Tag Archives: conway’s game of life

Ghost Maze is Live – October’s #1GAM offering in time for Halloween!

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In this game, players race through a spooky maze trying to find a portal that might grant them access to the next level. How deep will you delve into the maze? Screen Shot 2014-10-31 at 9.59.16 PM

 

In the game, you are pursued by ghosts that can kill you. You cannot hurt them, but usually you can outrun them. Each level will mean more ghosts. Don’t worry, if you die you will just respawn close to the beginning of the maze (bottom left corner). The exit is usually in the top right. The compass can help you try to navigate your way as well as the pillars and torches. There is a dungeon level, a couple different cave levels, and a temple. Once you get past the lava rock cave, levels are built of different segments so you might find a cave leading to a dungeon. There is no way to win or lose really  because the game will keep generating new mazes  forever so I’d say if you can get to level 10 that’d be a win. Also if you can do it without dieing that would be a feat. Click here to play Ghost Maze…

Controls:

WASD =Move
Mouse = Look
Shift = Run
C = Crouch
Space = Jump
M = change music volume

Technical Notes!

The mazes are generated procedurally using Conway’s Game of Life. The current default is Chance to Start at 20%, Birth 2, Death 0, Crowd 6 and Generations 6. This seemed to yield dungeons that worked best. The game tests for solvability with a flood fill algorithm and if it fails after 3 tries, it drops the player pretty close to the exit–so if that happens, congrats you get to go to the next level! The game also features an generally unseen homemade occlusion culling type thing. I disable rendering most of the maze that is not within a certain range of the player and re-enable as the player approaches. It cut the draw calls down to nothing and boosted the frame rate.

Additionally, I used the Ultimate First Person Shooter asset for my player and the spawning for the player, enemies and random objects. I used Breadcrumbs AI for the Ghosts AI. I used music from www.nosoapradio.us once again! Of course I used NGUI for my menu as always. I sure I can use it better. I need to figure out a good pause screen so players can configure the game.

Ghost Maze – A game about ghosts in mazes

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For the month of October I have been working on a way to randomly generate a world that is interconnected in a way that I can drop the functionality into my Space Wars game to manage jump gates between Star Systems. The result has been this maze game. Some of the behind the scenes stuff isn’t really used by the maze game and the wall building stuff probably won’t be used in Space Wars but its still coming along pretty well. Here is a video of the gameplay so far…

At some point you could see the maze generation. I used Conway’s Game of Life to generate the structure. Then I had to test which squares need walls. I am also using the Respawn system to drop in Ghosts and objects to help you navigate the maze. The exit portal ends up also being spawned randomly. Here is a pic of early maze generation —

Screen Shot 2014-10-15 at 6.37.17 PM

 

Originally, I was building 100×100 mazes, but with the game in action 50×50 currently runs best. Also it seems pretty impossible even in the smaller size. I built a pseudo occlusion culling system as well which disables renderers for rooms that aren’t super close. It definitely helped speed the game up.