Those Who Die as Cattle
What if a game gave you the backstory of everyone you killed or got killed? I feel like I've heard this question asked before, but I've never seen it done. For Ludum Dare 56 (a game jam), I spent 48 hours building a prototype called Those Who Die As Cattle, a WW1 trench warfare simulation game. I used ChatGPT 4o-mini to generate details for the 12,000 soldiers involved in the game. Notably, I had to supply names because it couldn't introduce sufficient variety. I also had to add randomly generated adjectives for the soldiers; otherwise, the prompts were too similar, even with different seeds…
What it does
In the maker’s words, at launch
What if a game gave you the backstory of everyone you killed or got killed? I feel like I've heard this question asked before, but I've never seen it done. For Ludum Dare 56 (a game jam), I spent 48 hours building a prototype called Those Who Die As Cattle, a WW1 trench warfare simulation game. I used ChatGPT 4o-mini to generate details for the 12,000 soldiers involved in the game. Notably, I had to supply names because it couldn't introduce sufficient variety. I also had to add randomly generated adjectives for the soldiers; otherwise, the prompts were too similar, even with different seeds and temperatures. Initially, I used Claude (which I usually prefer), but it made every soldier a former carpenter’s apprentice. Since this is a game and your actions should matter, instead of generating one block of text, I had it generate JSON by providing a template with cues for different things that might happen to the soldier. I used these to dynamically assemble a story for each casualty. For example: { "briefBio": "Tell me a little bit about the solider", // Putting this first is critical to introduce variety … "lastThoughtsArtilleryDead": "What are his last thoughts as he dies from an artillery strike" , … "effectOnOthersShotInjured": "What are the long term impacts on the people who care about him when he is seriously injured by a bullet wound", } The prompt template can be found here: https://gist.github.com/ElliotSwart/f7b5754f3b02e6c99791e365... The underlying simulation was programmed using Unity ECS (Entity Component System) and simulated, to some degree, each soldier and artillery piece. Casualties were taken in entity order, so there's some predictability regarding when each name gets added to the list, though it isn't completely deterministic. The area where I skimped the most was the UI, but the game is in a playable state if you're willing to look at the center column and figure out what the numbers mean. A final notable learning is that Unity UI toolkit (their modern, web dev like solution) performs significantly better on the web than in the native linux build, at least on the 2022 LTS version of Unity. This suggests that they may be leveraging the rendering efficiencies built into browsers.
Does the same job
all alternatives →- MAMeatshields – An in-browser turn-based strategy game2017 · ▲113
A few months ago (82 days to be exact!) I posted a link on HN to my game, Meatshields. A bunch of you commented and played my game and gave me some wonderful feedback. Over the last few months I've been playing with many of you and implementing the best of everybody's suggestions. So, thank you, HN for all your help! I feel this is an extreme overhaul I couldn't have done without your input. Since then, I have: Dramatically improved our hosting platform (So it HOPEFULLY won't go down this time (oops.)), Added two new units, Rebalanced all existing units, Added many more maps, Improved the…
- AHAn HTML5 game we made in 72 hours for Ludum Dare2013 · godswillbewatching.clay.io · ▲49
Point-and-click adventure with only one scenary! We tried to approach Minimalism trough gameplay. Isolated on a single stage, with a few a possible actions, you must endure trough a 40 days survival until the Sgt. Burden's crew can be rescued. Enjoy the puzzle and stay alive! And let me know if you have escaped the planet!
- MAMeatshields – A free, online, turn-based strategy game2017 · ▲42
I made an in-browser game called Meatshields (https://meatshields.com) which allows players to play a turn-based strategy game against many different players simultaneously. The game is heavily inspired by Advance Wars and I wanted to give people the multiplayer experience I loved from my childhood. I couldn't find an online version of the gameplay that I really loved (Advance Wars By Web (AWBW) is FANTASTIC, but there are actually a few gameplay mechanics in Advance Wars that I take issue with that I wanted to try to balance myself), so I decided to make my own. It's still pretty…
- WMWe made a game this week-end!2014 · ▲9
Hi Hacker News! My friend and I [1] would like to share with you something we did this week-end. We really like the idea of game jams like the Ludum Dare, and we’d like to participate, but it’s often complicated for us, as we are often limited by the rules inherent to this kind of competition: we have to be available at specific dates, and the rules doesn’t always work for us. For example: if you want to participate as a team in a Ludum Dare compo, you have 72h instead of 48h, and you are not required to publish your code. We realized that what we really like is: - To work together. - The…
- MWMeatshields – Write your own strategy game AI2017 · ▲7
Hello, HN! I've posted a couple times here to get feedback on a strategy game I've been working on called Meatshields. All of your suggestions and feedback have been EXTREMELY helpful so I want to thank everyone here once again for generously helping me iron out kinks in the game. One big request I got the last time I showed the game was the ability to write your own AI for it. I thought about it and realized that would be totally do-able! The downside is that you have to host the AI service yourself, so it's sort of BYOAI, but it won't need to support a massive ton of requests or anything…
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