Program a Defence Drone to protect yourself from the evil attackers. There's no direct control, only the forward-thinking and logic you feed into your program - this is your real weapon.
You write your code on the left side of the screen, click the red button and then see the battle play out on the radar display on the right.
The red and orange blips are enemies, and the green blips are friendly. The lighter green blip is the Defence Drone that your program controls, as you can tell by its label, which also shows its remaining health.
Each line is an action which your drone will do if the check after the 'when' check passes. The first line to pass its check has its action executed. Each time your drone wants to do something, it will consult your program, and do nothing if none of your rules apply.
The source code is made up of multiple lines, each line of the form: <action> when <check>
If you try to run an invalid program, the game will complain at you once the drone queries its program, telling you the offending line. The drone is very picky, so having two spaces between parts of your commands or an extra space at the end of the command will make it break, so pay close attention to the error message.
The current checks are: 'always' which always applies 'isWithin' which takes a type of object (edge/enemy/friendly), distance (integer) and an optional direction (north/south/east/west) and checks to see if an object of a given type is within the given distance (and maybe also in the given direction)
The actions are: 'fire' which takes a direction 'move' which takes a direction 'wait' which takes no parameters
Example program:
fire north when enemy isWithin 25 north fire south when enemy isWithin 25 south fire east when enemy isWithin 25 east fire west when enemy isWithin 25 move south when edge isWithin 2 north move north when edge isWithin 2 south move east when edge isWithin 2 east move west when edge isWithin 2 west move south when always
This is an HTML5 game written in Elm. I didn't get as much done as I would have liked, so the game is missing a good introduction/tutorial and the parser isn't very forgiving, especially in terms of whitespace.
@dylanigan Yeah, I'm disappointed that I ran out of time and couldn't have added more commands with better explanations. Perhaps introducing new commands one at a time.
There seems to be a good idea in here, but at the moment it's just too hard to get into as a new player - it really needs some of these instructions displayed in the game itself. And it certainly is very picky on syntax! Great concept though, and it is satisfying to see the drone execute your commands. I really wanted to reprogram it on the fly...
@cgriff I considered reprogramming on the fly, but was worried that the game would become too much about typing quickly, but after playing deadarius's game, I'm starting to come around to that idea.
Great entry overall, very innovative, always good to see new stuff. I'm afraid it was a bit too unforgiving at the beginning, I don't see how a new player would sit through this.
I really liked the concept. But more scripting options would have been nice. Like variables, also adding random obstacles/using editor would have fitted perfectly. And including the readme from the compo page would have been nice.
@elpaulo Yeah, I am sorry about that. I was trying to fix that part towards the end, but I was just too damn tired to think. Thanks for your patience and kind words :)
Good idea. But I think it would be better if the game didn't restart when I uploaded a new code to the drone. That way, I could reprogram it in-battle. I think bullets should be visible, and I don't get why the rouge soldier didn't die when it was right next to me, only there was a friendly power station in between us. Do friendly objects stop bullets? In that case, the AND logical operator should be implemented so I could check if there was a friendly building in between us and I wont shoot it.
Interesting entry. Took me a while to get it working before I realized pasting the sample program in the textarea adds whitespace at line endings, which makes the execution fail.
So maybe trim your input and it is bit easier to get into. Extra points for the theme approriate gfx :)
intersting concept. somehow i really did not like the textbased user interface (maybe it felt too much like programming ;) ). Maybe you could have done something like logical blocks that the player can arrange like in visual programming environments
It's a REALLY Interesting concept, but with one crucial problem. It is VERY confusing. There is no tutorial, guide or ANYTHING in the actual game, you just get thrown right into it! And when the game closes everytime you try to start it it makes it very hard to actually learn how to do anything.
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For now i always generate errors, but i'm gonna retry :-)
Nice job!
So maybe trim your input and it is bit easier to get into.
Extra points for the theme approriate gfx :)