#8 Survival elements and minimap

In the last blog I posted a movie which contained a first impression of the survival elements (e.g. temperature, thrist, ...). In the meantime I redesigned the user-interface (replaced the text with icons) and added some more information (e.g. "what happens when I reach a certain level of temperature?"). Furthermore, I implemented a minimap for a better orientation...

... and here we go:

#7 Crazy ideas - worth trying?

Do you know those moments when you have crazy idea but you take it with a pinch of salt? If so, you know how I felt some days ago.

What if it was possible to develop and implement an algorithm which recognises a simple pattern? (If you are a mathematician you might think: "Come on! That's child's play!").

Let us imagine there are several rooms, separated by doors. Every room is filled with 3 gas. The amount of each gas is not the same in all rooms, nor is the size of the rooms. What does happen if a door between 2 rooms open? The answer is: diffusion.

"Diffusion is the net movement of molecules from a region of higher concentration to a region of lower concentration. Diffusion is driven by a gradient in chemical potential of the diffusing species." [Wikipedia, 28 December 2018, at 07:07 (UTC)]

To be honest: I was never really good at mathematics, physics or chemistry. The higher the difficulty of the related task in school was, the lower was my mark. Therefore, please do not except a totally realistic game. At the beginning of the project I intended to develop something quite realistic, at least when it comes to game mechanics. However, while I was discussing with friend my ideas I suddenly realised: Realism can be counterproductive. Realism does not necessarily mean fun nor does it mean challenge. As a player (or human in general) sometimes you just end up being very frustrated because of realism. Anyway, let us get back to the topic, the crazy idea.

Besides diffusion, the idea gets complexer with the number of rooms involved (e.g. 3 rooms are in one cluster, 4 rooms in another, ...). There are some awesome tools like spss which include amazing algorithm made by some super brains to cluster data (e.g. Single-Linkage, Complete-Linkage, Average-Linkage, Centroid, Median, Ward, ...). Unfortunately, I could not just copy paste them. Nonetheless, these algorithm contain a fundamental logic which is key: similarity. Whenever you want to cluster something look for the similarities. The similarities in my example are the rooms which connect other rooms.

It took me quite a while but finally I managed to develop the algorithm. So what does this mean, speaking of game mechanics? I am not sure yet. However, I really do like the idea that things in the game are connected. If it is going to be a part of the game, underlying physical processes will work simplified (e.g. fix exchange rate, neglect pressure and temperature, ...).

To conclude: whenever you have a crazy idea give it a try! At the beginning I did not know whether it is going to work or not but I kept trying (for several days) and it finally worked.

P.S.: To visualise the idea mentioned above a bit better and to give you some insight about the current state (pre-alpha) of development I recorded a short movie. Unfortunately the quality is quite low. Hopefully it will be better next time.

I hope you enjoy the movie! Roll film, and ... action!

#6 The first view from the window ...

In this post I would like to give you a first view from the window. Though some silhouette are recognisable, yet much remains blurry...