[Drem]

For some reason this PSP game comes out in the US tomorrow. I don't know who was crazy enough to do it but bless their souls.

Carnage Heart, developed by Artdink, has always been something I've been curious about since I first saw the trailer on the PS1 demo disc that came with the system. It's a strategy game where you command a squad of robots (called Overkill Engines) but what makes it interesting is that you don't ever issue commands to them. Instead the game has you literally program the OKE's behaviors using a flow-chart like system. The most recent comparison I can think of is Final Fantasy XII's gambit system although Carnage Heart is significantly more involved.

Before battle you assemble your OKEs by choosing their physical build much like Armored Core, deciding weapons, engines, CPU, etc., which of course affect the actual physical capabilities of the individual units. According to wikipedia there was a system where you negotiated with production companies to procure equipment, adjust sales prices, and influence technological research in OKEs for both you and your enemies. Once you've built your robots you can then program them. Depending on the CPU you installed you will have more or less space for programming, but essentially you're given a grid on which you can install "chips" into each square. Each chip does a different action (I think you can tweak their behaviors as well) and you string these chips into a flowchart that your robot follows, endlessly cycling until the battle is finished.

So the big thing about this game is just trying to create the most efficient and competent program you can with what equipment you have available. It sounds incredibly niche and is clearly not for everyone, but I really loved this aspect in FFXII so I'm also interested in Carnage Heart. I don't know if anyone here has played it or is interested in picking up this new one, but it's cool that it's getting a release.

The game's first trailer. You can see some of the programming at around 42 seconds in: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FnRohuymLS4

Playstation store description:The centerpiece of Carnage Heart EXA is the design and implementation of giant robots called Overkill Engines (OKE). By themselves, these robots are unimpressive; only by hardware and software modifications do they become truly terrifying machines. Players will have a multitude of hardware and software options to add to their OKEs including weapons, fuel tanks, armor thickness, and more.

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I wonder if they didn't have time to fix that exploitation of the mechanics or if balancing it out to fix that exploit just made the game less interesting so they left it in.

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Here's that old trailer for the first game.

Here's a trailer from Natsume for EXA showing zoomed in video of a mech with spider legs jumping up and down a lot.

Another trailer showing the little hover robots that couldn't. It makes me want to set up bumper car matches where everyone is designed around damage through ramming. And the music in this game doesn't sound bad. I wonder who the composer it.

[Drem]

So this release came up kind of suddenly while I was in the mood to get Monster Hunter, but I did want to support the game so I went ahead and bought it. So having spent the money on it I felt I should at least play it a little bit of course. It's kind of winning me over from my Monster Hunter mood! I've only played like 5 minutes and it's all story scene/tutorial stuff but it's got a real nice atmosphere. Something about it reminds me of Front Mission. I think maybe it's the music; it's not overly "futuristic" but it provides a good atmosphere for something that takes place in the "near" future. The character dialogue feels very natural and has a good pace, enticing me to find out more about what's going on. It's a good start

The gist so far is that a Taiwanese girl named Chi-Ling Hsu is attending Cal Tech is down on her money and accepted a tutoring job through her financial aid program. She ends up at a huge mansion and meets a mysterious young man in a wheelchair who is attended by the a very straight faced android maid. His name is Kyle, there's some hint that he knows something about Chi-Ling's family, and he's decided his curriculum to revolved around Over Kill Engines. That's about all I've got so far.

Ironically the Vita, a system designed with a screenshot feature, can't take pictures of PSP games while the PSP, a system not designed with a screenshot feature, can take pictures of games if on a custom firmware. So everything I take is going to be from my cell phone. I wish I knew where my webcam was so I could stream the game at some point.

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Forgot to post these. Kind of a grim way to start the game!

[Drem]

Are you for real, Carnage Heart?


























Carnage Heart is not joking around. I've squeezed about 3 hours in between all my Monster Huntering and I'm still going through tutorials on manual control design. I haven't even touched automation yet. Very cool stuff. In a little bit I'm going to post a basic movement and attack program I made earlier to give you guys an idea of how the programming works.

But this game's seriously going to make me program in the ability to change my camera angle? So cruel! It takes up so much precious space in the CPU!

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Honestly the programming is actually very simple. It’s a simple flowchart of following the blue arrows down the line or branching at red arrows if certain conditions are met. The chips have defined uses and the tutorial does a good job of teaching you basic concepts of how you can make them work together to do basic actions like move and attack. But the game gives you enough freedom that you can tell very quickly that your program’s complexity is only limited by your ingenuity. And your CPU space.

Every CPU has a grid with a certain maximum number of action chips it can contain. Bigger CPUs can house more chips but will be heavier, causing your Overkill Engine (OKE) to move more slowly. CPUs also have speeds that tell you how quickly the CPU moves through the “flowchart”. While common sense would tell you that the faster the CPU the better, the Carnage Heart penalizes these CPUs if your OKE is ever shut down by a Pulse type weapon in combat. This period of inoperability is directly correlated with your CPU speed so the faster the CPU the more downtime your OKE will suffer. Arbitrary? Yes. But it makes your CPU speed selection more important.

Change your CPU size and speed based on your current mission!

Here’s a basic program I made at the beginning of the game to let me control my OKE manually. The objective was to let my program move forward, left, and right (without changing the direction it faces), rotate in both directions, and attack. This image is actually a splice of three separate images vertically (the game actually lets you take pictures using the Start button!). You can see an overview of the entire CPU in the map at the top right (ignore the cut off maps in the center of the screen; those are remnants from the image splicing).






Now I’ll go into each element of this program.





The Start icon is placed on the edge of the working space and, as one would expect, designates at which point the program begins. The flowchart will flow from Start and follow the blue arrows. The placement of this icon is fairly important since it controls exactly which directions your program can expand. If you start in the top left you can build right and down, but your program will probably hinge on some core concepts in the top left and build out into situational logic. Otherwise you’ll be very limited by space if you try to make some separate logic branches that only grow horizontally (you won’t have much space vertically if you’re trying to make separate, unrelated branches).

If you place the Start icon in the center you can now expand both left, right and down, letting you use combinational logic to create two distinct “sections” of your program that don’t interfere with each other. Satisfy conditions X and the program will proceed left, satisfy conditions Y and it’ll go right. Using this will give you more flexibility in making the separate behaviors for your OKE however you’ll also have less room horizontally to develop each section.



The Return chip is the end of your program. Whenever the program logic flow into a Return, it will reset back to Start and start over from the beginning. Whenever you place a chip it will flow into automatically placed Return chip until you replace the Return chip with a different one. Basically, you can’t have a chip flow into “nothing”. Since you’ll probably have multiple branches in your program you also have multiple Return chips. The corners of the CPU space also act as Return chips so if your program runs up against the wall you don’t have to leave room to place a Return chip, you can just direct the flow into the wall. Since space is such a precious commodity this is very useful.



The NOP (No Opertation) chip does nothing while simultaneously being incredibly useful in program design. NOPs don’t execute any actions but they still control the program’s flow of logic, receiving from one end and outputting from another end of your choice. This means you can use NOPs as bridges, connection the program from one area to another. If you need the program to connect from one chip to another chip a few spaces away you can use NOPs to create that flow without having to make extraneous actions.



This is a Movement chip, identified by a solid arrow with a distance below it. When choosing a movement chip you designate which of the 8 directions you want the OKE to move in and how far it will move measured in meters. I can’t remember off the top of my head how far it lets you go but you are able to choose Infinite (denoted by a lemniscate) to make the movement endless. If you set a Movement chip’s Processing Mode to Halt and set the distance to infinite you probably aren’t going to regain control of your OKE ever again.



The Rotate chips acts much like the movement chip except you’re denoting how much your OKE rotates. Choose left or right, choose the angle in which you’ll rotate, and set your processing mode. Without it you’ll be suck facing the same direction the entire battle.



The Attack chip lets your OKE do melee attacks. When setting the attack chip you choose which of four attack modes to execute: Low, High, Far, or Auto. Low and High will make the OKE swing its arms at the selected height while Far will make the OKE do a series of three attacks ending in a lunge. If the chip is set to Auto the program will automatically choose which attack to do itself. Again, the Processing Mode can be set to Halt or Passthrough.

Something important to mention here is the way Movement, Roatation, and Attack chips interact, and it boils down to this: movement and rotations chips can execute simultaneously but will be canceled if an Attach chip is executed. Conversely an Attack chips execution will be canceled out by any movement or rotation chip. So no, you can have your OKE spin in circles swinging wildly. This is why the Processing Mode on these three chips is important since it decides whether an action can be interrupted or not. If you don’t want to have your attacks constantly interrupted by other actions you better set it to Halt or use either a Wait or Halt chip.

As an aside, the Shooting Chips that enable you to use equipment like guns can operate simultaneously with movement and rotation chips. You can run and gun as much as you want!



This is the Wait chip. It lets you halt the CPU’s processing for any amount of time you desire. The basic application introduced in the game’s tutorial is to allow your OKE enough time to complete the first swing in a Far Attack before the CPU begins operating again, preventing your OKE from cancelling out that first part of the attack. When operating the controls manually in games you generally hold buttons after attacking so your character will keep moving after an attack. However if you were to do this in Carnage Heart you would instantly cancel out of your attack before your OKE could do anything since Movement and Attack chips cannot execute simultaneously. Setting the Attack chip’s Processing Mode to Halt would force you to commit to a long series of attacks, while trusting the user to just time his button presses manually isn’t very user friendly or at least a little more complex than desirable for such a simple operation of “attack then move”. The Wait chip will let the user hold a direction button while the OKE attacks without canceling any of the actions, making for a smoother control experience.

Obviously this is just one way the Wait chip could be applied.



This is the Button Input chip which prepares the CPU to accept button inputs. All Button Assignment chips that follow this chip will act according to the Passthrough Mode chosen on the Button Input chip. You can set the Processing Mode to “Halt Until Changed” or the typical passthrough mode. “Halt Until Changed” makes the CPU, uh, I’m not sure actually. I can’t remember what it does. So yeah, I don’t actually know how this thing works yet.

This also means my explanation on how the Button Assignment chip works may change if set to “Halt Until Changed”.



The Button Assignment chip is essentially an If statement. IF the selected buttons are pressed then the CPU follows the RED arrow. Otherwise the CPU follows the BLUE arrows as it regularly does. This chip gives you two options: Assign Buttons and Button Status. Assign Buttons lets you choose which buttons the chip will look for. You can choose any button on the system (sans the analog stick) and choose as many as you desire simultaneously. Assign Buttons looks like this:

Press All will make the CPU branch off onto the red arrow if ALL selected buttons are pressed.

Press Any will make the CPU branch if ANY ONE of the selected buttons are pressed.

Press Any Once is like Press Any however it only accepts the input the FIRST TIME you pressed the button. This is a setting that carries over across multiple runs of the CPU through your program. If the program reaches this same chip again and you’re still holding the same button, it will not trigger the branch. Considering how quickly the CPUs run, this helps you keep from repeating the same action multiple times.

Release Any executes the branch if any of the selected buttons was released. Essentially it checks for a button’s negative edge.

Any Changed just checks for a change in a selected button’s status. So this lets the branch trigger on both presses and releases of the button (I assume. I haven’t actually used it yet.).

Now that I’ve covered these basic chips, let’s looks at what my movement program is doing. As a reminder, the objective was to let my program move forward, left, and right (without changing the direction it faces), rotate in both directions, and attack.



(Nothing will happen olol.)

The program begins at START and then activates the Button Input chip. I have it set to Passthrough mode. The program then goes through a series of Button Assignment chips to decide which action to execute. First it looks for UP on the directional pad, then RIGHT,LEFT, the CIRCLE button, L button, and finally R button. You can see that if any button is not pressed the blue arrow flows into the next button check. Due to the limited space of my CPU I connected the LEFT button to the CIRCLE button using a series NOPs; I didn’t have enough room to expand downward.

If UP is pressed, my OKE walks forward 50m.

If RIGHT is pressed, it rotates right 30 degrees.

LEFT rotates left 30 degrees.

CIRCLE makes the OKE execute an attack, currently set to Far Attack. I make the Attack chip flow into a Wait chip so that the OKE will complete at least one swing before CPU operation begins again.

L makes the OKE sidestep left 50 meters. The OKE does not changes its facing with this action, it only walks sideways.

R sidesteps right.

And that’s about it! Easy peasy. Of course my design has some quirks. One issue is that all of my movement and rotation chips are set to high values for no real reason. This means that if I press any of those buttons my OKE is committed to walking 50 meters or rotating 30 degrees with no options for lesser increments. I should have set the values to 1m and 1 degree. This way if I tap a button the OKE will move very little but if I hold the button it can keep moving. This makes the OKE’s manual controls more flexible with no extra work!





You get all that? Now here’s some homework! This is a more recent program I made that features quick turns, special attacks, guarding and more involved conditional branching across multiple Button Input chips. (This is actually rather poorly designed and didn't work right but I beat the mission with it so it’s all good.)

[Drem]

I figured the gameplay was abstract enough that a detailed explanation and example would probably be needed to help people get a clearer idea of what the game entails. I'm glad it helped. I also forgot to mention that Carnage Heart EXA's community upload site is now open in English: http://www.satloke.jp/en/index.php?l=english . Players can upload and download programs, create teams, and arrange battles.