Shai Shapira

The Overseer is a little game I made for the 7-day Experimental Gameplay Project. The topic was “infinite world”, and this is how the game works:

You are the overseer of an experiment. Your robot must go through the infinite corridor of your laboratory, without running out of fuel. You do not directly control the robot, but you control the world – you need to set the parameters that generate the world to your advantage, to keep the robot (who is controlled by an AI, and not a very bright one) fueled and going.
The robot may encounter four things: energy packs (the yellow glowing orbs), mana packs (the blue glowing orbs), oil puddles which make the robot slide without losing energy, and spikes which damage the robot, requiring energy to repair.

Controls:

– The bottom panel is where your options are. The yellow line represents the robot’s energy – once it runs out, the game is over. The blue line is your mana – if that runs out, you can no longer do anything do affect the world until the robot picks up additional mana.

– The middle line shows the probability of each item to be generated. Click and drag each item to change the probability – the more you drag the more effect you make, but the more mana you spend.

Confession – I didn’t plan well enough for the 7 day schedule, so the gameplay is quite lacking… Consider it more of a demo than an actual game.

Here’s what it looks like:

Download it here. The game is free software, released under the simplified BSD license.