Hello World

I just read a post about a veteran game developer. He shared his advice on how to break into gaming. And no, you should not start out trying to write a doom clone. Instead you need to take some baby steps. Your first program must be Hello World.

Well I decided to follow the steps exactly in the order that he recommends. I tried learning some Java in the past year. Now I am getting a little rusty. So I banged out a Hello World Java app in a little bit of time.

Now comes the next challenge. You got to write a Tic-Tac-Toe game. It don't need any fancy graphics. In fact, it does not need any graphics at all. It just has to work. So let me go off and code it. I had a hankering to write it up in HTML (my current college class), but I will stick with Java.

Don't worry. At the end of the 10 program journey, I will be rocking with a Pong clone. No it won't quite be Doom or Quake shattering 3D. But it will be a fun journey. I think that is what my guru is trying to teach me here.

Minecraft Hype

I heard that there was some game developed by a dude that was earning $250k a day. WTF? How can a game make that much money every day? The thing only costs 13 or 14 bucks a pop. Looks like there is a lot of hype out there about the game. And that is a good thing for sales.

So I figured I would try out the game. Now I was not a out to go out and pay $13 for the thing. I wanted to play a free version of it. I went to the web site. The thing had some weird message at the top of the page about the servers being overloaded.

I downloaded an executable. It required Java. So I downloaded and installed Java. Then the game I downloaded said I needed a login. What the heck? I went back to the web page and tried to sign up. Got a user ID and password. Tried again and the game would not accept the credentials. Then I tried to play the game on the web page instead of the one I downloaded. The thing hung my browser. If I have all these problems, I doubt the thing is selling 20k copies a day. Must be a fluke some type of fake propaganda to get sheeple to buy the thing.

Reddit Game Jam

I just heard about the Reddit Game Jam. This is a 48 hour period to write a game for a theme that is chosen at the start of the contest. It is sort of like a 2DRL with a lot more rules. In the end they use Reddit votes to determine who has the best game.

You cannot steal images for your game. They want you to make it cross platform. You cannot use any commercial libraries. If you use some personal libraries, you have to supply the source code to everyone.

Your game has to run on minimal hardware. When you are done, you must share all of your source code. That does not mean that you have to open source your code. But you must post it all out there. You get one extra day to package your code. This all sounds like a fun idea. Maybe I can unleash some kind of roguelike on them. It might be tough to get it all done in 48 hours though.

Writing in Elvish

I just found out that it is not that hard to learn how to write in Elvish. Now there are many ways to translate English to Elvish. However one easy way is to use a mapping between the English and Elven alphabet. You combine this with some simple rules regarding the placement of vowels. The result is one simple way to do the translation.

Previously I imagined the written Elven language to be complex, like the Klingon language from Star Trek. However this need not be the case. If you want to learn how to write Elvish yourself, go check out Ned Gulley's tutorial on this. You will be glad you did.

Game Over

I finally completed my new game Mazeband. It was completed in about siz days. So I can say that I met the 7DRL challenge.

Download a copy of Mazeband right now.

Make sure to click on "request download ticket". Then click on "download". Sorry I could not put this game on my hosting service. It is currently down at the moment. This was the best free alternative I could find.

Play the game by navigating with the number pad on your keyboard. Get all the gold in the least amount of turns. See how good a score you can achieve (lower scores are better). I hope to have a more exciting game next year. Peace out.