Sunday, January 16, 2022
By: Matthew Doucette
NanoSnake was developed while prototyping Kakeru. I was creating player-seeking enemies and decided to have them seek themselves.
NanoSnake:
I decided to pull this effect out of Kakeru and call in NanoSnake. Now it is a single snake made up of 20,000 individually intelligent nanites.
Here's the playlist, which will evolve further overtime:
NanoSnake YouTube playlist.
While showing it off to Jason and Myke Wills, I discovered that certain parameters would give singularity properties, where the system would collapse over time to a single or double loop system, that no one would be able to tell was made up of 20,000 nanites. Videos of this coming in the next week.
Categorization Confusion:
I was not sure if I should categorize this under computer graphics demo effects, simulations, and/or AI. Nanites have the potential to be all three.
Kakeru:
Here's where it first happened in Kakeru:
Kakeru 乗数 (Prototype) - NanoSnake (Snake-like Enemy AI) (Emergent Behaviour)
I called the loops "furls." Some of the erratic behaviour is cased by each enemy having different speeds and different turning radiuses. There are 20,000 enemies here, running at 144 frames per second
Also See:
- God Particle - whose purpose is to explore emergence (complexity from simplicity).
- Game Prototypes - other game prototypes
- Simulation Prototypes - other simulations
That is all.
About the Author: I am Matthew Doucette of Xona Games, an award-winning indie game studio that I founded with my twin brother. We make intensified arcade-style retro games. Our business, our games, our technology, and we as competitive gamers have won prestigious awards and received worldwide press. Our business has won $190,000 in contests. Our games have ranked from #1 in Canada to #1 in Japan, have become #1 best sellers in multiple countries, have won game contests, and have held 3 of the top 5 rated spots in Japan of all Xbox LIVE indie games. Our game engines have been awarded for technical excellence. And we, the developers, have placed #1 in competitive gaming competitions -- relating to the games we make. Read about our story, our awards, our games, and view our blog.