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R&C Future: A Crack In Time
Ah, I like those long game titles. Anyone remembering Leisure Suite Larry in the Land of the Lounge Lizards? I have a feeling that a title says something about a game. If they care about the title,...
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Are they out of their mind?
I while ago, I downloaded the demo for X-Men Origins: Wolverine. It’s a PS3 game and I like Wolverine, so I was really excited. Whoa, they really spent some time on the levels … lush forests … tree...
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StarCraft 2 on openSUSE 11.3: Update to 1.0.3 fails [update]
Found a solution! See this blog post. When I tried to start the game today, it told me that 1.0.3 is available and that it needs an upgrade. After 49% of the download, the BlizzardDownloader.exe...
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SC2 Tips: Liberation Day
Send your troops to the red cross I’ll post some tips to help you beat the levels in StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty here from time to time. Let’s start with the very first level “Liberation Day”. During...
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Finished single player SC2
I just finished the single player missions of Starcraft 2 – Wings of Liberty. Except for the video sequences and the end scroller (which both stuttered badly – a coder on the C=64 would have been...
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Too Much Time on Your Hands? Try Minecraft
I’m addicted to a new game: Minecraft. It’s a bit like Lego: Everything is a brick, simple rules, no documentation. Unlike Lego, you got lots of bricks. Lots. The levels are huge. I actually managed to...
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One Day Left To Buy Darwinia
There is a little strategic gem to buy at Humble Introversion Bundle: Darwinia. Hurry up, there are only 24 hours left … until you have to buy the game elsewhere … where you can’t set the price. The...
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Create a Better World, One Game at a Time
Can you make the world better by playing games? Sure: Fold enzymes on fold.it. Scientists tried for 15 years to fold a H.I.V related enzyme, fold.it solved it in 15 days. You know better than the...
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Dealing With Cheating
All online games attract cheaters. Most of them try to ban players who cheat but Rockstar Games came up with a better approach: They herd them. Makes me wonder what took them so long. It would be great...
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Selling Used Games? No Way!
Sony found a new way to harass customers: They filed a patent for a technology that prevents playing second-hand games. In a nutshell, the “game playing system” checks whether someone else already...
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Writing Games with Processing: Getting Started
Ever wanted to write your own game? Can’t be too hard, right? Most games sold today are ego shooters. But the genre is sucked pretty dry. The most innovative games in the last years were simple,...
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Writing Games with Processing: Setup and a Simple Player Character
We have an idea, now we need to write the game. Let’s use a screen size of 640 x 480: void setup() { size(640, 480); //VGA for those old enough to remember } The next item on the task list is to render...
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Writing Games with Processing: Enemies
The next element of our game are the crocodiles. Since we can have several of them, let’s use a class to collect all data necessary to draw them: class Enemy { color c; int x, y; String name;...
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Writing Games with Processing: Moving Around
The game would be pretty boring if Platty would just sit there, waiting to be eaten. The player needs to be able to move him around: void keyPressed() { if(key == CODED) { if(keyCode == UP) {...
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Writing Games with Processing: Hunting Platty
As it is, the game is pretty boring. The player has some control but no goal. Let’s add a routine which makes the enemies hunt the player. There are many complex algorithms for path finding but we aim...
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Writing Games with Processing: Eating Platty
If you try the code from the last session, you’ll notice that the crocodiles can reach Platty but the game doesn’t end. We’re missing collision detection. Following our KISS mantra, the collision...
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Writing Games with Processing: Winning
Now that the player can lose the game, he needs a way to win. One idea we had was that crocodiles are greedy: When they run into each other hunting Platty, they start to fight over the food. To achieve...
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Writing Games with Processing: Highscore!
What’s a game without a score? Boring! Luckily, adding scoring to our game is a piece of cake. We just count the number of moves that Platty survives. For this, we need another global variable: int...
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Writing Games with Processing: Cleaning Up
While the code for our game is simple enough, it’s starting to get messy. movePlayer() contains code to move the player, the enemies and the collision detection. Also, the game ends when you win. There...
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Writing Games with Processing: Intro Screen
Merry Christmas, everyone In the last post, we cleaned up the code. This makes it now very simple to add an intro to the game: class IntroState extends State { Player p; Enemy e; Step playerStep; Step...
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