http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=537

 

*The game can be downloaded but it is extremely buggy and crashes a lot. I've had to restart my comp several times, so make sure you don't have anything unsaved and whatnot.

 

 

 

I'm not near the level of programming to code something like this, but my inner geek practically exploded at the concepts that were used to make this happen.

 

I've often thought that hardcoding was a waste to dynamic code. Like if you spend one year just dynamically coding everything, then you'll gain several years of just watching the code grow practically by itself. I've thought of how much time could be saved by having the program generate the content, instead of basically hardcoding art models and buildings and textures, when a program could just create it for you, but with the right parameters so that you have enough control over it. I just understand the concept and have thought about it before, but I didn't know that there was such coding going on out there, nor did I think it had been used at this level, nor did I know it would save such space.

 

The game itself is pretty plain but the fact that it is 97KB and I can do the most basic actions of a FPS is amazing. I also understand the limitations like limited animations and sounds, but really in the future you can recursively use this concept with added parameters and rules to govern the generator that intense or deep romantic music, or really artistic textures could be made, as the code matures. So right now it may be limited but in the future this could be where things are headed. And as it matures it probably won't have a such a noticeable loading time either.

 

This is just pretty interesting to consider of its possibilities and potential now and in the future for not just games but creating artwork, creating an infinite amount of instances of some experiment with only X amount of laws/conditions/rules to govern the generator, planning out cities or patterns...etc. Just give it the right boundaries basically and it could do wonders.

 

 

Very interesting. I'll download it when I get home, and run it in a vm.

I've played that game and yes it's pretty cool.

 

Another similar thing is Wolf5k (a Wolfenstein 3D "clone" which is only 5 kB). You can play it here, but it's coded in a really weird way and runs only on very old browsers. Netscape 6 ran it fine under Windows XP.

It's an interesting concept, definitely something that has quite some potential if used in the right situation. Obviously now hard-drive space isn't a huge issue now but I'm pretty sure some of the other things could be great.

 

I was intrigued to see that this was a similar concept to that used by Spore, definitely a fantastic example of how this kind of thing can be utilised in a successful environment!

 

I had been working on a concept not too long ago that involved biological viruses attacking cells and having a system in which the game would allow dynamic creation of viruses based on mutation from other viruses. These would adopt an entirely different look and trait, essentially allowing for the game to create a massive amount of permutations without having the necessity to hard-code them yourself. (Unfortunately this has been side-lined due to exams, but I thought it sounded cool nonetheless!)

 

Creating something like this, or at least creating a game that has any aspects of dynamic-content is a brilliant concept to try and develop, albeit more difficult than creating a simple game.