphears. Even though the dragonflys are not 'round' there is only a ball of collition checking,. with the speed of the shots,. and the simplicity, it looks fine to me,.

find the attached model viewer,. I may add something like this to the game eventually,.

Adding some noise is a great idea,. I will try that for future games,. I was really not going for realism in any way and just imagined the blobby back drop was some misty vortex,. not meant to look like much,. just something so movement registers,. basicly same for the 'trees'.

your gameplay insights are interesting too,. I will consider them,. I think the balance of player to badguys is very important,. and the player does move much faster then most,. only the flys are almost as fast as the player,. but they only take one shot to get rid of.  The speed change when shooting is really more of an increase of inertia so it is more smoothed out,. but over a second or so you should notice a much higher top speed when not shooting!

I also like your sound comments perhaps we can chat some time about posible collaboration as i see many similar interests.  my music and sound design tends to come out 'darker' it seems.

Moi- yes I do have a tenedancy to get the computer to do some level design and I do like the iterations that are much easier for machines to do than me.  Most of the techincal acheivment is down to Ville K. and he really is my partner in this game,. and all the ones I have done with ZGE, as he created that fine tool/engine. 

After playing it some more, I wonder if you could make it so that stars that are expanding and about to disappear are worth more than a normal star, like 2 or 3 stars. It would allow the player to play with the risk of losing stars while trying to grab more at once. The feedback from grabbing a large star is also very large, so it would fit. Let me know if it's already like this, cause it's a bit hard to tell since the game doesn't tell you how many stars you're carrying besides your vessel growing spikier.

Since what seems to define how good you are in the game overall is how fast you can fill your base to 100%, perhaps create a highscore list with the best times?

thanks for playing some more Melly,. and the good suggestions!  I had thought of the power up buisness, however did not add it, as that is the exact same mechanic jon used in everyday shooter.  It still workes as is as a pressure hightening mechanic since when you see them start to peek, you know you only have three seconds till they gone. and if its a group of em it looks like a bigger loss.

as far as a scoring system. that is most likely the the last thing I would ever add to a game, if at all. I am not a big fan of playing for a score,. altohugh I do find it fun in games like ZicZac or KRYSTA,. I am more about geting to the end,. or just winning the game, I will consider this though as it is likely a good idea, just not my focus.  thanks again.

I think this would be a lot better if the camera followed the cursor or at least had the option to do so.

Thanks qoouep that is was a great suggestion.,  :beer:
 I roughed it in,. and it seems like it will work much happy. It is a mix of the follow-camera chasing the player, and also the pointer, to differing degrees,. I need to smooth out those limits I had to add to keep the player from going off the screen,. however, having the camera aim with the player's cursor does seem to work better.,
 the attached is a sample, but it is messy, and too rough,. and don't look at my startings on level two, that is even more unfinished!  oh, windowed 1024x768 only!

I had a real good time with this. Managed to get to 75% before finally giving up. My main problem is that I was spending a lot of time mournfully gazing at my 360 pad and wishing I could use that instead. Mouse + keys is all very well but the amount of readjustment due to player movement makes aiming hard - haven't tried the version with the new camera, which sounds like it will fix things.

Also second the motion on the fading stars - I actually convinced myself they were worth more for a few minutes before realising the truth. Regardless moving over them was very difficult because of the key movement.

The difficulty was just right for me - starts off fairly tame but gets pretty hectic to the point where you're just leaving stars all over the place because they're too risky to get. Using stars as a shield is a great idea, but the visual feedback on how much shield / how many stars left could be made clearer. At the moment one has to strain a little to see the blue ovals.

I also liked the way the bullets could be shot. It makes it possible but risky to just take things head on. Good times, thanks jph!

edit: ah and props for the filesize. pretty incredible art and sound for a small file size!

my fav entry so far, good job man, not as fastpaced as i liked but i started playing, and I look outside and its dark now.

Hard as tho, but in a good way  :-*

thanks haowan, yeah I am fairly stocked about the new camera system, should improve overall playablity,. just gotta find time to work on it,. if you have a 360 controller then you must try my game designed for one;  http://iterationgames.com/gyoza_360contoller.zip its a single level so far but a good one! 
 I would love to have 360 controller support in ZGE!! If anyone has experiance implemeting it, and knows a bit of pascal,. then head on over to zgameeditor.org and contribute to that great open-source freeware game creation tool!

and gnome I think the gameplay speed/action will pick up on a later level,. I am still coming to grips wil implementing what I want in ZGE,. I came from GM and was spoiled by all the given math functions,.  so if i find the time,. I will get it to where I want it to go.  peace.

Very aesthetically pleasing, and very polished controls... I think I can see the love put into this game :)

The gameplay felt a little dull after a couple of minutes, though. Sometimes I even felt like being able to aim with the mouse was unnecessary (maybe it's me).

Thanks for this game!

I love the graphic style and the fact that its so small yet I can't help but feel there should be a real random element to the game to keep it fresh and surprising with each play.  Not only cause of the spirit and general reason for the compo but given that the game could benefit from random placement and other random yet of course controlled elements that would make the game more exciting.  Randomly placed trees, random amount of stars given from enemies, randomly placed "base", random enemies and more would really work for this game and I'm puzzled why you don't see that.  Oh well still a cool game and impressive use of PG graphics and sound.

Daniel - thanks,. yeah, it is just a simple game currently,. I had hoped to add a bunch more stuff but time being limited, I had to stop there,. I will add to it though, time permiting.

jbrodack2008 - Procedural Generated Content is NOT equal to Random Element.  I have said that a few times now on these boards talking about my game and the games made by others,. as a few of you seem somehow confused by this,. you CAN use PCG to create randomly tweeked content, however this is not the only way to make stuff using these tecniques.
 As far as the use of randomness in my game, there is loads,. not sure why you don't see it. I did make an attempt to balance Game Design with Random PG elements however,. .  The bitmap parts for the trees and background are uniquely created for each tree, the trees are randomly placed/sized/rotated/animated the bad bugs are randomly placed, and the AIs that contol them are state machines, that randomly move between states creating some complex behaviours and proceduraly generating a vast array of movements and patterns,. many more than I could have hoped to create by hand. The results of blasting a bug is random as well, some times you get nothing, sometimes more bad guys, some times Stars.  Hope that helps. Peace.

from the comp announcement thread:
"The theme of the game is PROCEDURAL GENERATION, with an emphasis on generating new content every time the player starts the game.

Procedural generation, or procedural content generation, is a term to describe the creation of content algorithmically "on the fly" (i.e. after the software executes, rather than before).  In video games it is generally used to either generate "random" content (like graphics or levels), or to reduce file size.  This competition is focused on the former, but you may choose to apply the theme however you see fit."

so the spirit of the compo seems to be for things to be new each time you play it.  I know PG doesn't have to equal random and even the compo rules recognize that. I'm familiar with PG to reduce file size with kkrieger being a famous example.  But I just think most are expecting PG to be used for random elements given the compo description.

However, thanks for pointing out the random elements of your game.  I'll admit I hadn't played enough to be able to be sure about the more subtle random elements. It probably would have appeased people a bit if you had pointed out the random content in the detail you had just given me earlier or added it to the first post in the thread.

Anyway I really DO like your game and look forward to possible new updates.  I guess after playing some of the other games I expected the PG use to be as obviously random as some of the other games in the compo.  Still it seems some of my "ideas" you had already implemented regarding random content. 

Sorry to make it seem like I was saying there is something wrong with your game for not being random enough.  I was basically posting to all the thread of my favorite compo threads saying what I liked as well as what I'd like to see changed in the games. I'll admit I was wrong in that there are random elements to your game.  anyway you did do a great job on your game and it just seems the PG is used more subtle in your game than others. 

I'm very impressed with what you were able to do as far as the art, sound, etc, with just 64K.  Very cool indeed!   :beer:
I toyed around with a similar movement scheme some time ago for a top down shooter that I was going to call "Zombie Popper!"  It takes a little getting used to, but I think it works nicely.
Cheers!
--Zack