i love this so much, I would love to add this to my wall paper, but im mostly on a Chromebook book so it's harder to do stuff like that, so I usually just wait for the sim so stop generating buildings to screenshot it and put it as my wallpaper, but I also just ADORE the pixel art style i cannot just stop looking at this and i love the ships that sometimes flies by if i could get a picture of one before it leaves i would toatally do a pixle art of it. But fr the main point im trying to say is that it's just good, like good good
Ha ha. I just recently created a Bluesky account (that's what any "serious" indy dev do). If you do so, feel free to share that over there or here if you want to show the extent of your creativity to the entire multiverse 👽
Since I dont have a Bluesky, I'll show it all here at the moment. I've done 7, but those are the small ones lol if you want to see how it's going, I have a pixel-art account
Find the source html file in the inspect element (the link to just the content, you know you found it when you see SLUMS in a fullscreen html page without any fluff, now copy the link.
Wow, this is insane, I didn't know about that, the dream finally come true for some people, you are a true screen ... saver. Here is 1 000 000 ㋳ federation credits for your contribution, enough to buy a can of space crab soup 🤖
I can confirm it work perfectly, It even continue to work offline, there is also sound and mouse click recognition, but I didn't manage to get the mouse wheel and keyboard controls working, maybe there is a way ?
Otherwise, I should maybe make a SLUMS - Lively special edition, with the screensaver mode activated by default or something, It will be easy to make... Anyway, I already put the setup process on the page thanks to you. But personally, I think I will stay with my old blank and soulless wallpaper, my desktop already looks like a dystopian cyberpunk garbage
You can enable keyboard or mouse inputs in settings > wallpaper > wallpaper input
If you end up making a lively version of SLUMS, you should 100% ask the lively developers to put it in the wallpaper library by default, as there are similar things like parralax.js already included.
Also I just want to thank you for the procedural generator as I've been using it as a wallpaper for years.
AND thanks for the 1 000 000 ㋳ federation credits, I gambled it into 400 000 000 ㋳ and finally bought my dream house on Folstag X
Ha ha ha, Folstag X, I guess it's still better than the District 9 of Sinister Tartarus Prime... 💀
I couldn't imagine SLUMS will resonate this much with some people, thank you for your interest in this little piece of software, this means a lot to me. What you said really motivates me to make a Lively custom version now, I hope Lively devs will eventually be open to this idea, if not, Lively seems to be open source if I'm correct, this means I could provide a custom Lively package with SLUMS in it.
Oh, and as an intensive "user", feel free to give me any feedback, ideas or maybe things you wanted to see in a "SLUMS Lively edition". For now, with the upcoming PROCJAM 2025, I'm more into different procgen stuff, but this would be really cool to make that after.
I don't even know how I crafted this thing (in 2 weeks ! (and +-1 month for 1.1 I guess)) . I was like...possessed and the thing just happened. I have no resources to give you except the 1.1 devlog here and me :
Among all the inspiration I already gave on the comment below, there are also City bomber (or Blitz, the game generate the city each time) an old computer game I was playing in elementary school, this game was also clearly in my mind when I made SLUMS 20 years later.
You can see how the buildings layout made of cells influenced the making of SLUMS. It's the same here. Just see the layout as a giant grid where 32x32px cells are colonized procedurally. When a cell animation reach a certain point it just trigger a "coin toss" and then the program decide to colonize a nearby cell and how to colonize it (or not), and then, the process repeat, again and again, on multiple layers, until cells cannot be colonized. The program follow a ruleset to build the city, while also picking building element on different pools depending on many factors. This, a ton of handmade assets, mixed with a ton of RNG, is what give life to the SLUMS
Thanks :) Ok so if I understand correctly, you'd have a main structure grid with "plugable blocks" and some decorations grid picking random assets to enhance and bring more life and chaos (in an ordered way :P) + some variations depending on the different depths. Then vehicles + some ppl animations. Rince and repeat for different biomes. Is that correct?
That's more of a logical grid, all the logic is made around 32px size main " plugable blocks", for art and math and all . Each blocks is effectively, a unique sprite/obj, with its variable and all. It's overly under optimized I think, that why you can sometimes read +1000 obj on the top right, near a "60fps" I hope. On early prototype the blocks were able to spawn without following any kind of grid placement and that was more ... complicated and chaotic, both from a dev or art perspective. You got the recipe. Here for example you have the very famous frame n°16 of the animation "BLOCK10" :
And here you have the frame n°11 of the object "SHIP", the USS... Callister :)
Yeah, that's about it, a bunch of sprites, some rulesets and RNGesus put into the equation. Amen.
Ohh it's so nice, clever, it's a bit like pre-rendered morphing. It make a lot of sense! Thank you so much for your kind explanations and for taking the time to answer me! :)
I don't know if you already use batching, but it could help a lot with draw calls and perfs.
If you talk about the draw call render technique. The engine do that natively. The perf seem ok on my side considering the number of moving shit on the screen. Stable 60 fps on HTML and + on desktop. But I really don't know if the engine does the job correctly in this case considering the astronomical number of animation frames spread on multiple spritesheet. I also considered the use of tilemap at early dev, a giant texture atlas for everything, but I finally used this method.
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..
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🤖
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.
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i love this so much, I would love to add this to my wall paper, but im mostly on a Chromebook book so it's harder to do stuff like that, so I usually just wait for the sim so stop generating buildings to screenshot it and put it as my wallpaper, but I also just ADORE the pixel art style i cannot just stop looking at this and i love the ships that sometimes flies by if i could get a picture of one before it leaves i would toatally do a pixle art of it. But fr the main point im trying to say is that it's just good, like good good
Thanks for being my 154th follower void006. Let me give you the ships spritesheet (the spriteship🤡) used in SLUMS. Just to show you my gratitude.
I would love too see colored pixel art version of some 😉
Pogers, and as another gift for being your 154th follower, I will color some of the ships (it should definitely be called spriteship 🤡)
Ha ha. I just recently created a Bluesky account (that's what any "serious" indy dev do).
If you do so, feel free to share that over there or here if you want to show the extent of your creativity to the entire multiverse 👽
Since I dont have a Bluesky, I'll show it all here at the moment. I've done 7, but those are the small ones lol if you want to see how it's going, I have a pixel-art account
Oh, I see, some of your art looks like pixel art Jackson Pollock painting :) But I didn't manage to see any spaceships
Of all things great about this I love the FTL effect most. Thank you for making this, it's amazing!
❤❤THXXX❤❤
Its possible to use SLUMS as a live wallpaper in windows.
First download Lively wallpaper: https://github.com/rocksdanister/lively
Find the source html file in the inspect element (the link to just the content, you know you found it when you see SLUMS in a fullscreen html page without any fluff, now copy the link.
or just copy https://html-classic.itch.zone/html/9128725/index.html if you don't want to mess around in inspect
Now open lively and click the + button
Click enter URL and paste the link in. Now it will download the page and play the html file in the background.
Its pretty simple but I'm not sure how many people know about it so I figured id leave instructions here.
Wow, this is insane, I didn't know about that, the dream finally come true for some people, you are a true screen ... saver.
Here is 1 000 000 ㋳ federation credits for your contribution, enough to buy a can of space crab soup 🤖
I can confirm it work perfectly, It even continue to work offline, there is also sound and mouse click recognition, but I didn't manage to get the mouse wheel and keyboard controls working, maybe there is a way ?
Otherwise, I should maybe make a SLUMS - Lively special edition, with the screensaver mode activated by default or something, It will be easy to make... Anyway, I already put the setup process on the page thanks to you. But personally, I think I will stay with my old blank and soulless wallpaper, my desktop already looks like a dystopian cyberpunk garbage
You can enable keyboard or mouse inputs in settings > wallpaper > wallpaper input
If you end up making a lively version of SLUMS, you should 100% ask the lively developers to put it in the wallpaper library by default, as there are similar things like parralax.js already included.
Also I just want to thank you for the procedural generator as I've been using it as a wallpaper for years.
AND thanks for the 1 000 000 ㋳ federation credits, I gambled it into 400 000 000 ㋳ and finally bought my dream house on Folstag X
Ha ha ha, Folstag X, I guess it's still better than the District 9 of Sinister Tartarus Prime... 💀
I couldn't imagine SLUMS will resonate this much with some people, thank you for your interest in this little piece of software, this means a lot to me. What you said really motivates me to make a Lively custom version now, I hope Lively devs will eventually be open to this idea, if not, Lively seems to be open source if I'm correct, this means I could provide a custom Lively package with SLUMS in it.
Oh, and as an intensive "user", feel free to give me any feedback, ideas or maybe things you wanted to see in a "SLUMS Lively edition". For now, with the upcoming PROCJAM 2025, I'm more into different procgen stuff, but this would be really cool to make that after.
I cannot stop coming back to your project. Do you have any doc/blog on how you achieved this? I'm super curious about the making of such :)
I don't even know how I crafted this thing (in 2 weeks ! (and +-1 month for 1.1 I guess)) . I was like...possessed and the thing just happened. I have no resources to give you except the 1.1 devlog here and me :
Among all the inspiration I already gave on the comment below, there are also City bomber (or Blitz, the game generate the city each time) an old computer game I was playing in elementary school, this game was also clearly in my mind when I made SLUMS 20 years later.
You can see how the buildings layout made of cells influenced the making of SLUMS. It's the same here. Just see the layout as a giant grid where 32x32px cells are colonized procedurally. When a cell animation reach a certain point it just trigger a "coin toss" and then the program decide to colonize a nearby cell and how to colonize it (or not), and then, the process repeat, again and again, on multiple layers, until cells cannot be colonized. The program follow a ruleset to build the city, while also picking building element on different pools depending on many factors. This, a ton of handmade assets, mixed with a ton of RNG, is what give life to the SLUMS
The rest, is just dark magic 😈
If you have any question...
Thanks :) Ok so if I understand correctly, you'd have a main structure grid with "plugable blocks" and some decorations grid picking random assets to enhance and bring more life and chaos (in an ordered way :P) + some variations depending on the different depths. Then vehicles + some ppl animations.
Rince and repeat for different biomes.
Is that correct?
That's more of a logical grid, all the logic is made around 32px size main " plugable blocks", for art and math and all . Each blocks is effectively, a unique sprite/obj, with its variable and all. It's overly under optimized I think, that why you can sometimes read +1000 obj on the top right, near a "60fps" I hope. On early prototype the blocks were able to spawn without following any kind of grid placement and that was more ... complicated and chaotic, both from a dev or art perspective. You got the recipe. Here for example you have the very famous frame n°16 of the animation "BLOCK10" :
And here you have the frame n°11 of the object "SHIP", the USS... Callister :)
Yeah, that's about it, a bunch of sprites, some rulesets and RNGesus put into the equation. Amen.
Ohh it's so nice, clever, it's a bit like pre-rendered morphing. It make a lot of sense! Thank you so much for your kind explanations and for taking the time to answer me! :)
I don't know if you already use batching, but it could help a lot with draw calls and perfs.
If you talk about the draw call render technique. The engine do that natively. The perf seem ok on my side considering the number of moving shit on the screen. Stable 60 fps on HTML and + on desktop. But I really don't know if the engine does the job correctly in this case considering the astronomical number of animation frames spread on multiple spritesheet. I also considered the use of tilemap at early dev, a giant texture atlas for everything, but I finally used this method.
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!