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[ananasblau]

Autonomous Planetary Research Individual 50 is my #onegameamonth for April 2013 2014 and it is an exploration game. The game one will be a mix of Waking Mars, Wayward and the most brilliant of all: Starseed Pilgrim.

Even though APRI50 got some unique features, there are a few similar games in the making: Isomer, Rimworld, Simplans (the DNA stuff is quite simple compared to APRI50).

You are playing Angelica Smith, highly trained scientist with a few biomechanic modifications, who was sent here as part of humanity's search for new planets to colonize.

After your arrival in orbit in a tiny hyperspace capsule, you have successfully landed on the planet. In a barren landscape, shaped by regular and unhealty rainfall you need to establish a base and start exploring.

You play on far away planet, collect things, place things, watch them grow and mutate and go on from there. The landscape will come to life with the help of your terraforming.

What will you find and will your mission be a success?

Story aside, this game is about terraforming. You get a selection for evolution kits which come with their DNA identifiers. Those DNA strings (you can give them your friends!) are being matched against properties like wether it will create liquid, fauna, flora or maybe a fireworks or honey. You place them on the map, a flora kit would create grass, re-appling it makes that trees, you get the idea. Placing a liquid would cause it run down the slopes, filling lakes and if you feel like placing honey you get a honey lake. APRI50 is taking those simple means you have in games like Minecraft to a whole new level of complexity and interaction. You are changing the face of the planet.

Tech specs:

• Lua, using LÖVE as an engine
• Desktop game for Windows, Mac and Linux. Mobile devices once LÖVE adds support
• Moddable (extensions can be added and changed)
• Has graph-based maps that look awesome and are quite rare in video games
• All In-dev screenshots
• Code will go here: https://github.com/TomK32/APRI50
• Roadmap
• facebook

The latest gif (use LICEcap, in case you need gifs for your own game):

[ananasblau]

In a document issued yesterday by the APRI Truth Commission, the public gets a glimpse of the destructive and merciless tools provided to APRI50 in 2049. Any of those Evolution Kit could destroy a small settlement and after that reproduce into a even more fearful weapon. The Truth Commission also stated that I has so far interviewed 320 surviving natives of APRI50's actions on their planet.

# Classified Information - For Authorised ARPI Personnel Only!

## Evolution Kits

Evolution Kits are devices and instruction for a rapid evolutionary
process essential for a terraforming process.

Developed by the APRI mother-corporation as a weapon in a "Scorched
Earth" scenario, the Evolution Kit has shown a great potential in
reversing the same scenario and for terraforming in the APRI Project.

Every Evolution Kit consists of a specialized quantum computer,
instructions and genetic algorithms to change the surrounding area into
almost anything. It is also self-replicating and especially for the
APRI Project the replication has been fitted with a subset of mutating
coroutines to adapt the consecutive Evolution Processes to the
environment provided.

## How to apply a Evolution Kit in 1 Easy step

The APRI's modified body can hold upto 10 Evolution Kits at one time.
An Evolution Kit can be set onto any surface to start a scan of the
surrounding resources. The Evolution kit will emit a blinking orange
light during this step.
Please note that the top side of the Evolution Kit should face upwards,
gravity is not a necessity for the Evolution Kit but proved to have a
positive effect on the processes executed by the Evolution Kit.
If the surrounding resources prove not to be sufficient the emitted
light will change into a constant red light.
Please note that in surroundings where colours cannot be distinguished
the scanning process is blinking, a failure is a constant light, while
a transformation in progress will increase/decrease its intensity slowly
in a 10 second cycle.
During the transformation process has succeeded the Evolution Kit will
be consumed and Mutated Evolution Kits will be produced within a
timespan no less than 10% and no more than 25% of the transformation
process.

[ananasblau]

In it's fourth year of investigation the APRI Truth Commission has issues following photographic artifact recovered from the 2049 APRI50 project recorder. On the image you can see the debug interface for branches of various destructive Evolution Kits. Each leaf represents a new mutation followed by a "score" which function and significance is yet unknown.

The Truth Commission also issued details on a text artifact found on old internet machines. The text, written in 2010, contains details on the algorithm that later turned into the base of every Evolution Kit. Apparently the algorithm was part of a game. No further details were stated on this game, the text artifact and how it came to play a vital role in the Evolution Kit.

[ananasblau]

The new 2130 APRI Truth Commission is issuing following document from the recovered project recorder of APRI50. The Truth Commission is taking this step in order to answer calls from the APRIisG00D movement to stop the Truth Commission's investigation and to stop pursuing the action of APRI50 as if they were a war-crime. The Truth Commission would like to emphasize that an over-whelming majority of historians not just from Earth but also from the Colonies and even alien scientist agree on the 2123 APRI Truth Commission's classification of APRI50's war-crimes.

# Classified Information - For Authorised ARPI Personnel Only!

## Terraforming - Quantum computing meets biomatter

The following document explains the computations most likely executed
during a terraforming process of an Evolution Kit.
Please note that quantum mechanics are used in the computing unit
and the biomatter storage is of a mutatable nature. Due to this the
computations executed by the Evolution Kit may vary greatly and even
fail.


## The interfaces of the Evolution Kit

The Evolution Kit has following co-routines:

* Markable
* Growable
* Transforming
* Scoreable
* Consuming
* Reproducing
* Liquifying
* Hardening
* Transparent

Co-routines are easily modifyable and extendable by the expirenced user,
please refer to APRI Document #25132 for detailed instructions.


## A Evolution Kit interface in detail

When plugging a interface to the Evolution Kit framwork a positioning
information must be provided as the co-routines of the Evolution Kit
won't be called simultaneously.

Every interface of the evolution kit must provide a `apply` method.
This method must accpet a `chunk` of data containing detailed binary
information of the previous results in the previous steps of the
Evolution Kit quantum computation.

The final computed chunk will be applied to the surrounding area,
required resources will be consumed and the biomatter processor will be
activated to create new, evolved versions of the evolution kit.

[ananasblau]

Screenshots aren't getting any sexier yet. But it's more about figuring out algorithms and tech than making nice things on the screen. Next up is finding the best way to modify the map based on the numbers you see in the screenshot.

Btw, I plan to go with a triangle map, just can find any other devlog here that did the same.

[ananasblau]

terribly slow progress these days. I'm trying to figure out the best way to store the evolution kits when the grow and change the map. The map is tiles as usual but the evolution kits are entities. Anyways, I got a first code design now and also a map. Tomorrow I'll start doing jolly interesting things with the evolution kit.

[ananasblau]

Evokits growing (not perfect yet) and once they stopped evolving they are dissassembled and merged into the map to become part of whatever is planted there next.

[DesTomate]

Seems like you have some pretty solid ideas behind your project. hopefully they will turn into something fun to play with! good luck!

[ananasblau]

Seems like you have some pretty solid ideas behind your project. hopefully they will turn into something fun to play with! good luck!

uh... fun. that one category I never score with my games... But I'll do my best!

ideas are solid and unique enough to make it at least an interesting experience.

[ananasblau]

Long time no see, here's a new animation. The code got a little more abstract making it a lot easier for me to add different terraforming mods. One mod turns it blue, another one green and they can even happen to the same evolution kit turning it into something green-blue-ish.

Next step would be to get "seeds" once an evokit has run through. And an inventory for those seeds.

[ananasblau]

So I added an inventory today. And a first attempt at a graphic representation of those evolution kits the game uses. Each kit has a quite unique DNA and those are the three ideas I have to represent them in an image.

The greyscale stripes doesn't care much info about what the evokit is capable of, the black/white carries information for each extension (growth, liquifying, fauna etc) on the kit, but kind of cryptic; and the last one uses colour (yes, I won't do it like this, I'd use stripes and dots for the colourblind).

I like the cryptic one the most, implementation might be some piece of work though.

Underneath the icons I already have a line with the DNA string and scores for each extension. information can't be clearer than that.

[ananasblau]

I haven't touched the icons yet, want to do a bit of gameplay first. And here we are. The player has four resources that are consumed when placing an EvoKit.

I also added a new EvoKit extension: Hardening will turn the surface into grey stuff, rocks.

The next extension will be an extractor so we can get a few of our precious resources back. And then it's suddenly a game!

[jO]

that looks crazy complicated.
Love it! 

[ananasblau]

that looks crazy complicated.
Love it! 

It won't have a learning curve like Dwarf Fortress, rather like Starseed Pilgrim. Place a few evokits, remember what sort of dna they had and what effect. I have a cross-breeding machine on my todo list to make those evokits even more exciting. A modest but long learning process to master the game, that's what I have in mind.

[ananasblau]

Just a technical update, I'm working on a port of mapgen2 to Lua.. Away with the boring square grid and enter polygons. After three hours I'm already halfway through the Map file but the delaunay library and the number generator might cost me a lot of time.

This is just a small cut from the original flash version of mapgen but I hope to reach the same level, with a strong zoom, for APRI50.

[ananasblau]

this whole mapgen2 and graph instead of grid is a laborious mess. But I'm close to actually render the graph.

[ananasblau]

So why am I still porting this darn actionscript library? I honestly don't know. But I'm almost through with it, see all the numbers in the screenshots, I want those but I don't want those nan values. So close.

[ananasblau]

I'm making huge progress. Admittingly the port of the delaunay/voronoi lib from AS3 to Lua still has some bug and will cause ugly points and faulty edges when I run and harmonize more than once, but for the first run it does work and I'm happy with that for now.



Here you can see those faulty edges:


And here with only one run, no faulty edges:


Edges are stupid so I filled the areas, there's something missing on the borders of the map, but actually that looks cool.


Next up is updating my nice transformation codes when you place a evolution kit, that was all for the grid and doesn't work anymore. Instead of changed the tiles in a grid the evolution kit will soon modify the center and corner points.

[ananasblau]

Now, the mapgen brought lakes and oceans and coastlines - except for the lakes that I will re-add later -  I won't need any and dropped the whole lot. Filled up the whole very nicely.

I also made the debug window much smarter (red polygon is where the mouse pointer is supposed to be), in 10 lines only   

On placing evolution kits: the scores are now being stored on the polygons and the next task is to actually do something with those values. What you see right now on the map is the biomes as defined by mapgen, that's nice, but far to simplistic for my idea thus the next steps are:

• Colour (which is just the backdrop until I do real fancy stuff and add proper entities) the polygons based on a combination of those new values, i.e. re-calculcate the biome after each and every time an EvoKit is placed
• Add entities like grass plants, trees, animals, rocks or fireworks

Nothing was done for the gameplay.

[ananasblau]

I bet every game developer has this friend who shouts "destroy, destroy, destroy" when you explain your game. Well, I needed a first game play mode anyways so this is going to be Stefan's Doomsday with the map slowly being laid to waste by meteorites. What I have to add is particle effects and a counter for the biomass that you have to keep in the positive.

In the meanwhile, the map was a bit pale, I dusted it and now it looks a lot better, no? Also note the thin lines to mark the polygons, that's a new debug mode, or maybe a permanent feature.