A bit close to 'The Butler Did It', a game with almost the exact same description someone made for last weekend's Ludum Dare..

Wow!  Very impressive that he managed to put that together in just 48 hours.  I've been working on mine for three weeks on and off, and it looks like his murder generation system is a good deal more advanced than mine.

But unfortunately, I can't seem to run it;  the Windows port says it can't find the pixel format that it's looking for, and fails to create its graphics window, so I'm left staring at a boring console output window. 

[Procedurally Generated]

Yeah that's a nice idea but I'm not sure that's what everybody was thinking when talking about "procedurally generated".

Likely true, but it does seem to be what Derek intended, based on the initial description of the "procedurally generated" option:

Procedurally Generated - Everything (you can manage) is procedurally generated, from the text to the graphics to the music to the gameplay.  The player should expect a very different experience every time they play.

I guess one interesting way to go about this (that I plan on doing) is to have every procedural element of the game be generated based on a seed, which would be given by the player at startup. So the player can experiment with different seeds, or even use the same seed constantly and have the same experience if they want to.

I seem to recall that Chris Crawford's game "Guns & Butter" used this to generate the world.  The player typed in the name of the world he wanted to play in, and that string was used as the random seed to generate the world map, road network, resource allocations, etc.  Enter the same name again, and you'd get the same world back again.

I reckon that's a pretty awesome way to do it.  User provides the seed, and it's in a human-friendly format, rather than players having to note down a random integer in case they end up wanting to revisit a particular game instance.

From my point of view, if the game is just making a selection between a list of items which were explicitly created by the author, then that's random.  So for example, if the author created 1000 levels and the game randomly picks one of them, that's just randomness.

If, on the other hand, the author gave the game instructions about how to create a level, and if by following those instructions the game is capable of independently creating a level which the author has never seen before, then that's procedural.

Thanks for the comments, guys!

Yes, it's intended to be set around the 1890s, though I'm still having a bit of trouble nailing down a convincing writing style for that era -- for a procedurally generated game, it's turning out to demand a surprising amount of flavour text.

The other thing I'd like to have in the title is a sense that there's more than one story in the game;  that after you've played through once, the game will be ready to give you a new story with new characters and fresh events in a different location;  that's why I initially made "Incomparable Deductions of" the subject of the original title.

But you're totally right that it's almost unusably long..  Even I have mistyped it a couple times, so I can't imagine that anyone else would be able to remember the whole name for long enough even to type it into a Google search.

I suppose that I could just chop it, and use "Incomparable Deductions", or blatantly rip off the esteemed Mr. Doyle and call it "Elementary, My Dear", or something along those lines.  I'm going to have to think about this some more. 

I've been working on a murder mystery game in my spare time..  The computer randomly generates a classic 'locked mansion' dinner-party murder mystery, and then lets the player interview the party guests in an effort to work out whodunnit, when, and how.

Rather than use the Clue/Cluedo "process of elimination" mechanic, the deduction here is based upon examining the testimony of what each of the various suspects claims to have seen during the evening, but the player needs to keep in mind that the murderer is actively lying, and the other suspects have imperfect memories.  Eventually, there will be some traditional clue discovery as well.

So I put an early version of the murder mystery generation system up on my site a week or so ago, and needed to give it a name.  I was on a bit of a deadline to put it up on the site, and so went with the very first title that had come to my rather fatigued mind:  "The Incomparable Deductions of Police Constable Sir Nicholas Spratt". 

What do you guys think?  Too lengthy?

I've been playing for a little bit, and have really been enjoying Droid Assault, even if I haven't made it as far as those on the leaderboard. 

As a first-time player, here are the things I had trouble with:

I didn't figure out the meaning of the "Enemies" HUD element until partway through my third game.  If it doesn't mess with your layout too much, it might be worth changing the label to "Enemies Left"?

I couldn't find how many transfer points I had available until my third game, either, which kind of made it difficult to have a real strategy while playing.  I wonder if this would have been easier for me to find if the game had made a bigger deal of getting and spending these points.  Perhaps animating the pips up from the HUD and to the 'bot you're taking over, and down from the 'points' value when you earn a new pip?  Just something that would really draw the eye down to the transfer points HUD element whenever a pip was earned or spent.

And I didn't notice the arrow pointing to the exit and nearby enemies until just this very moment.  Lucky I did, though, because I was just about to ask for one.     Maybe the arrow can be brightened up a little, or have its hue changed slightly so that it doesn't get interpreted as meaningless visual sugar?


But very, very cool overall!  It does bring back fond memories of Paradroid, but with a very different spin on the concept.  I like it a lot!   

I'm all for Procedural and Bootleg. 

Yeah, and how they have a copyright notice on there about the "prancing horse device". I can only assume that refers to the logo, since I can see no prancing horse devices, and the Ferrari logo is nothing more than a clump of dark pixels in the image. Either that or it applies to a device we can't even see...

Yeah, for some reason, companies seem to like to refer to their logos as devices.  Another example is Coca-Cola's "Dynamic Ribbon Device";  the waving swath of white usually drawn beneath the textual Coca-Cola logo.

I wonder if it's some attempt to gain protection beyond standard trademark protection.. as if by calling it a "device" rather than a "logo" they think they can perhaps apply for a patent or something...  dunno.

Part of the reason is that you're totally biting my style, from 'Too Many Ninjas!'

I completely understand, and would like to assure you that this was unintentional.  I will most likely think of another clever acronym for T.M.I.

This might be too obvious (or too many syllables), but..

"Total Meltdown Imminent"?

At the end of the day, the final product is all that matters.  You'll get no free passes from the end-users based on whether there were limitations imposed on you by the tools you chose to use to make your game.

And absolutely the same is true of those who use hard-core programming tools/languages;  you don't get bonus points for doing things the hard way.


If you reckon you can get a result you'll be proud of with any particular tool, then by all means feel free to use it.   

I tend to agree.  In any creative endeavor, if the first thing that comes to a viewer's mind is the tool that the creator used, then that's a strong sign of low-quality workmanship. 

My opinion is that you shouldn't worry about what tools are considered okay or not okay to use.  At the end of the day, it doesn't matter.  Hide the telltale traces left by your tools as best you can, and make your creation smooth and beautiful.  That's what workmanship is all about.   

Hi, everyone!

I'm Mewse.  The avatar is me, when I'm hiding behind an acrylic ball.  Which is surprisingly frequent, actually.  Yay, contact juggling FTW. 

I started playing games on an old Apple ][+ far too long ago, and started programming when I was about twelve, first in BASIC, then in HyperCard, then in Pascal, then in C, and then in C++, almost entirely self-taught.  I've only ever taken one computer programming course -- introduction to C++, which I took at college after I'd already been programming in C++ on my own for about four years.  It was kind of an easy A, but they wouldn't let me skip the introductory courses.  In the end, I decided against the computer science degree rather than taking all the entry level courses.

The very first game I designed and worked on in C is now more than fourteen years old and won't even run on any computer made in the last five or six years, but it looked like this at the time:


These days, I've been writing small experimental vector graphic games in some of my spare time.  The way I see it, vector graphics means never having to apologise for your utter lack of pixel skills.      Those games and my development blog are over at http://www.vectorstorm.org/. 

Some of my more recent freeware games are:

The Muncher's Labyrinth (unholy love-child of Pac-Man and Rip-Off)


StarShot (a proof-of-concept music game)


Thunderstorm (an shooter in which the player controls a lot of different stormclouds simultaneously, defending themselves against insidiously cheerful other clouds)


I try to be good about making sure the things I make are all cross-platform enough to run under Windows or OSX or Linux.. but I've been kind of lazy about Linux. 

Anyhow, my current project is a murder mystery game which randomly generates its scenario every time you start a new game;  it's one of the more difficult things I've ever tried to do.  Algorithmic content seems to make everything a lot harder to implement, and much, much more difficult to debug.  But if I finish one game like this, it's sure to get easier in the future.  Right?  Right??

Anyhow, I've known about TIG for ages, and followed the main news page all the time, but have only recently started to wander into the forums;  I was a little startled to see how much activity there is, in here!  I'm looking forward to meeting and sharing ideas and techniques with everybody here!

Mewse