I have renamed SpaceArena to Artificial Life – Cells and entirely changed the game play from.
Singleplayer mode is now a solely test of your focus and reaction. You control a blue fish shaped cell that has to evade the red cells. If you collide with them you will die immediately. A collision with the side of the screen doesn’t do any damage and you simply bounce off. Every few seconds a food object is dropped in the game. The more you can gather the more points you will receive. The right mouse button will start a charge attack that will push everything away and make you immune for a few seconds.
Multiplayer is the same as Singleplayer but other players that play at the same time may randomly join your game. You can decide yourself if you want to tolerate them or better get rid of them using your charge attack. 😉
Main improvements to the last version aren’t actually any gameplay changes but the following technical improvements:
- graphics changed
- physics is now 100% stable and deterministic
- a new lag compensation algorithm keeps all non player controlled objects in sync even if you have a bad connection
- server api included
- multiplayer users will now automatically join each others games
- the server tries to find the best game to join with the best latency
- the game will show you the top10 reported by the server + your own rank
- the game asks you a name used to show in the top10
The next update will add the artificial life to the multiplayer mode. The AI will be ranked like other players and join your multiplayer games. It is based on a neural evolution algorithm and is bred not programmed! I am also working on another kind of AI/AL that will not simply play the game but instead learn to mimic your own gameplay! More on that later.
