mr bear squash you all flat
I made this a while back but here’s a board game I made that would work on a Thicket-style hex-grid: Mr Bear Squash You All Flat
More ➜Thicket
March 30, 2020
Thicket is a turn-based game experiment inspired very loosely by Hunt the Wumpus, Dou Shou Qi (鬥獸棋) and the animal novels of Felix Salten. In the game you play a deer-like animal who is hunted by a wolf. The game takes place on a field of hexagons that can be rearranged into different maps. Other animal pieces have their own habits and goals, including a bear, which can kill the wolf. Some animals may be nocturnal, assuming there is a day/night cycle. Some animals could be protecting young, looking for mates or hunting different animals. The player may not always see what lies in the adjacent areas, but can smell what animals have wandered through the hex they are currently in. From this information they must guess how close the wolf is. Likewise, the player leaves a scent, which the wolf can detect and will follow. The implication is that to escape the wolf, the player must lure the wolf into situations in which she is removed from play.
My goal with Thicket is to create a reusable framework for making turn-based hex-grid games and cellular automata experiments. I’d also like to use this opportunty to experiment with a pipeline from my 2d frame-animation practice using Toon Boom Harmony into Unity. I’d like to create a flexible system where hexes can be given properties (a tunnel, an obstacle, a trap, water, light or dark, animal scents), peices can be given properties, and the whole thing can be run with n number of players, including zero players. Art should be easy to replace /add so the whole system can be skinnable for different games. I’ve entertained the idea that you simply add more types of actors and terrains and they can all be combined in any manner of ways, so that each game is really just a new problem posed on a multipurpose board, Thicket being the first of many.
I tried to prototype an early idea for this game as interactive fiction some time back with limited success (this barely works and is unwinnable, but it implements a couple of things, like scent)
Downloads:
Documents:
thicket_moodboard images
Videos:
Dou Shou Qi
I used to play this game (under the name Animals Chess ) as a child. It’s also called Let’s catch the Lion or Jungle. My set had the small wooden chip peices with line art like shown in the video. These icons have stuck with me, especially the wide circular eyes on the animal faces. In terms of game mechanics, I like the looping hierarchy of pieces- the weakest peice can take the most powerful peice. In my mind Thicket might incorporate a similar system.
Hunt the Wumpus - TI 99-4a
Hunt the Wumpus is a turn based game with fog of war, using blood marks to hint if the enemy lies waiting in a nearby space (could be scent trails in Thicket). We played this game on the TI in elementary school.
Fresh
Fresh is a film about a powerless actor manipulating powerful actors into eliminating one another. Thicket is a game about the least powerful peice on the board manipulating more powerful peices into removing each other from play.
Ogre Amiga
Ogre was an asymmetrical turn-based game where one player controlled a whole army and one player (or the computer) controlled a single, super-powered tank. Things I like about this- hex grid, asymmetricality, variable number of players
Hedgehog in the Fog
😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍😍
Making Unity 2D Levels with Hexagonal Tilemap
This may be the most relevant one- uses the built-in Unity tilemapping, goes into detail, includes fog of war, shows how to do tiles with “height”, which I will probably use, since I’d like to have characters that kind of stand up off the hext tiles and can be larger than the hex. (ahhh boo, it’s not click to move, it’s keyboard movement, so no pathfinding, no getting hex co-ordinates for the mouse etc.)
creadte A* nodes from unity tilemaps
unity delegates
Prim's maze tutorial
Posts:
zero players
I reposted Paolo’s Games Without Players piece yesterday because every time I think about how best to situate Thicket, I feel like it would be as a zero player mode simulation, constantly reseeding itself. I don’t think of Thicket as being a particularly healthy space to inhabit, it’s purposely about themes that bother me- predation, hierarchy, violence, manipulation.
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bad thought?
Is it bad that I am thinking of starting Thicket over again in something like Clickteam Fusion? I’ve never used Fusion before but it seems like it would be much better suited for this, Unity seems so sluggish for a 2d turn-based game, when a lot of the problems I needed to solve should have been boilerplate. Plus, I’ve overelaborated too early with things like piece movement and post processing layers. This should have started out as a grid with cells that fill with characters like emoji simulator or a roguelike, but I got fixated on trying out hexes because of games like Ogre and Hoplite, and the idea that there would be rooms. Now that I am thinking more and more about Hunt the Wumpus and its squished dodecahedron with 20 nodes I like the idea of linked nodes… that’s the simpler version of what I was trying to accomplish with a hexgrid and filled hexes for walls.
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Thicket 1.1.2alpha release notes
Thicket 1.1.2alpha is a little bit more game-like but definitely still an experimental space and not particularly fun. Thanks to James Curry, Nick Crockett and Alex Rickett for fielding my bumbling programming questions.
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more thicket maze generation
Maze generator is centered and working nicely now thanks to some help from James. I now need to stop manually placing player and npc objects and place them in unoccupied spaces in the mapbuilder script (right now if a tree lands on a character there’s a hang)
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Dirtstyle 1
against better judgement, the last 20 hours were spent driving feom LA to Austin, without stopping or having any contact with strangers. I’m about to collapse, but I had an idea during the drive. I keep interrogating these old game ideas (Thicket is a really old one) by asking myself, “how is this situated?” Where does the game go to connect it to the world and prevent it from just blowing away, never interacted with, like so much digital media in a now fathomless sea of noise?
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maze creation
It’s been a hairy quarter so far and I haven’t had a lot of time to look at Thicket, but I have been playing with maze generation a little bit. Alex Rickett sketched out a possible implementation of Primm’s Maze and I’m experimenting with parts of it. I’m drawing a hex-shaped island of ground based on a given radius int, then trying to draw a boundary around it (shown by these debug red dots) and then adding bramble scenery which are both opaque and add obstacle tiles (red dots). Right now the ring around the map is slightly too big and the brambles are drawing off the edge of the map, so it’s probably problems related to coordinate conversions. Also I’m not sure if Alex’s node-based solution is a good solution for me. James Curry also experimented with a grid-based version (all in php!) worth looking at here
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Field of View pt 3
I haven’t had a lot of time to play with Thicket lately, but I updated FOV to increase and decrease with the in-game time of day. I did this by wiring the turn counter into a Mathf.PingPong function and using that as the FOV size int.
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Field of View pt 2
Field of view is working now. There were a couple of issues previously- one was related to a rounding error in hex line drawing, which James helpfully caught. Another was a missing hex-to-offset coordinate conversion. Now I have very nice looking FOV erasure of fog tiles. Next steps will be to turn the fog on always and to map the vision range to time of day, so you see further during the day than at night, rather than night happening all at once, also I need to redraw the fog each turn so the fov is turn-by-turn rather than cumulative.
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Field of View
I haven’t posted about Thicket lately because I’m in a 6 week long compressed summer statistics course which is kind of kicking my ass. I am still consistently working on Thicket though. Right now I am working on field of view for fog of war. This consists of a couple of functions that I ported from the Red Blobs site with the help of James Curry. Field of View uses a rangefinding function and then uses a line drawing function to draw a line to every tile that range finds. If the line hits an obstacle then we dump the hexes from that line, if not, we add them to the array. Then I clear that array of hexes from the Fog tilemap by adding a null tile to them. Right now the range function works and the line drawing function mmmmmostly works? (It draws some slightly irregular lines sometimes and I’m not sure why) But the whole field of view function is choking for some reason on the method I use to check for obstacles, which are a type of object I call scenery which can have a bool called “opaque”, instead of using the pathfinding tilemap which is a whole different thing. Now why this scenery check is causing a problem, I can’t yet determine. I’m using it in the Spoor script (spoor is the scent object that animals leave behind) to check for water tiles, and it works fine there, and uses the same kind of coordinate (offset) input. for some reason in my field of view function it hangs everything up, however, with no error. I miss having a class instructor to bounce problems like this off of- James doesn’t know/have Unity so he’s best to ask about things like the psuedocode on the Redblobs hexgrid site, not stuff deep in my unity project like this.
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Offset to cube coordinate conversions
I was able to make my own functions to convert from offset coordinates (what unity tilemap and SimplePathFinding2d use) to cube coordinates (what I presumably need to be able to get hex ranges and line of sight). I replaced the square range finding for highlighting moves (which was complicated and distorted every other column you moved) for this hex one- this is currently just moving out in each direction in a star shape, but with a little more puzzling I should be able to get the whole range (I hope).
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Game thoughts
The original model I had for Thicket was for exploring the problem of how a powerless actor defends themself against a powerful one (the solution is still pretty ugly). So, what happens when we also design for the perspective of the predator that is just trying to survive? Or for the chicken that potentially gets sacrificed to distract the wolf from the deer? What happens when we say, “what’s the least awful solution to this problem?” (presumably one that kills the least number of pieces on the board). How do we design for a game that doesn’t conveniently end when the predator animal is killed or put in check or the prey animal is eaten? The answer is we try to imagine the best possible outcome for the situation, one where you can’t just redesign predation itself, and that’s one very much like the actual balance that happens in nature. Predators cull older, less healthy animals and the populations are relatively stable in this relationship. The other option would be to eliminate predators, in which case the prey animals might overpopulate and die of disease. Rather than treat the scenario as just a chess game, make it a simulation where the game never ends, but different kinds of stasis can be reached, like- everybody dies, or populations stabilize. So the original strategies of manipulating powerful animals into eliminating each other are still there, but that’s not the only level the game operates at- the game would continue if the player dies or the predator dies and you see what happens. Then use the engine to move on from the predator/prey problem and model different problems, the problems should represent themselves- they don’t need to be metaphors for anything to be valuable or meaningful outside of the idea that problems can’t really be solved by just ‘eliminating’ an enemy.
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𐂂 Thicket End of Quarter Summary
This stage of developement has necessarily been primarily a study in programming skills and design patterns for games. I learned a lot about creating event driven state machines, delegates, pathfinding, using singletons, and more. All of these things are currently incorporated into the game and will influence the development I plan to continue on it after this course.
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Offset vs Cube
So There’s a few ways of adressing a hex on a hexgrid. One is regular square grid style co-ordinates (just offset), and another is Vector3 cube co-ordinates- For a better description and visual aids, check out this page on red blob games.
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refactoring
Ok, refactoring was a very good idea. Nick suggested that we separate a bunch of stuff out from piece into behavior scripts, then get rid of the GameController script, make a pieceManager that is in charge of looping through pieces turns, and then have lists of behaviors on each piece that execute in order. Anyway, now enemy movement and eating pieces both work.
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refactoring
The suggestion for my AI movement woes is to refactor and create a player script and an ai script that both inherit from piece. This kind of depresses me a little but I’ll try it.
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Why won't you move?
I’ve been stuck all week trying to figure out why my AI pieces aren’t moving when they seem to be correctly making paths. I’m sure it’s probably something easy about the way the simplepathfinding2d package I am using works, but I am stumped.
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GetPathPointList?
So, I made a lot of progress the other day with the addition of Simple PathFinding 2d… I’m successfully drawing debug paths that conform to my hexgrid. The next step is figuring out how to grab a list of Vector3Ints for grid locations along a path and then turn them to world positions with CellToWorld and then step through them one at a time (each piece has a range var that represents how many spaces they can move each turn).
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tiles and pieces
I played with those hexgrid helper classes for a while and then put them aside. I’ve decided to start from scratch and then return to them later. Right now I want to just conceptualize the most basic objects in the game, and if there’s something I don’t know how to do immediately I’ll pseudocode it.
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Thicket week 1
Set up a page and post tag to serve as my process book for a solo game project for school, these are now hidden from the main feed.
More ➜Links:
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Emoji Simulator
I'm really inspired by this emoji cellular automata tool made by Nicky Case. I feel like it wouldn't take much to turn this into a game construction set. Just give "listen to the arrow keys" as a possible ruleset for an emoji so that peice can be a player -
Unity mesh basics
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hexagonal grids, red blob games
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catlike coding,hexmaps
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Unity Docs, Procedural Mesh Geometry
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wikipedia animals chess
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wikipedia Fifteen Rabbits by Felix Salten
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wikipedia Hunt the Wumpus
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Game Programming Patterns
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Unity - 2d extras
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Ray Wenderlich,tilemap
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unity docs Tilemap.GetTile
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how to get all tiles from a tilemap
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how to add and get component from a tilemap
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unity tilmap A*
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Unity, learning tilemaps
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hexagonal tilemaps,unity docs
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scriptable tiles, unity docs
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Prim's maze hexgrid