First Post

So this is my first post about game development! First off, I've been chipping away, learning the ropes, for years now with a friend James. My degree focused on application development and I have a background in the arts. For the past few months I have attended a local Meetup group in my area centered on game development. Back in January James and I attempted to attend a Game Jam but were foiled by the weather.

Here I am a few months later still taking baby steps towards something I can publish and hopefully use as a seed to future success as an independent game developer. 

We recently learned the hard way about IP protection. A game that James and I had been working on was, let's just say, inspiring to someone else we naively showed it too. On the bright side he is selling his interpretation and so I feel that at least we may have had something had we finished it.

I have a childish project hosted on IndieDb here

It was a bit of an experiment spawned from a presentation about genetic algorithms. My GA isn't perfect in this iteration, and probably isn't a true GA, but it was an interesting exercise and a good test of my C# skills on the XNA framework at the time. I was inspired during the talk when someone presented the question of how genetic algorithms could be used in games. The immediate, and default, application seemed to be to use GAs to administer the AI. A second and less direct approach was to use the algorithms to devise optimal starting strategies for games like StarCraft . This troubled me as both were fairly obvious solutions. I began brainstorming. I was curious to see if instead a genetic algorithm could be used to administer UX or some other facet of a game.

I set some criteria for this experiment. 

1. It has to be a game.

2. It has to use a genetic algorithm in some other aspect besides the AI or strategy development.

3. It can't involve killing anyone.

The third criteria is something I occasionally try to aspire to in my concepts. Too many games today involve the player virtually killing someone or something. 

Overall I don't feel my little Monster Mash game is much of a game. There is a score and the difficulty does increase slightly each evolution. Future plans would be to add some other goal set besides scaring the people. Possibly mazes or puzzles to guide the monster through. Feature wise I would incorporate visual manifestations of abilities or possibly mutations that manifest visually to provide new abilities like flying or becoming an apparition to pass through barriers. 

The genetic algorithm is difficult in this game cycle. Each round ultimately functions as a fitness test. The problem is a true GA needs hundreds, thousands, or more tests to be effective. I had to tweak the rules of GAs a bit to accommodate the low volume of fitness tests. I found the system lead to a wide range of stats combinations in the beginning; coupled with mutations in later iterations the player could experience wild shifts in abilities from the previous round leading to a frustrating and inconsistent UX. On the other hand odd quirks poked their heads up. On occasion the system would evolve a character that responded inversely to directional input. This proved better for some unknown reason and persisted through later rounds. 

I successfully didn't incorporate the death of anything in the game...