Games for Kids: dodger
I've always thought it would be fun to build video games, and when my daughters were born, I knew I would eventually want to build some simple games that they could enjoy while they're young. My original attempt at this lead me to pygame, and the result was a simple alphabet/number game that plopped letters and numbers on the screen (very similar to AlphaBaby, but not nearly as good!). Unfortunately, I never continued to develop that one ...
Published: 2007-06-16
Compiling Warzone 2100 on Mac OS X
I recently ran across The Warzone 2100 Resurrection Project, and I thought to myself,"cool, I wonder if there's an OS X version..." So, I hit their downloads page only to find the message: "(The MacOSX diskimage will follow soon)"So I thought, "oh well, I'll just grab the source code and compile it!" After about two hours of digging, I finally got it compiled, and here's how! (NOTE: I've got quite a bit of Unix ...
Published: 2007-05-16
Hello Torque, again.
Well, I've just begun to dig into the Torque Game Engine again, but this time, I'm building it on a Linux box. Once I downloaded the Linux source, it took me a while to figure out how to get it compiled. TGE's configuration is a little different than the typical "./configure and make" process.First of all, I tried to make sure I had all of the development tools necessary to build TGE, including nasm, libogg, libvorbis ...
Published: 2007-03-09
Casual Games
It seems like I keep running into this term, "casual games." Apparently this is a burgeoning industry with the advent of more advanced handheld devices (like cellphones). There were even two keynotes (Trip Hawkins ofDigital Chocolate, and Robert Tercek of PeopleJam and GDC Mobile) regarding causal games at the recent Game Developers Conference.Basically, any simple (hopefully addictive) game that's quick and easy to learn falls in the category of a casual game. Two of my favorite examples are ...
Published: 2006-10-15
Torque
Well, I finally bought an Indie Game License for the Torque Game Engine. Like many young men over the past decade or so, I got into Computer Science thinking I'd like to create video games. Maybe I'll finally get that chance!My initial impressions with Torque are a little mixed though. I can immediately see huge potention in the sort of things you can do without even touching the Engine itself... thanks to the built-in scripting language and ...
Published: 2006-06-20
Games!
This may come as a surprise, but I actually got into computer science thinking I would eventually find a job making computer games! What's more surprising, though, is that I've never even tried to write a game of any sort! There are plenty of places to start, I mean, there's only 11,000 game projecs on Sourceforge. Now, I'm guessing that about half of those are actually Libraries or Frameworks for developing games, and sometimes I ...