Basic neural propagation pseudpseudocoded

Today I've worked on making up a way to program the propagation of actionpotentials.

I think that every part of a neuron and robot will be a prefab. A neuron will have a soma which takes up one square. This soma will have one to 4 neurites. Each of these neurites are in a sense dendrites, since every part of a neuron can be stimulated and will propagate the actionpotential to every direction. Each square will have one prefab that decides what animation it has depending on what things lie approximately to it.

Each prefab will have a sprite, a position and an animation. It will activate a square if its a wire. If it is an ending of an axon it will activate a square to be filled with neurotransmittors of its sort. If there is a part of a neuron there or a robots "cyborg interface" (the trigger that makes the robot 'fire'), the propagation will continue. This only occurs if the neurotransmitter is the matching sort. This will be depicted with color so it's easy to see the missmatch. Maybe even the neurotransmitters will have distinct shape as well.

The following things I have made in simple pseudo-pseudo code:

Neurons and parts
Neurotransmitters
Bacteria enemies
Heater robot
Laser robot
Pusher robot
Conveyor belt robot
Turner robot

All of these parts use one square and some parts can be on the same square, such as connections that makes natural and artificial synapses.

I've found a skilled game programmer that is interested in the game. Tobias is one of my most skilled programmers I know. I think that delegating the most advanced programming tasks to him will be the best. So I will ask him to take a look at the tower defence toolkit and see if it would suffice. He'll maybe suggest that we write everything ourselves, that would be cool and could make more efficient use of the computer juice in those small tablets and pocket computers.

If we make the decision to make our own thing then we will depend on him allot. So we'll see how dedicated he is and if he'll be likely to continue until the depending work is done. I'll ask him to estimate how long it will take since he is more experienced with this.

I'm also doing research for a gamecompany through my education, and they use unity. Maybe I can ask someone there to get some tips about how to go about the advanced stuff. That would be great.



Until next time I will have talked to these people and structured this all a bit more.


I often listen to Ubiktune releases when I work to get into the working flow.
This time: coda - Minimap

Until next time!
//Tistou Blomberg

Planning code

I have been sick this week.

Next week I will plan the game and brainstorm about how to use the features I've discovered in Unity to develop the game.

When this is done I hope to be able to make concrete assignments. I want the assignments to be formed to the developers skills so that it is not to hard, not to easy and will be a step towards completing the code.

//Tistou B.

Tower defence toolkit free from unity assets store

This week I've worked on understanding the code within the tower defence toolkit. It's written in C# and quite nice for making tower defence games it seems. Our game doesn't need the autoaiming part of turrets and we need neurons which should be able to grow in different directions. I don't know how we should structure our code to best pull this of. In the beginning I thought of using classes but with unity it seems more reasonable to make prefabs that unity uses instead.

I've experienced a difference in coding things from "scratch" and using unity. Unity has so many features that much of the coding isn't needed, I think it can be an advantage to learn more about how unity is thought to be used to make games. I wished that I had played around with it more and been making easier games to get an intuitive feel about unity. Progress is going steadily forward and I can see that the project can be done but I'm not as optimistic about the time. I like that I get more experience about how much time things take, I think that is a good thing to be able to estimate. Especially in the planning/project manager business.

I've also started to make a prototype of the game just to see some results to be able to show to people and maybe motivate some. I've also started to divide coding between people, it's hard when you don't know yet what to code, offcourse. The main thing right now is to plan how the whole game will be structured and get a big perspective which can guide me about what exactly needs to be done.

I will continue on my prototype and focus a lot on getting a perspective on how things should be implemented in unity. I'm not sure about my estimations about time so I'm not at all sure about when we're going to be done, I think it will be done before this summer but I have really no idea. It's till fun and interesting so the development continues! :) Will work 3 days on it next week.


Now I'll continue playing BANG! with my friends.
//Tistou Blomberg

Sorry I forgot to write this post yesterday

Hello!

This week I've focused on writing an essay for my course in linguistics so I've been forced to leave gamemaking this week. I'm sorry for not updating earlier.

When I'm done with it I will have MASSIVE time to make games. So don't be alarmed, I will probably spend like 3-4 days a week on the game at least until january.

Next Sunday will have a post worthy it's weight in gold. How much does a post weigh?

Keep it fresh!

//Tistou Blomberg, a lazy prick