Entries Tagged 'Games' ↓

The other day I came across this really cool posting talking about school projects for computer science students.
Basically it talks about the different “levels” of effort required to make a certain type of video game for a CS class. Having just finished a CS class that involved a group project (but not a game) I was intrigued by the author’s take on the topic. (I usually try to dissuade people from doing games as a CS project, they just eat up too much time usually unless everyone in the group is on the same page.)

Overall I found myself agreeing with the various comments and evaluations of each game type (pacman, tetris, etc.). But when I got to the end of the “Advanced” topics section, I laughed out loud:

RPG - if you hate your life (and some apparently do), this obviously final year attempt at video game programming glory is likely to end badly.

That pretty much sums up my experience so far with my attempts to make a “simple” RPG. There’s a lot going on in a typical RPG, and it takes a lot of effort and attention to detail to pull it off and make it look good and play well. And even then, if you manage to get the mechanics of the game engine working semi-decently, then you have a tall order to fill by creating the contents (scripts, maps, graphics). Needless to say it can quickly become a huge time sink. Which isn’t to say it isn’t fun, because it is. But when you get overwhelmed on a project like this where you are working for yourself (i.e. not getting paid to work on it) it becomes very difficult to get your motivation back.

Personally, I’m hoping to get my motivation back to work on my little project some more. I think what I’ll probably wind up doing is working on it in-between other projects.

It occurred to me the yesterday, with more and more people seeing the power of Javascript and CSS, more websites are getting slick. Ok, that’s a pretty obvious statement, but here’s something that’s not obvious: This presents a great opportunity for easter eggs!

Easter Eggs are little hidden things in side of a bigger program. Some times it just the developer’s names, other times it can be something totally unexpected like a flight simulator hidden in a spreadsheet program. With the power of Javascript and nice tutorials like this one, there’s a lot of opportunity to have some real fun!

Just think, with all of the computing power a modern browser affords us developers, it should be very easy to recreate tons of games from the Atari 2600, early Nintendo systems. The imagination can very easily run wild….

I’ve been watching Code Monkeys a lot lately. If you haven’t seen it yet, its a cartoon on G4 that is basically South Park, but set in a 80’s video game company. Its pretty funny, sometimes sick, but always twisted. Every week the characters get into all kinds of trouble, usually while trying to make a “new” game.

One of the best parts of the show is when the developers are either talking about or pitching their new games. Just from hearing the titles of the games I wish some of them had been made! Cool titles like “Monkey vs. Cobra” or “Hobo Killer” or “Family Ties: The Video Game”. Plus some of the shots of the games looked pretty funny too. Check out the whole list here: Games featured on Code Monkeys

All of those wacky titles reminded me of all the times in other movies, TV shows, games, etc. I saw a “fake” video game and thought it was the coolest idea ever. Like “Billy Graham’s Bible Blaster” on the Simpsons. Or “Astro Chicken” in the Space Quest series. Classics!

And thanks to the wonders of the internet/web2.0/lazy web/wikipedia, there’s a massive list of all of these fictional games! Check out the list here: Fake Games

Seeing all of those games there got me thinking: Wouldn’t it be cool if someone made some of these games based on just the title? (Or in the case of shows like the Simpsons, take the clip of the game and expand it into a full fledged game!)  That would be so cool. So cool in fact, I think I’m going to start doing that, looking at a title and then trying to come up with a game. Cheesy, yes. Wacky, you bet. Fun? Lets find out.

I saw today that a indie developed “Fallout inspired” RPG was being taken down by the author due to lack of sales. This bummed me out because:

1. It sounds like a game I would have really been interested in
2. Although it had been out for some time, I had never heard of it
3. I’m wanting to make a RPG that isn’t based in a dungeon
4. The world needs new games that aren’t just derivative sequels of the same-old-same-old

Its always sad when a product is retired, but this situation sounds bad. According to the comments on the Ramapant Coyote site, lot of people are feeling the same way I do. But at the end of the day, its the author’s call, and in this case the author decided to pack it in.

I stated in #4 above that the world is too full of games that aren’t anything special. That’s why indie games are so exciting. Many are of the games that are made on the indie seen are passion works on the part of their creators. As a result these games are different than what you normally find in a store. They try new things, they take chances.

But sadly, just as in real life, sometimes you win, sometimes you loose. I hope Mr. Moffat finds the success he is looking for in his future endeavors.

Recently I heard about pyglet which bills itself as “a cross-platform windowing and multimedia library for Python“. This is more-or-less what pygame offers, but with one exception: pyglet doesn’t depend on SDL, its written in pure python.

As a side note, if you try to install pyglet on a Mac, there is a small catch. I’m running 10.4 Tiger which uses Python 2.4. Pyglet.org does offer a dmg file to install itself, but it doesn’t work. The reason for this is that Pyglet does need ctypes, and ctypes did  not become a standard part of python until 2.5. So, to get pyglet to work on your Mac, you’ll need to get (and build) ctypes, or install Python 2.5. I installed ctypes and found it to be pretty painless.

Its still in an alpha state, but I thought it sounded interesting so I decided to take a look at it. Compared to pygame, it seems to be a little more streamlined. I’ve never really push pygame to the limits, so I can’t really compare the two as fully as I would like. One thing that I did like were the demo apps and the examples in the documentation. They were concise, yet demo’ed useful things that I would want to do in an app.

I started reading the documentation after lunch the other day and within a few minutes I found myself modifying the code as I read through the docs. Within 5 minutes I decided that I would try a sprint: Could I implement a quick and dirty game of pong within an hour using pyglet? Well, the answer is Yes!

After playing around for an hour I had everything except the computer’s paddle in place working. A few days later when I had some time I spent and additional 15-30 minutes (while watching the game on TV) and knocked out the “AI” for the computer player. This isn’t award-winning code or game play (the bounding box collision test is pretty crappy), but it did show me that I could get something done quickly using this framework.

So, check out pyglet. Here’s the code to my craptacular version of pong. (There are 3 files, two images for the paddles and the ball, and the source file pyglet_pong.py)

I don’t want a copy of Photoshop. Its not that I’m cheap (that’s a whole other story!), its just that I don’t like using sledgehammers to kill mosquitoes. I’m trying to do some simple bitmap editing and it has turned into a big headache because it is hard to find a simple graphics editing program.

I was using Pixen which is highly regarded and does just what I need it too. Buuuuuut… I can’t get the program to run more than a few minutes without a crash. And that just really bums me out because it seems like the perfect program. Sadly, I’m not the only one having this problem, posting around the net seem to indicate that this is a common issue.

And unlike Windows, the Mac doesn’t seem to come with any simple programs a-la Paintbrush. What’s up with that? I realize Apple is all about minimal cruft and what-not, but this really takes it to an extreme.

For the moment I’m trying out tileeditor which is a pretty minimal editor, but at the same time seems to work pretty well. (Although as a side note I would like to point out that you need to start the editor in the same directory as your artwork, otherwise it seems to try and save to the wrong directory. Every time I did this is put _tmp and the front of the path, which of course doesn’t exist. I’m not sure if this is a Mac specific thing, but just starting the program in the art directory seemed to get around this issue.)

Like most amateur game developers, I’m inspired to try and create games that I think are cool. And like most game developers I’m influenced by games that I have played. So it follows that if a game really got me going, that I would like to make something like it in the hopes that other people will feel the same way about it that I do.
Now a problem occurs when that thin line that separates “inspired by” and “a carbon copy of” gets crossed. There’s a ton of games and mods out there that cross that line. Usually its just a quick little thing by the developers that gets left behind after a while. Other times it gets a lot of attention and then the lawyers get involved, and the project gets canned quickly. Inverted Castle had a great posting about this. The idea that Hunty posted was to make your own story. And I think he is 100% not just to avoid getting sued, but just to make a new and exciting thing.

It seems hard to come up with something new and original to base you game on, but if you think about it, it doesn’t have to be. Most movies, books, and games are based on a couple of ideas that have all been used before. They just take a couple of them and mix them together in a new way.

Think about this: How many movies and TV shows have you seen that centered around a stolen treasure? And how many books have you read that were set in outer space? And… how many featured a smart ass outsider as the hero of the story? See, combine those things together and you have “Trent and the missing Jewel of Titan”.

Need bad guys? Think of 5 typical bad guys (gangsters, thieves, corrupt politicians, etc.) and think of why they would be involved. Pick the two best and put them in the story.

Now think about how Trent would react to meeting these people (assume they aren’t going to kill him right away because he seems like he’s not worth the time of day). Imagine the weaknesses of the bad guys, how would this work in Trent’s favor? Where’s a place you’ve always wanted to see? What would Trent say if he wound up there?

Answer those questions and it should give you a lot of possible locations and situations for your game. Pick the best few out of the bunch, and use those as your starting points for your levels/adventures. Start with those. If they are working, go back and look at what you threw out. Can it be changed or salvaged? Did you come up with new materials or ideas?

Its not hard. You just gotta practice. Take a favorite story, and take the best elements out of it, and scramble it up a little bit. Then branch out and add new elements (the stuff you find yourself saying, ‘it would have been better if X had happened…), the next thing you know, you’ve got an original story!

Tired of Sudoku? Looking for a new challenge? Boy have I got something for you then. Check out Planarity.

I really like this game. If you’ve ever sat through a discreet mathematics class and wondered where and when you’ll ever use graph theory, this is your answer. Basically the site presents you with a series of nodes/vertices and you have to rearrange them until the edges (i.e. the lines between the nodes) do not overlap. The result is called a planar graph.

The first couple of levels are pretty easy, but with every level more nodes and more edges are added. This makes each level more challenging in that it takes longer to solve than the one before it. Oh, that and stopping. Once you start playing its hard to stop. I closed my eyes once and I started to imagine moving the nodes around… That’s when I knew this was a cool game.
Its a great idea for a website and a really fun game. I’ve always liked graph theory, there’s just something cool about it. Now thanks to this site, we have a new way to play around with the graphs and learn more about them. Additionally this site serves as a good introduction to other ideas in graphing like cycles, bipartite graphs, and minimal spanning trees.

If you were asking yourself, “I wonder what Nick has been doing for the last 2 hours?”, I’ll tell you. I’m been playing Dumb: The Game.

Truthfully, I’ve only been playing the 5 sample puzzles. They are fun, but challenging. One or two Iwas able to figure out pretty quickly, but #9 and #12 have me stumped. Guess what I’m going to be thinking about for the rest of the day…

Mike is really on to something with this site, he’s got a good idea for a game (brain teasers), he’s got the perfect delivery medium (web pages so everyone can play), and he’s got the perfect hook (funy name, good samples, free registration). Rock on Hamumu!

Do you like Sudoku? If so, check out my Sudoku Helper! I wrote it to help you solve Sudoku puzzles by just giving you a hint of what the numbers could be, instead of just telling you the answer. This way you can still enjoy the game!

It works by having you enter in the numbers in the column and row that intersect at the square you are stuck on. Additionally you can enter in the numbers that are filled in for that 3×3 square. The Sudoku Helper will then tell you what numbers could be in the square.

Give it a try! Sometimes the best strategy is to get a hint, not the final answer. Hopefully you’ll find this helpful!

Sudoku Helper