Hi everyone! We completed Cell Master recently and wanted to share a bit of our trip along it. 

After finishing our previous projects, Mysterious Operation and Introspection, we wanted to improve our code skills. The ProcJam is very relaxed with deadlines and theme. The community was great too so we joined them. We started around 10th October and the goal was to submit something on 13th Dec.

Our first design was a simulation game where you could control the planet directly to influence to the humans living on it. We learned about some SOLID patterns and the results were better than expected. The planet geometry generation was smooth. The placement of the human was a bit worse, we couldn't find a good method to get the height of the sphere on any given point and used Raycasts, a solution I don't like.

That worked for the generation, and we learned about three patterns now: Builder, Factory and Commands.

We also added a procedural calendar, where you could set any amount of months per year, days for each month, etc... And a lightning detail where the sun would rotate around the planet.

Navigation was a worse problem. We didn't wan't to build an A* path search on a isosphere. Or goal was to learn patterns not algorithms. We implemented the trial version of the AStar project. It was a good solution but it limited the size and detail of our planet.

At this point the game was playable. Generation worked. Humans got a little IA, where we learned about the States pattern. They would now search for food if they were hungry.

At this point this would be "playable", not very engaging, but we know it would be easy to add new features. We tackled the math problems that were left behind. The rotation of the humans as they traveled along the sphere was easy to solve. Maths are easy :) .  But we couldn't find a good solution for the ico-sphere uvs near the poles.

We did solve it for the triangles outside the poles but weren't happy with it.

And we scrapped the planet idea. We changed it for a plane. Humans would become cells and the goal of the game would be to guide them towards a given random color.

It would be a nice test for our new code, if we implemented the patterns correctly the change wouldn't be too hard.

We tackled the issue and... it was done under 2 hours. We changed, literally, 2 functions: The start generate planet command and the function that finds a random point in the planet surface. And one new class, the plane geometry builder.

This was the final result:

We don't have an artist so we didn't care about the graphic side that much. We took some time to polish the menus, credits and instructions. And finally shipped it upon the deadline.

There are plans to keep expanding this game. So please download it and give us some feedback! 

Thanks for reading!