I'd like to leave here my congratulations to everybody who took part on this contest.
It is great to see so many cool game ideas and I'll definitely save some time to play all the entries.

Keep up the good work!

Viruses that possess more than one type of symbol may reproduce on more than one type of cell.

Is the reproduction rate related to the complexity of the virus?

Yes. Initially I thought it would be related only to the stats and/or abilities but using the complexity of the shapes makes it more interesting since you can recognize viruses that are more complex and more dangerous.

Movement: Should the viruses be controlled like a normal RTS by selecting and moving or should I go for a different movement scheme like positioning colored markers to move all viruses of the same color to the position of the markers?

Hmm.  What about the option of giving orders to each cell along the lines of (be aggressive/reproduce/do nothing)?  And let them figure out things themselves. 

All of the various entities do look quite large: is it a case that there's going to be a lot of scrolling about involved when you're playing the game?

Yes, it would be possible to give orders for each type of virus chosen by the player. I would certainly play it like that too.

About the scrolling and the entity sizes, the player will be able to control the zoom and hopefully he will be able to easily scroll around the map by using the mouse or the arrows keys. I'm finishing map generation and then I'll start playing with map sizes to discover what feels best.

[Optional:]

Thanks for the encouragement words

Finally got some time to work on this game again and I managed to finish the virus shape generator. Here is a screenshot showing some of the resulting viruses.

And this is a screenshot of my stress test just for fun :D

I also started working on the gameplay and I hope to make some advances towards a playable demo before the deadline. Meanwhile, I'll share some details on what I expect to do. First the basic elements:

• Maps are composed of cells that are impassable by viruses. These cells can be of three diferent types indicated by the symbol on their borders: square, triangle or circle.
• Viruses, as seen on the screenshots, may have some combination of these three symbols on their borders. Viruses possessing the square symbol may reproduce on square-type cells, viruses possessing the triangle symbol may reproduce on triangle-type cells and so on.
• Viruses that possess more than one type of symbol may reproduce on more than one type of cell.
• Viruses can attack each other by using different types of antibodies. The antibodies may vary in color (red, blue, green and yellow) and in type (square, triangle and circle).
• Antibodies do double damage to viruses possessing the same type. They also do extra double damage if they have the same color of the target virus.
• Antibodies that differ in types from the target virus cause no damage. Antibodies that differ in color from the target virus cause normal damage.
• Viruses have different stats like HP and movement speed and a passive ability that may include resistances to attacks, invisibility, area-effects, effects that activate when they die, synergies with other virus types, etc. The types of antibodies used by the viruses are different for each virus too.

Now the gameplay flow:

• A random map is generated with different proportions for each cell type. That means a virus type may be useless if there are few cells of the corresponding type for it to reproduce.
• A set of a few viruses (probably 1-5 virus types) is generated and used to populate the map. Difficulty level settings will affect this.
• The player may study the map and the viruses types and then choose a set of viruses(1-5 virus types).
• The game starts with the player choosing some starting cells for his chosen viruses.
• From this moment on the player may produce new viruses only by infecting new cells with his viruses that are on the map.
• Enemy viruses may reproduce by using the same process.
• The game ends when all player viruses are destroyed or when the player manages to destroy all the enemy viruses.
• Optional: The game ends with the player losing if too many cells are destroyed.
• Winning or losing the player receives a number of genetic codes of random viruses that can be used on the next games.
• After each game the player may research a number of new viruses by entering genetic codes. By using this feature, players may share interesting viruses.

Finally I'd like to know your opinions on the following:

• Movement: Should the viruses be controlled like a normal RTS by selecting and moving or should I go for a different movement scheme like positioning colored markers to move all viruses of the same color to the position of the markers?
• Active Abilities: Should the viruses have active abilities that can be activated by right-clicking them when you have enough [insert-mana-like-thing-here]? Example: by right-clicking a virus it can explode and cause massive area damage. My problem with this is that I won't be able to make the AI use these abilities efficiently. So the player will have some advantage but it can be compensated by making the AI have a greater quantity of viruses.

Feel free to comment on the other features and gameplay too.

Pandora is going to be a real-time strategy game featuring intercellular battles between viruses. Genetic sequences are used to generate viruses with different characteristics and abilities. The missions where the player battles infections using his own custom set of viruses will probably be procedurally generated too.

Viruses depicted in the shot above were generated by the current implementation of the virus generator using the genetic sequences shown below each virus. I'm currently working on the other two classes of viruses and then I'll start with the gameplay implementation.

More details coming soon.

[(SPOILER)]

These are my first level scores for the four modes:
Survival - 408 kills
Coin - 54 coins
Lightning - 28 seconds
Thor - 1003 kills 

Those are very impressive scores in Lightning and Thor mode. How did you manage 1003 kills in such a short period of time?


By the way, it's great to see all these positive responses. Hopefully that well translate into plenty of votes. 

It is all thanks to a complex strategy I developed specifically for the lightning mode. I prepared a screenshot showing the details of the strategy. Be aware that it may spoil the fun of reaching the 1000 kills barrier by your own merits.

The image is available (SPOILER) here (SPOILER).

Currently I have 40 stars and I'll certainly need new strategies to get the remaining ones.

I've been playing this game since the first version was uploaded and I just can't stop. I finally reached 100% game completion but I still want more stars and I definitely want to break the 1000 kills barrier

These are my first level scores for the four modes:
Survival - 408 kills
Coin - 54 coins
Lightning - 28 seconds
Thor - 1003 kills 


Congratulations for delivering such an awesome game!

UPDATE: YES! 1003 kills !!!!! 

I really good game we have here, congratulations on finishing it Farbs!

I got through levels 14-20 using the Defender ship against the Gauntlet ghosts. Mario + Goombas in some stages is a great combination too (mainly on those stages with chambers full of enemies). As a final note, I really really really hate the last Space Invader ship. Got pwned by it so many times that now I wait until the ships change to something less dangerous like the Arkanoid blocks :D (though I think I'm the only one who got killed as Link by one of these).

Have you changed the active configuration to Release for your project? That dll is only needed if you are compiling a debug version of the application.

You can change the active configuration using the configuration manager available on the build menu (Visual C++ Express 2008).

Thanks for the comments and for the bug report. I just experienced this bug and lost my first position with 1285 points 

I´ll work on it right now. Oh, and I´ll try to add an option to hide the highscore table.


Updated: Fixed the bug and included the requested option. Download the patch or the second version from the links on the first post.

Finished it !

Read the first post for download link and screenshots.

coding mantis - is that a marble madness I see? 

Oh yeah, that is Marble Madness (called Marble Maze on the TRS-80 version). Oddly that was the only version of Marble Madness I ever played. Recently I played Neverball that kinda reminded me of this fine game.

When the penguins reach a certain age they migrate to a secret place. What happens there is something incomprehensible even to the penguins themselves. That place is the Incomprehensible Penguin Arena! The place where penguins fight for no specific reasons, fishes and penguins fall from the sky and tens of leopard seals swim randomly while killing penguins that happen to be in their way.





I'm coding the game since March, 9th using C++/SDL. The gameplay is mostly finished and I'm currently working on a scoring system. I'd post a playable demo but currently I'm on a linux-only machine and I can't compile a windows version.


March, 23th Update!

I finally finished it after two weeks of work. I hope you all have fun with this simple little game. I tested in a few Windows XP machines but I couldn´t test it on Vista so I don´t know if it will work. I´ll be around for today so post here if you find any bugs so that I can try to fix it.

Screenshots:
Title Screen
Gameplay

Download link: http://jefrsilva.googlepages.com/IncomprehensiblePenguinArena_v2.zip (~5mb)

Patch for those who downloaded the file IncomprehensiblePenguinArena.zip:
http://jefrsilva.googlepages.com/IncomprehensiblePenguinArena_Patch.zip (~41kb)

- If the game does not run, try to install the Visual C++ Runtime (vcredist_x86.exe) included with the game.
- Read the included README for detailed instructions about the game

Now it is time to test some of the finished submissions 

Hi,

I´ve been reading TIGSource since November 2007 and thanks to the VGNG competition I finally reached the forums! My name is Jeferson, 27 years old, living in Brazil and currently trying to obtain a master´s degree in Computer Science. Now for some random info about me:


- These are the oldest games I remember playing when I was about 5 years old. They are Marble Maze and Karate. I miss my CP400 


- This is the first game I "downloaded". The game is Jack the Nipper(a great game by the way) and I got it by recording a radio program that transmitted the game.


- I never thought that the thing in the floor below was a cat. I always thought it was the damsel in distress :D


- This is my worst enemy. The merciless orbital station of doom!

I´d like to post some of my previous works but unfortunately I don´t have any of them right now. Most of my games were simple text-mode games for the MSX. I created some game demos for PC but I didn´t finish any of them and they got deleted. For some reason I stopped making games in 2004 and now I´m starting again. I´ll post my entry on the VGNG competition later.

Okay, I think this is enough for today. Nice to meet you all.