Everybody seems to think my game has multiple levels. It doesn’t. Honestly, I don’t know why my ground on sprite hit tests would be failing, but from past experience with them, it only seems to do that when the game is badly lagging.

And It’s not because of the gameplay, but a seemingly lack of understanding of evolution.

The theme was Evolution ot Growth

The second definition of evolution given by google is “The gradual development of something, esp. from a simple to a more complex form.” There’s no reason the theme had to mean the ‘scientific’ definition of evolution (I’m a YEC anyway).

While I don’t have much time to review every game there, I will write a short paragraph about the two I’ve picked.

my 1st place will have to be Abigayls : Snakes Evolution. While I know many people here are voting for others, I choose Snakes Evolution as my #1 because I like the spin it put on the older snake clones you see everywhere. I’m not sure if anyone has tried to do what abigayl did before but if they have I didnt see it. So as far as I know its an original concept and to be honest I had the most fun playing it, and at the end of the day that’s what matters.

My 2nd place is RTL_Shadow’s “I had to evolve”. I really appreciate the little style and thought put into the basic level design, it showed good conveiance and really made it work.
I also loved the music, It was a step in the right direction and really set the atmosphere in the game. It was an over-all enjoyable experience and I have to say well deserving of my #2

thanks for giving me the chance to give my say.

Really hard to choose here, there’s at least 4 games I want to give votes to. Awesome work everyone.

I’ll give my 2 points to
Solsund – Unnatural Selection
Because I think the game concept and theme have such a massive potential, and the game has replay value.

And 1 point to
Abigayl – Snake Evolution
It looked really polished and played well. Interesting take on an old theme.

Honourable mentions I nearly voted for:
RTL_Shadow – I had to Evolve – just a little too short and easy.
truefire – Freedom
It felt a bit too slow – when I found I’d taken the wrong path, and it was going to take at least 2 minutes to get back to the top of the ladder again, I gave up.

RTL_Shadow – I had to Evolve IIII
Solsund – Unnatural Selection IIIIIIII
Darkscanner – Nightmare Evolution I
truefire – Freedom IIIIIIII
MossyStump – Essence IIIII
Abigayl – Snake Evolution IIIIIIIII
Halysia – Spore Coral
LennonLenford – Baby Quest
CuriousGaming – Farm and Grow IIIIIIIIIIIIIIII

Farm and Grow is winning!!!

Creatures don’t just learn to see colours (I had to evolve), or even know they should get a retina. (Nightmare Evoution)

Who said I was basing my game off of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution? Maybe it was following Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s. Ever think of that?

Darkscanner – Nightmare Evolution I

I don’t see that anybody voted for me, even as second place. Who?

Some more clarification.

Updating your game is not ok.

You need to link me to a version which has not been updated past the deadline. Send me a new link to your old .swf if you have updated the currently linked version.

I had to Evolve: Too much text, although given that the game is way too easy, you can move around while reading the text, but I think it’s too much; I had to wait a lot after finishing a level (reaching the door) and wait for the text.

The game as a whole seemed slow: slow animations, slow movement, slow text (and slow site d:). Also, in one of the levels, touching a wall teleports you to an enemy. And… the controls are bad; sometimes it’ll keep moving in a direction after you released a key or it won’t jump at the right moment.

And… it needs some sort of ending. I mean, the whole last levels is “I had to evolve. I had to survive.”, and then what?

Unnatural Selection: I liked the idea, not so much the implementation: it seems too random, it involves no skill as all you have to do is to keep breeding to get close to the requirements.

Some things that annoyed me were the lack of a way to trash a creature that you don’t need and is only wasting space. Also, the drag and drop thing; a click should add/remove. Finally, why put them in random spots? Some even overlap; an organised table would be better.

I think that with some work, this can turn into a nice game.

Nightmare Evolution: No WASD, bad collision implementation, laggy and I can’t tell anymore; I fell from a platform and was never able to move again. The description says “kill everything”, yet I never knew how to attack.

Freedom: I wasn’t able to play it for long; it was running a bit slow, so I closed everything to clean my RAM a bit an to my surprise I had to start over; autosave when it says “You feel you will remember this place” is a must.

It kept running kinda slow and I didn’t feel like doing it all over again; it was challenging (which is really nice!), but mixed with it running slow, it was frustrating.

Essence: Simple concept, easy controls and way challenging. I’d suggest adding powerups or some sort of combo system, so the reward of catching multiple light orbs without letting any dark orb hit the ground between the combo would grant you a bigger reward. This could compensate the insane difficulty curve. I wasn’t able to finish the game; got to level 6 or 7, but the dark/light ratio mixed with the speed was way too much for me; there were times when 10 dark orbs would spawn before a single white one appeared, and then I wasn’t even able to get the white one because I had to focus on killing the four black orbs that were on the screen at the same time that the white one spawned.

Also, sometimes a dark orb would spawn at the edge of the screen at max speed, and unless you were aalready aiming at the lower part of that side of he screen, it was impossible to get it.

And… I think I hurt my hand, and that’s not nice.

The game has potential, but it definitely needs a reward system, powerups or something.

Also, it seems that the energy can go negative; once the bar went empty, I was never able to fill it again.

Snake Evolution: Unplayable because of lag.

Spore Coral: No instructions; the screen got filled with those blue things which throw yellow things and a bunch of animals were moving around. I never got the point, nor I know if it can be considered a game.

Baby Quest: Same as the one above. Its only pro is that this one was uploaded to Megaswf.

Farm and Grow: Beautiful! I loved this game, although eventually stopped playing because there was nothing else to do but waiting for everyone to die from an ilness.

Some ways to improve it:

• Don’t allow to buy animals if you don’t have an empty peg. I had a single peg with two cows and the market allowed me to buy three sheeps that I was never able to use.
  Also, remove option to go to school when there’s nothing else to research and the option to draw water when your health is at 100.


• Where is this farm located? They have some serious health issues over there; out of seven deaths, six were caused by ilness. Maybe allow researching cremation to stop wasting space in graveyards?


• Keyboard shortcuts to change the game’s speed.


• Missions: “A big company wants to buy <ammount> <food> every <days> for <money> from you.” Or maybe events, like weather changes affecting crops, plagues, thieves or whatever; anything to keep the challenge, because as I saw it, after a while, it becomes way too easy and there’s nothing else to do but to wait for all the available fields to be filled with graveyards (thanks to ilness).
It got boring at this point:

Great job for a GiTD.

---

1st: CuriousGaming

2nd: MossyStump

Originally posted by Darkscanner:

Creatures don’t just learn to see colours (I had to evolve), or even know they should get a retina. (Nightmare Evoution)

Who said I was basing my game off of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution? Maybe it was following Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s. Ever think of that?

Hahaha!

Originally posted by Senekis93:

Snake Evolution: Unplayable because of lag.

It’s not lag. It’s supposed be be a pixelated effect. The game runs at generally 4 ms update, which should only lag computers from the early 90s or perhaps 80s :P

bad collision implementation, laggy and I can’t tell anymore; I fell from a platform and was never able to move again. The description says “kill everything”, yet I never knew how to attack.

Yeah, using AS2 was a big mistake. As for the attack thing, the tutorial would have included it if I had made one. Just jump on top of whatever you are attacking to kill it.

Originally posted by Abigayl:

Originally posted by Senekis:

Snake Evolution: Unplayable because of lag.

It’s not lag. It’s supposed be be a pixelated effect. The game runs at generally 4 ms update, which should only lag computers from the early 90s or perhaps 80s :P

It is lag: Plugin-container CPU usage before your game: 3% (GDR). During your game: 89%
This results in your “Hard” mode running slower than the original snake game on its lowest speed setting.

I don’t know what you’re doing to make such a simple thing run that slow, but you really need to learn some optimisation tricks.

About my old computer, it would be a good argument for a 3D game with thousands of objects moving around all the time, but for a simple grid with 10~ snakes which consist of two squares? Nope, you can’t blame my computer for your mistakes.

First: RTL_Shadow – I had to Evolve
Second: Solsund – Unnatural Selection

Originally posted by Senekis93:

Originally posted by Abigayl:

Originally posted by Senekis:

Snake Evolution: Unplayable because of lag.

It’s not lag. It’s supposed be be a pixelated effect. The game runs at generally 4 ms update, which should only lag computers from the early 90s or perhaps 80s :P

It is lag: Plugin-container CPU usage before your game: 3% (GDR). During your game: 89%
This results in your “Hard” mode running slower than the original snake game on its lowest speed setting.

I don’t know what you’re doing to make such a simple thing run that slow, but you really need to learn some optimisation tricks.

About my old computer, it would be a good argument for a 3D game with thousands of objects moving around all the time, but for a simple grid with 10~ snakes which consist of two squares? Nope, you can’t blame my computer for your mistakes.

The game has an in-game FPS counter if you press ~ (or sometimes other keys, depends on keyboard). I went beyond hard mode to the worst possible circumstances: high speed (not 100%, that’s bugged), max snakes, max length, and the rendering stayed at a consistent 6-10 ms, for a full 60 FPS almost all of the time (never once dipped below 50 FPS).

Now, what is your computer setup, and what setup in-game were you using? If there actually is a problem with my game, I’d like to be able to fix it. You are the only one who has complained of lag (although I have gotten people thinking the pixelated effect was lag, hence my first response to you).

EDIT: You may want to PM me the answers so that we do not derail the topic.

I received lag as well Abigayl. I’m on a macbook that is able to run flash games which would require reasonably more CPU than your game.

I don’t know if this happens to anyone else, but sometimes I get lag on a game, but if I shut everything down (browser and connection client) and re-open it, it does OK. It seems, in these cases, that the lag is actually a residual build-up from other Flash games.

I had no lag on Snake Evolution.

Addition: I do get around 60% CPU usage running it, though…

I also had no lag on Snake Evolution. As I mentioned, there was the illusion of lag, but when I sped up I realized that it was just an illusion caused by the snakes all making a jump every 10 frames or whatever, and no other graphical changes occurring in the meantime.

For what it’s worth, I’m getting 20-50% CPU use when I open snakes….which is waaay more than a game like that should be using. I’m not using a particularly powerful computer, but it’s not that bad…..I do think that game’d lag an old computer, it does seem to use too much cpu.

2 points for Freedom.
1 point for Snake Evolution.

Thanks for the feedback all… seems like I should watch the CPU usage as well as the ms update (what I have been using up til this point to determine lag). Would explain the discrepancies.

Some basic stats about Snake Evolution:
Full snakes, length and mostly full speed to stop the lock up bug.

Intel Pentium M 1.6Ghz processor, 90% CPU usage 
20ms update
9ms render
17ms flash
46ms total

Intel i7-2670QM Quad Core (8 threaded, though)
2.8GHz mode           2.2GHz mode
60fps                 40fps
2ms update            6ms update
2ms render            3ms render
12ms flash            12ms flash
16ms total            21ms total
8.94% CPU             12.0% CPU
71.52% of the core    96% of the core

This game really does not have a lot going on graphics wise so I guess I can see where they are coming from asking why the game is eating CPU time for breakfast. This really makes me wonder just what Flash is doing with it’s time and also makes me wonder why the latest version of Flixel doesn’t show that in it’s debug screen.

Regarding update/render/flash, the only thing the programmer will be able to really directly change is update time, unless by other means you can speed up render by having less entities/whatever Flixel uses.

Solsund, that’s a really high end laptop core, isn’t it? In reference to the i7 one.

UG, you can speed up render by prerendering things that have color shading effects or rotations applied to them. It’s the standard size vs speed tradeoff. I’m not sure Flash has such a speedup in copyPixels but if you have straight 0xFF alpha channel throughout your whole image (no empty squares or translucency) you can do a very fast copy and speed it up that way instead.

Granted, that’s assuming the way you’ve designed the game lets any of these things help out.

I asked a guy at one point how he managed to get such a crazy beautiful game that ran fine on my slower desktop machine and he wrote back that he changed the enemy explosions from 1×1 pixels to 2×2 pixels and it still looked great and ran great too. There’s always fun little tricks you can use, if you think it through.

Originally posted by lSWATLLAMA:

Solsund, that’s a really high end laptop core, isn’t it? In reference to the i7 one.

Decently high end. I caught a good sale and got the laptop for 650 bucks. I decided it wasn’t worth it to buy something lower as I wanted something that could last for years without feeling slow. Now I just need to sell a game to make the investment worth it. :)

Ah, good price for a laptop. My brother has the desktop equivalent processor, assuming that the equivalent is an i7-2700K.

I hope you do sell a game! I might buy it. Assuming I sell a game as well and get money. :D

I’ve had no lag with any of the games, not even Abigay’s snake game. I do have a powerful computer, but if people get the same lag with her other games, I don’t understand the problem since my old crappy dual core could handle all her games fine.