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[LiquidAsh]

MADRIS ( Original Link / English Translation )

Finished Game: Windows Instructions: Place falling rooms so your sims can walk to a room that satisfies their needs.  Your sims have five basic needs, that can be met by rooms with a corresponding color: Mm-Kitchen (orange), $$-Garage (green), Zz-Bedroom (blue), :)-Commons (purple), and PP-Bathroom (yellow).  Once your sim's most urgent need is satisfied, all of the connected rooms in that layout are removed from the screen.  Each level has a unique objective that when met, unlocks a unique reward.  There is also an arcade mode that allows you to play for high scores rather than to unlocking new levels and rewards.  Thank you for checking out MADRIS.  Enjoy! Progress: June 28th: What a great competition!  I'm hoping to make this a Tetris + Sims style mashup: Arrange falling rooms and hallways so that your sims can get to the rooms necessary to satisfy their various needs.  The plan is currently to use Game Maker (based on the amount of time I'll be able to put into this over the next month).  Having said that, I am a bit concerned about using a tool that doesn't support recursion.  Live and learn, right? June 29th: Finished putting together several graphics, and about to start implementing some functionallity.  On the top of my list is to randomly group pairs of rooms (without blocking doorways), and then allow the player to position them tetris-style. June 30th: After getting random pairs of rooms to spawn without blocking their doors, I realized that dropping pairs of rooms together is too cumbersome.  Lining up the doors is hard enough with a single room at a time.  It took a bit of time to get the rooms rotating without losing alignment (GameMaker doesn’t support floating point sprite centers and my sprites all have even widths).  Random rooms are now spawning and dropping with the help of the player’s guidance.  I also have sims populating some rooms now, but all they can do is patiently sit in there.  Next up: path-finding for the sims. July 1st: The path-finding now seems to be working.  Once a path is found, I need the sim to follow that path to the target room, and then clear all of the connected rooms.  Once I get this working, I’m going to revisit the sizes and shapes of the rooms (primarily to make them smaller). The debugging info in this screen includes: unconnected doors (black circles), doors connecting rooms (red circles), and the path that the sim should follow to get to the room that will satisfy their current need (red line). July 2nd: The sims are now running around clearing rooms, and it’s starting to feel like a real game (fun!).  I’m really enjoying the tetris/pipe-dream matching mechanic, and hope that fleshing out the sims’ simulation will only make it more engaging.  I probably won’t get much time to work on this over the holiday weekend, but resizing/redrawing the rooms is next on my list, prior to fleshing out the sims and developing some fun sim-objectives. July 5th: I updated the room sizes and shapes.  I also broke the rooms down into 20 different furniture pieces that the player will earn while playing.  I replaced the old doors with doorways that light shines through upon connection.  20/20 of the sims are animated to walk around, and there can be multiple sims in a level at once.  Next up: breaking the game into levels with specific objectives, implementing the in-game hud, and adding music and sound effects. July 6th: I did a bunch of testing today that resulted in finding and fixing a relatively rare multi-sim induced bug.  I also found some music that I think will suit the game well.  It’s composed of beat-box samples, and I think it will go well with the sounds I’m planning on having the sims make. July 7th: The game now includes a next-piece preview, music, and a MADRIS icon.  I also optimized the room linking and path finding, so they only run when necessary.  These additions along with a few release-hacks facilitated the release of the first public demo.  Please post your reactions below. July 8th: Per forum feedback:  Room types are now selected using a 5x random bag method, rather than generating each room’s random type independently.  Also, room positions can now be adjusted by a couple of grid cells after touchdown. The arrow keys can now be used as controls too. July 9th: Almost finished with the level select and sim select menus.  I just need to display the sims stats on the selection screen.  This should lead nicely into finishing up the in-game hud, and then implementing the various levels’ objectives. July 12th: Finished displaying sims’ stats in the sim selection menu.  Implemented the HUD, along with pause and lose in-game menus.  The sims' stats are now affected by rooms dropped and needs satisfied.  Their needs are no longer randomly generated, and they no longer spawn in rooms that satisfy their immediate needs. July 15th: I’ve been playing with and tweaking the sims’ stats quite a bit.  I also rewrote names and objectives for all fourty levels.  The first ten objectives are implemented.  There’s also a win-menu to display which reward you have earned, and to guide you back to the level select screen.  Next up: create a save game system, and implement progress and objective checks for the last thirty levels. July 19th: You can now save and load objective-based games or play an arcade mode.  It’s finally time for an updated demo. July 26th: Added mouse controls to menus, along with little furniture particles in the background.  I also revised some of the menu font colors, and added next/back stoplight icons.  The unlockable furniture is now colored, and the base-rooms include the old furniture outlines.  This makes the rooms much easier to identify at the beginning of the game, when no furniture has been unlocked. July 27th: I just finished the in-game tutorial level.  It turned into a kind of puzzle mode, that the game really isn’t very well set up for code-wise.  If there’s enough interest, maybe a puzzle mode like this could be a more prominent feature of MADRIS2(?).  I won’t be able to submit this as a finished game over the weekend, so I’m trying to wrap up the sounds and final testing and touch-ups within the next two days. July 28th: I just added sounds and the about information, and made a few other relatively minor tweaks.  It doesn’t look like I’ll have any more time to work on this between now and the contest deadline, so I’m calling it a game.  I’m happy with the progress I’ve made over the last month, and am looking forward to hearing more reactions to MADRIS!

Cover: Latest Screen:

[N. Crayon]

This was one of the other carts I really liked the look of. Your ideas and mine are a little different, though- I'd not thought of tetris + sims. I'm looking fowards to seeing how this works out!

[Melly]

That's a really interesting and potentially challenging concept to pull off. Hope you can make it work!

[Nugsy]

This one caught my eye too, but you beat me to it! Haha.

I realise there is a no dibs rule, but i think it's going to be way cooler if everyone makes a game using ideas from a different cart.

Good luck in the comp LiquidAsh!

[naroui]

Seems really interesting, I'm really keen to see how this turns out

[Inanimate]

How's your progress on this one?

[Nugsy]

Nice! I love the simplistic style.
Can't wait to see more of this.

Are you going to make the houses have multiple floors?

[LiquidAsh]

Well there are stairs, but otherwise I think it's going to be up to the player to imagine which rooms are up versus down stairs (or split layer).  I am however planning on including multiple "levels".

[LiquidAsh]

It's becomming clear that I'm going to need to change the sizes of these rooms.  I started with the cart-image dimensions, but think it will be much more fun and less frusterating with smaller rooms.  This will be next on my list after I finish path-finding for the sims (which I now have 18 of).  I think I've figured out a good way of teasing some recursion out of GameMaker, but I should soon know for sure.  This should make the pathing so much easier.

Also, I just came across this 25th aniversary of Tetris piece today: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/5876/alexey_pajitnov__tetris_past_.php

[miconazole]

Interesting concept. I take it the rooms aren't going to disappear when you line them up?

[LiquidAsh]

Interesting concept. I take it the rooms aren't going to disappear when you line them up?

My current thinking is that when a sim makes it to the room that fullfills their current need, the entire collection of connected rooms will be cleared.  For instance if a sim is hungry, you need to arrange a path for them to reach the kitchen.  Once they can, that sim will run into the kitchen, causing all of the connected rooms to be cleared.

[feeblethemighty]

I am fully intrigued by this game.  Good luck!   

[LiquidAsh]

I just uploaded the first playable demo of MADRIS!  Beside the lack of menus (one execution = one game), there are no sim-stats or level progression in this demo.  All that this demo really shows off are the basic room-dropping and sim-satisfying mechanics.  Please let me know what you think!

[njm1992]

It's a great concept and the gameplay is also good... But...

TOO MANY GARAGES!



Perhaps you could use something similar to the Random Bag that Tetris uses?

More info here: http://tetris.wikia.com/wiki/Random_Generator

So far I'm loving your game

[yokomeshi]

Awesome!  Looks like it'll be a great game, especially once you've got the sims acting in more complex ways.

Couple of minor suggestions: first, sims probably shouldn't be generated already in the room they want, e.g. a sleepy sim in a bedroom.  That might be moot when you redesign their desires, though.

Second, in Tetris and such games, there's usually a brief period between when a piece "lands" and when it locks in place, allowing you to slide it around and get it into position - you can slide a piece under an overhang, or off of a ledge you inadvertently touched.  That might be nice to implement here.

[oyog]

This is a brilliant concept!  Who knew Tetris mashups could be so good!  First it's S.T.A.C.K.E.R. and now this!

...in Tetris and such games, there's usually a brief period between when a piece "lands" and when it locks in place, allowing you to slide it around and get it into position...

I second this.


The music is FANTASTIC, by the way.

[LiquidAsh]

Thanks for the great feedback and encouragement everyone.  I’ve just updated the demo to include changes based on your comments.

@njm1992, The garages do tend to be the most difficult pieces to clear, but you bring up a great point (and accompanying link, thanks!).  I was actually wondering whether many Tetris implementations did anything like this.  After implementing the random bag selection, I realized that it highlights a prominent difference between MADRIS and Tetris.  In MADRIS, you are often waiting for a certain room to satisfy your sim.  Much of the challenge comes from building layouts without burning bridges while you wait.  So evenly cycling through pieces generally shortens the wait, and takes some of the tension/fun out of the game.  In Tetris, many players may wait for a long piece to score a Tetris, but even while they are waiting, the pieces they place change the values of what pieces follow.  For now, I’ve expand the random bag to include 5 of each piece instead of one.  This seems to be a good balance, although I’ll definitely need to revisit the issue as the sim-objectives fall into place.

@yokomeshi, I agree that we’ll have to wait to see whether generating sims in rooms that satisfy their needs will work with the in-development sim-objectives.  The advantage of leaving them in is that connecting them to an existing layout is a quick and easy way to clear rooms.  Either way, I can see some advantage to at least throttling how often this happens.

On your second point, it was actually possible in the last demo to slide a tile as it landed but it was a bit dependent on the timing (ie, out of the player’s control).  There was also an unintended, but interesting effect that accelerating a piece down would allow you to consistently slide your piece.  However, it was of course more challenging to control at this speed.  Having said all of this, I just implemented a reliable slide, and it’s a big improvement.  Thanks for the suggestion

@oyog, I hadn’t heard of S.T.A.C.K.E.R. before, but it certainly is an interesting Tetris mashup.  Thanks for pointing that out.  Also, there aren’t any credits in the demo, but I should give credit where it is due on the music by Kevin MacLeod.  I really like the Beat-Boxy sound, and think it will nicely compliment some of the sim-sounds that I need to record.

Again, big thanks to all of you.  I’m looking forward to getting some more features out to all of you ASAP, but in the mean-while, keep the feedback rolling.

[Melly]

I played the build on your first post for a bit. I like how the game handles (though I tried using the arrow keys first). The play area seemed pretty cramped, though.

[LiquidAsh]

Thanks for the feedback Melly.  I do need to get the arrows working.  I was putting off that event duplication task until the controls are finalized, but it now occurs to me, that I can probably just have those events fire off the WASD control events (I just updated the demo to include this).  As far as the room dimensions go, I purposely set that up to be easily adjusted.  I'm thinking about having differently sized areas for different objectives/levels.  Out of curiousity though, do you have any suggestions for how much bigger you'd like to see it?  Thanks again for the feedback.

[njm1992]

Okay, I'm finding this game quite addictive... everytime I'm supposed to work on my own game I say "I'll just play another round of Madris" even though there aren't any score or anything of that sort yet.

Something I might want to point out is, I didn't realise the gray pieces was hallways until I saw the game cart for the second or third time. I thought they were some kind of blockers to make it harder. It might just be me, though