Capture The Flag

I made the reproduction algorithm better. When it’s time to reproduce, the organisms with the most amount of flags captured for each team reproduce with occasional mutations. I also added an invincibility feature in which the organism does not detect collisions for the first half second after respawning.

I think all that’s left is to make the UI prettier and create graphics for the players. If I’m up to the challenge, I might further improve the combat and reproduction algorithm, because right now, I’m rewarding selfish organisms (organisms that only focus on capturing flags rather than defending or something). If I can find a way to encourage both selfish and selfless organisms, that will make this simulation 10 times better.

I finished making the base of the game. I created the colliders (it’s a big buggy, but for the most part it works).

I need to fix my natural selection algorithm because right now, it sucks. I need to find a way to decide which organisms should reproduce and which ones should die.

Once I figure that out, I should focus more on the frontend. For my last project, I kind of neglected the frontend, but for this one, I want the animations/design to actually look good. I don’t have much frontend/design experience, so let’s see how this goes!

I have been procrastinating on creating the colliders because such a task seems daunting. So, what I did instead was create more input neurons and debugged the code so that the neural connections actually work.

I also coded the algorithm to detect if a player has the flag. Because it’s incredibly difficult to train a neural network to bring back the flag once it has it, I coded an algorithm that forces the player to bring the flag back to its base regardless of its output neurons. This feels like cheating, but it’s the only way to get this to work lol

To discourage players from getting stuck to the wall, I should make it so that if it stays at the wall for more than 5 seconds, it will die and respawn.

I need to create the respawn algorithm, killing algorithm, and the colliders. After I get the root of the game done, I need to figure out how I want to simulate natural selection here. I have a couple of ideas, but that is a problem for future me!

I created very basic player movements using only the current player’s position (x and y coordinates) as input neurons. I will try to create the colliders next time I have time to work on this. The colliders seem like a lot of work to implement, so the next devlog have a bunch of hours :)

I created the flag sprites and began coding the internal neurons. I need to figure out how to detect colliders in js, though. The small black box on the top left corner of the field is the player. In the end, I will probably make an actual sprite of the player, but for now, it’ll be a black box :)