I thought I would add a few little proof of concepts I’ve made. While they’re only small and not really ideal for being put up as their own game, they show various different ideas. I was quite interested in cellular automata for instance, so I thought I’d try my hand at making the simple falling sand, and more complex water simulations.
The water simulation makes use of compression and each cell below another becomes additionally compressed by a certain amount, unlike in falling sand games, this has the benefit of allowing it to rise to equal levels either side of a barrier (as it would do naturally).
In these two simulations you can pour water/sand by clicking on the application area, and toggle between water/sand and walls with w.
After having played around with these I thought I would try and look into cellular automata a bit more.
I also had a go at recreating the game of life, including the standard rules but also changing the colour of each alive cell to a more vibrant green the longer it survived. That app worked in a similar way to
In the game of life app, you can start and stop the simulation with ‘S’. You can also change the computation speed with numbers 1-2-3-4, (1 being fastest 4 being slowest). Pressing ‘P’ will cycle through different pen sizes, from 1 cell at a time up to a 5×5 grid. The ‘E’ Key toggles between inputting cells and an eraser, and if you want to start again completely, the ‘C’ Key will clear the map.
Finally, although this one is in need of more refinement, this is an attempt at creating a procedurally generated cave. The cave was initially generated with wall tiles arbitrarily scatted around the grid at a 45% wall to air ratio. Then I wrote multiple algorithms one which would smooth the appearance of the cave, to ensure that walls would clump together more and not be scattered randomly, and a further algorithm that ensured that large open spaces would be filled up, so there wasn’t just giant inaccessible spaces. Although it probably needs a few more algorithms on the cave layout alone, I believe it is shaping up quite well. I inserted a little player as well so that you can explore the caves, there is always the chance you might get trapped in the “spawn room”, (This being one of the reasons a few more algorithms are necessary) in which case you can generate a new cave with the “R” Key. The “A” Key is Left and the “D” Key is right, to move the little fella. And The “W” keys is jump.
Oh and if you want a more realistic cave exploration experience, the “L” Key toggles lighting mode.
). I was happy with the way it turned out, although I think it would’ve been nice to have had a larger resolution to work with. Oh well, c’est la vie.
). I definitely learnt a hell of a lot about ActionScript3 as well as about game design in general.
