alifegames (was Re: GGZ)

[Henningsen <peter@alifegames.com>]

>> alifegames.com
>
>Hm. Is there a Linux version of your game in progress? It looks interesting 
>and is GPL'd, but requires windows. Just wondered...

I don't maintain bSerene, the game that's available on alifegames.com any
more. It is written with Direct3D, and porting it to Linux isn't worth it in
my opinion (though just by word of mouth it has been downloaded over 10 000
times and actually has people actively playing it and recommending it to
their friends). I'm working on the next version of my artificial life
monsters, which evolve and adapt to players' behavior. I'm also working on a
much more sophisticated type of AI that can be used for squad mates in
fighting games where the player controls more than one character.

I agree with earlier posts that it would be nice if not everyone did their
own game, but people came together in teams;-) Currently I'm writing a
random dungeon generator (dungeonmaker.sourceforge.net), which will be very
modular, so it can be used by any grid based game (like isometric...). I
also want my alife monsters to be extremely pluggable, and I'd actually
prefer if I wrote just the AI/alife code, and could insert that into several
games that other people write. The problem with that is that playing against
alife monsters is different from playing against monsters that spawn and
stay in place after that. Alife-monsters move around in their environment,
form themselves into groups, and actively hunt down the player. This makes
it necessary to have a different game design from the standard hack 'n slash
games.

While bSerene had arbitrary 3D maps, the experience taught me that it is
possible to have much more intelligent monsters by working in grid-based
games (like Diablo or Age of Empires), so my monsters will act in grid based
environments only (where a grid square is either open or blocked). They
could still be rendered in 3D, as long as the map is grid based. If anyone
is interested in having such alife monsters in their game, I suggest you
contact me off-list.

Peter Henningsen
alifegames.com


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