SLUMS
THIS IS NOT A GAME
Nor a tool, or a video, it's just your computer creating things from 1 and 0, it's pure mathematics in action at the service of the art, isn't it wonderful ?
Brewed with blood love for the PROCJAM 2022 (make something that make something). SLUMS can generate a fully procedural dystopian/cyberpunk/space opera city piece by piece in REAL TIME.
1.1 UPDATE
https://alambik.itch.io/slums/devlog/617397/slums-11-update
CONTROLS
- Press SPACE to regen the SLUMS
- LEFT CLICK or T to enable/disable Time speed x 6
- RIGHT CLICK anywhere or press C to take a Capture and save it as clean .png automatically named after the city
- MOUSE WHEEL to change the color of the scene (100 colors)
- Press S to enable/disable the Screensaver mode, auto regenerating a SLUMS every 180 seconds
- Press D to add 30 seconDs to the screensaver timer
- Press 1, 2, 3 to change the color grading filter
- Press M to Mute/unMute the audio
TRIVIA
- There are +1422 hand drawn sprites.
- There are 136 307 520 possible places (names) combinaisons, if you take 1 second after an other to visit a place you will need more than 4 years to view all of them.
- I was very inspired by an old Maxis game : SimTower and Yoot tower, his spiritual successor, you should play them if you like building/management game, I did'nt have courage to make a real game like those.
NOTA
Be sure your web browser is supporting WebGL and have hardware acceleration turn on in the settings : https://get.webgl.org/
The game should read "WebGL" in the top left corner, not "Canvas2D"
Development log
- SLUMS 1.1 UpdateOct 12, 2023
Comments
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absolutely mesmerizing.. can absolutely understand you made a DRM protection!! this is pure art man!! reminds me of a game i loved called canabalt. thanks so much..
ps: still waiting for the screensaver :)
I hate the websites (and people) like "Y8" & co, who steal the [FREE] creations of Itch.io devs to make money on their back, without any consent or remuneration. The DRM try to be basically a giant middle finger to all this soulless capitalistic trashbags. But any h4ck3rman can break that in 5 min I guess...
Canabalt art direction is very similar indeed. But I think the main inspiraton beside SimTower, is Mineshift, another PROCJAM (2021) entry.
Thx for the visit citizen, and don't forget to go out with your trans-dermal ID chip up to date, or the cyber neo cartel will cause you trouble🤖
After the Construct screen, it seems to be a black screen for me. Pressing space and mouse buttons do nothing.
What is your browser ?
Do you have hardware acceleration turned on ?
If you cant see the cube here : https://get.webgl.org/ you have a problem.
FireFox, but I have them all. I'm not using the browser version, I'm using the downloaded version from the Itch shell program. Not sure if I have hardware acceleration. I can't seem to find it in the nVidia control panel. I can see the cube. Thanks for the help.
All right, I have absolutely no idea how the Itch launcher work. I guess it's just some kind of web browser in disguise, there must be some settings you can tweak or something.
This would be cool as a screensaver. Maybe with some settings like a timer for starting a new slum.
Boom, screensaver update.
Yo sick!
so cooooool!
Hey Alambik, I was wondering if I could use this (or at least take VERY heavy inspiration) on a website I'm building, I think a slum being generated in front of you on the homepage of a website with "Dystopian" in its name is absolutely perfect. Could you contact me at my email, [email protected]? If I can't that's fine too, and thanks for reading :)
Hi Dustin, SLUMS has a built in site-block DRM (see one of my comment below), this mean it can only be executed on this webpage (it's a bit more complicated than that in fact), and I'm sorry but I don't plan to rework on it for the moment.
But yeah, of course you can take inspiration, I don't have the monopoly of dystopian cities generators, go make your own if you want, I would love to see the result :)
Thats... honestly im going to need to look into having content i make protected using a similar siteblock, thats a really good idea.
I thought of something just now - could I record 100-500 instances of the program, then have those be randomly selected to display each time the page is reloaded? I'm thinking if not I'll have to try my hand at coding because I'm dedicated to this idea now lol
It would be really cool if you used procedural generation on the music
heres a link to someone who made a procedural music generator.
https://codepen.io/jak_e/full/EKRarY
Yes I already had the idea, it's not really that difficult to do, but I preferred to make the "perfect" track I wanted to match what is on screen.
And if we want to go further, we can procedurally generate absolutely everything, from peoples, to ships, and background, but as a developer you need to mark a stop somewhere in the procgen madness !
that sounds like it would be epic! procedural generation generating a procedural generator procedurally.
it would be cool if you turned this into a sidescroller where you fight proceduraly generated robots or something.
This is awesome.
Holy shit this reminds me of brigador up armored kinda :3
Mmh... that's would be funny to destroy the entire city with a giant mech :)
yea x3
This is really atmospheric, actually.
Would you be willing to provide a binary to download? I'd love to set this as a screensaver on my Linux Mint machine. 🤔
Hum... there are an hidden site-block "DRM" in the program to prevent theft, cause some people steal itch.io stuff to put it on their shitty websites full of ads, without permission and without crediting creators, even the HTML ones.
2 of my projects where theft previously so I made a custom anti theft protection powered by a strong code obfuscator specially for this project.
To make a linux port I will need to remove it, or the program wont run on your computer. And even if the code is minify I'm afraid of some kind of data mining / retro engineering and a potential unethical redistribution of my "intellectual property" :)
I will study the case, but I can't confirm anything for now, and also I cant test/debug myself a linux version.
That's fair.
If you change your mind (and don't feel like installing a distro) I'd be happy to give it a test run. 👍
this feels less like a city generator and more like watching some kind of techno-organic fungus slowly consume a planet.
that's not a complaint, that's the most true-to-genre reaction the program could've gotten out of me.
That's true there is really something organic happening here. Some kind of parasitic/bacterial behavior. Maybe the reflect of our own behavior, who knows ?
I love the variety of different backgrounds, some of them feel like truly surreal locations for a cyberpunk city.
Makes me wanna continue the city generator I was working on a while back… >.<
Hmm... if you take a look at the top left of the screen, you should read "SLUMS 1.0 web gl" but it seems your browser use the 2d canvas renderer, try updating chrome and to force "hardware acceleration" on the settings. You can test if your browser is Web gl compatible here : https://get.webgl.org/
Ah okay, my Chrome is up to date but I have to have hardware acceleration off because it breaks some things I use for streaming. No worries, then! Firefox works great.
I adore the atmosphere that each of the generated cities have, especially with how the background elements can compliment/contrast with the city in front of it. The background variant filled with spikes is my personal favorite; feels reminiscent of old nuclear warning concepts which is perfect for a sci-fi setting!
Bruh, the nuclear waste warnings concept is the precise inspiration for this background ! Glad to see somone know that crazy stuff.
The red biome is the hot/volcano biome, so I tought it would be a great idea to put this particular shape here, both disturbing and forbidding, perfect for an hypothetical Alien landscape.
Super cool!
This is so coooll! Absolutely stunning aesthetic and atmosphere!!
Such a cool concept beautifully executed, great stuff!
This is incredible work! Very inspiring, and just mesmerizing to watch
The atmosphere to these are great.
The towers build out of tiny pieces, yet the final results look very coherent. I wonder how you managed that.
Each building is made of 32x32 px block, each block is animated, when a block pass a certain point on the animation, it spawn a new block or a roof and also sides blocks. There are also "bridges" block who can spawn between building with a certain gap space. Also the maximum height for the towers is specific to each layers, at a certain point, a roof must spawn.
This is incredible! The only change I would really appreciate is that you set a specific key to change the scene, not all of them, because if a player is in full screen and needs to task switch or wants to take a screenshot they lose the city they're observing. (I figured out a way around it but it's cumbersome.)
I love the audio design. You really captured the ambiance of Blade Runner and I like that at least some of it is dynamic, such as with the big ships. (I'm assuming it's a combination of procedural and dynamic but I'm not entirely sure.)
Thank you. Yeah... don't worry, I know the keymapping is ****, that was a real pain to make screenshots for the project > U <
Only the big ships make sounds, the smalls one are directly incorporate into the music to fill the gaps and to have more control over the soundscape. It would had been difficult to hear the music otherwise. I really wanted the big ships to make that cinematic sonic blast effect.
I only saw the first Blade Runner, sure I was inspired by the movie, but for the music its clearly Deus Ex HR who had insipired me the most I think. Take a look at this :
Oh, I see. I haven't played Deus Ex: Human Revolution so I wasn't aware, although now that I've looked it up I see that composer Michael McCann was inspired by Vangelis's film scores.
Thanks for that link. I'm going to check out the whole score.
Amazing concept! One of the most unique submissions I have seen in a while. Love your work :)
Thx dear follower, since you are into music, I hope your ears didn't bleed too much when you heard my ""mastering"" , done with a 20 euros headphone :)
Wow haha, I still think the music sounds great!
Thx, for info I used the "enigmatic" scale here, that's why the music sound bizzare & unusual
They didn't teach us in music school about this. So cool! It kind of feels like a diminished scale.
Thanks for sharing, I'll definitely use this in the future :)
I see how you remixed Future Fish Food into this. Great idea! Looks and sounds amazing.
Thats right, there is a little of my previous game here, and also a bit of Bladerunner and star wars, in particular for the dark crowded streets and the heavy aerial traffic.
The ambience and pixel arts are absolutely gorgeous, great "not game" !
Thx, I see you are also a procedural enthusiast, your Geneland as clearly its place here, thats a really nice start.
Thanks! I'm gonna work a bit more on Geneland before putting it in a procjam because the text generation is really barebone for now lol, but I'm working on a small "not game" with some friends to submit to Procjam2022 🙂
I cant wait to see it