- \n
- Length<\/strong><\/li>\n
- Width<\/strong><\/li>\n
- Type:\u00a0<\/strong>A number, usually from 0 to 5. It is rounded to the nearest whole number, determining the piece type:\n
- \n
- 0 (Or anything outside the range): Structure<\/li>\n
- 1: Engine<\/li>\n
- 2: Solar Cell<\/li>\n
- 3: Armor<\/li>\n
- 4: Weak Structure<\/li>\n
- 5: Weapon<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
- Angle:<\/strong> The angle of this piece relative to its parent\u2019s angle<\/li>\n
- Backtrack<\/strong>: Allows branching by causing this piece to move its base toward the center by this many segments before branching off. So for example backtrack 1 would create a Y shape.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
- When a new creature is created, its stats like arm length and number of arms are just averaged from its parents. Gaussian (bell curve shaped) random numbers are added to these averages. Then for each segment it gets a random one from all its possible parents. The\u00a0inherited\u00a0segment\u2019s genes are also altered by Gaussian randomness.<\/li>\n
- The damage, health, solar collection, engine power etc. of each component is determined by its mass, which is close to width*length.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n
The end result gave a lot of variety in the creature types, and I\u2019m pretty happy with it.<\/p>\n
Music<\/h3>\n
Considering that it was randomly generated by Wolfram Tones, I\u2019m pretty happy with how the music turned out. The only small thing is that the music can seem a bit dissonant with the tone of the rest of the game at times. Another oddity was that the 64-bit JRE refused to load the music file, saying it was too big. The 32-bit JRE had no trouble, though.<\/p>\n
<\/h2>\n
What Went\u2026 Less Well<\/h2>\n
PlayN<\/h3>\n
Again, PlayN was something of a mixed bag, especially because of its default build system, Maven. When Maven works, it works really well but its error messages can be a bit incomprehensible when it fails.<\/p>\n
Additionally, PlayN\u2019s severe performance problems in HTML5 mode forced me to repeatedly scale back the size of the game world. I suspect this has a lot to do with JavaScript being slow.<\/p>\n
AI<\/h3>\n
The game\u2019s AI isn\u2019t very good, although creating good AI for a game where the structures of creatures is so random would be a bit difficult. Still, I would have liked to make better AI for both enemies and player controlled bacteriums.<\/p>\n
The Name<\/h3>\n
This was the first LD48 entry I had trouble naming. Originally, it was going to be called \u201cPetri Dish Empire\u201d. You can still see this name in some of the source code, and in the URL on my site \u201c\/pde\/\u201d. Eventually, I decided this sounded uninspired and I switched to \u201cEmpire of the Petri Dish\u201d, which while sounding a bit better is a mouthful. It was only after the compo was over that I realized I should have named it \u201cBacterium Imperium\u201d.<\/p>\n
Testing and Balance<\/h3>\n
I noticed partway through development that weapon pieces were overpowered, so I made them more expensive, but it wasn\u2019t really enough.<\/p>\n
Another problem was that if the player wasn\u2019t aggressive enough, the enemy\u00a0bacteria\u00a0could grow out of control and make the game very slow. This is why I added the solar cell cap, but it was a kind of rough change that I added late in development.<\/p>\n
Late in development, I discovered a nasty exploit where you could use the fact that you can create a bacterium anywhere to put a small, heavily armed but immobile bacterium right in the core of an enemy, killing them quickly and easily. To fix this, I made it so that if on creation a bacterium intersected another, it was pushed away from the other one. If it still intersected others, it was pushed away until it did not, moving farther each time. The problem was that I just normalized the difference vector between their positions and then multiplied it by an increasing multiplier. Thus, in the degenerate case where they were right on top of each-other, it would enter an infinite loop. The issue was only discovered after the compo was over, so I couldn\u2019t fix it in the compo version. Judging from the comments, it doesn\u2019t look like a lot of people hit this issue, luckily.<\/p>\n
<\/h2>\n
Analytics<\/h2>\n
I went back through my server access logs to see if I could make some interesting graphs of how people played the game. Here\u2019s what I found:<\/p>\n
Here\u2019s how people downloaded the two versions (The native Java one, and the HTML5 one). It shows both which ones they downloaded and in what order they did:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/data\/posts\/2012\/09\/be7d4a2beec0f743b38b3d6507c38c52.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nIn total, 90 people viewed the HTML5 version. However, 16 of them went on to download the Java version, so I suspect the HTML5 version didn\u2019t work for them. Of the remaining 74:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/data\/posts\/2012\/09\/9b8f34cd4188ebcde1a03dec3f0090d5.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nOf the 9 people who won the HTML5 version, I measured the time from when they first requested the Javascript (the first thing that happens when you load the game in a browser) to when they won:<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/data\/posts\/2012\/09\/15c9b38765875de5981ea8eeb61b49d4.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\nFinally, the game lets users select their screen size. While users can select any size, they\u2019re encouraged to select a size just under the viewable area of their browser. Here are the sizes people used (The size of the bubble indicates the number at that size):<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"\/data\/posts\/2012\/09\/a3509fad9deb138a5bddf9c58d8e7021.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n\u00a0<\/p>\n
All in all, I\u2019m pretty happy with how it turned out, and I hope you all enjoyed playing it!<\/p>\n
For the curious, there is also a post-compo<\/a> version with some alterations.<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/p>","time":"September 17th, 2012 9:22 pm","title":"Empire of the Petri Dish \u2013 Post Mortem","title_was_empty":false}
- Backtrack<\/strong>: Allows branching by causing this piece to move its base toward the center by this many segments before branching off. So for example backtrack 1 would create a Y shape.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n
- Width<\/strong><\/li>\n