GONADS
This game is from the old Ludum Dare platform. You can try viewing the original page on Web Archive
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GONADS is our take on the theme: blind, undirected evolution fueled only by death and the sexual impulses of 21952 different robots. Unfortunately, that was too many robots and we never quite realized our goal of actually making a win/lose condition or progression on the character's side. So what we have left is more of a toy than a game; more of a preview of our generated robots. We have art for about 9 times as many chassis as you can see in the game, in addition to a large number of traps and things the robots could do to counter the traps. All the artwork was originally produced since the beginning of the jam.
The game would have worked as such: You are an employee in a lab who's robots suddenly go haywire, forcing you to protect various important assets. You can place barricades and traps, but the robots are varied and diverse, and among their ranks are robots built perfectly to compromise your defenses. The better the individual robots do, the more likely their GONADS (galvanized ontogenetic nanobot assembled deployment systems) are to transmit their own designs back to the manufactury, guaranteeing more similar robots. The goal of the player, therefore, is to misdirect this reaction. Build walls and walls of wood until every robot carries a saw and an axe, then switch to metal bars and sprinkler traps and watch as they fall against your defenses... until the one nerdy robot carrying an umbrella and an arc welder makes it to the front of the pack, impressing all of the lady robots,* spreading his seed far and wide.
This is more of a general proof of concept for the pathfinding that that game would use. You can place blocks from the panel in the upper left that add to the 'cost' of the path based on the hardness of the block (wood<stone<metal), and robots will re-path mid route, even to other goals.
We (just two of us) do plan on fleshing out this concept in the coming weeks. Check out http://madleedesign.com/ for updates as we release a finished version in the next month.
*(There are not actually lady robots)
The game would have worked as such: You are an employee in a lab who's robots suddenly go haywire, forcing you to protect various important assets. You can place barricades and traps, but the robots are varied and diverse, and among their ranks are robots built perfectly to compromise your defenses. The better the individual robots do, the more likely their GONADS (galvanized ontogenetic nanobot assembled deployment systems) are to transmit their own designs back to the manufactury, guaranteeing more similar robots. The goal of the player, therefore, is to misdirect this reaction. Build walls and walls of wood until every robot carries a saw and an axe, then switch to metal bars and sprinkler traps and watch as they fall against your defenses... until the one nerdy robot carrying an umbrella and an arc welder makes it to the front of the pack, impressing all of the lady robots,* spreading his seed far and wide.
This is more of a general proof of concept for the pathfinding that that game would use. You can place blocks from the panel in the upper left that add to the 'cost' of the path based on the hardness of the block (wood<stone<metal), and robots will re-path mid route, even to other goals.
We (just two of us) do plan on fleshing out this concept in the coming weeks. Check out http://madleedesign.com/ for updates as we release a finished version in the next month.
*(There are not actually lady robots)