October 19, 2011

Grand Thief Arto

Here's me and Li's game for our school course. The game isn't tweaked too much but it's a game with some fairly cool ideas.

Grand Thief Arto

Download
Java runtime including source (0.2 MB)

Instructions
Your goal is to collect loot until you can escape through the entry point when you've collected enough to complete the level.

There are touchpads and lasers you need to shutdown by walking next to a computer or an electric board and shut them down from there. Otherwise you need to open doors and then just run around and collect.

You can either play by launching the bash script "play" directly in the folder or launch the game with:

java base.GameFrame
or
java -Xss2048k -Xms64m -Xmx1024m base.GameFrame

Or whatever your preferred way of launching java apps is. You obviously need the java runtime, otherwise you might fetch it from here.

You might need to create the binary files for it. Use the bash script "create" or do:

javac base.GameFrame

But it might not be necessary.

Controls
Arrow keys - Walk around
Space - Do action
Esc - Menu

October 19, 2011

Design for Hackers has arrived!

It's here! After about a month of waiting I've finally gotten the book that will make me a design god! Or at least make me aware of something called design. Joking aside I'm really terrible at design and making things look good. Admittedly my programming art for my games has gradually improved but I honestly don't know what I'm doing, I just mess around until I get something decent. Maybe this can be a small aid? I even have some websites I want to design, and while I'm at it I want to try the Perl web framework mojolicious which looks totally awesome!

October 19, 2011

The End of the Tunnel

Lately I've been feeling like there's been a shit-ton of stuff going on, quite a turn-around from the last time.

One course about data structure and algorithms (super fun to be honest) has wrapped up. We thought we were ahead with the assignments but in the end it got very stressful. I sat up pretty late trying to optimize our code from 0.16 to below 0.15 seconds and it almost drove me crazy...

My last resort was to convert all strings to integers and do some funky bit shifting operations but it got too late so I had to go to sleep before making it work correctly. Of course I couldn't sleep and I lay and thought about all the things I didn't do or where I could've messed up. I woke really early, couldn't sleep, and I went to fix it before our presentation that morning and look and behold! It was fixed in less than 15 minutes and it was blazingly fast! It's funny how sleep or a nice shower can solve almost any problem you have, except hunger I guess.

While this was going on I also took part in a competition of some sorts in connection with the course. There was a programming problem after each lecture that we had to complete and the goal was to get as few hours as possible after the problems were released. Most problems were quite easy but there were a few hard ones. One I also lost some sleep over! But again I woke up and had to run to the computer to try to solve it... At least I won some money for some lovely new books so I guess it was worth it.

We're now finishing our other course, the one with the Java game that spurred me to wanna make more games, and I think I spent a bit too much time on that... The game turned out pretty cool, I will make a post about it tomorrow I think, but it was a level or two above the actual demands I think so we could've chilled and not stress that much. And now we only have to document it! Describe how all the classes work with UML and some blocks of text... Sigh.

And oh yeah, we had totally forgotten to write a project specification that was supposed to be handed in over a month ago and we had completely missed the deadlines for the other assignments in that course. Luckily the deadlines were only suggestions and our assistant was cool about the specification too so we survived with our head still intact.

It just seems so silly though. Why did we wait with the other assignments, I think I did them in one day or something, until the very last second? It seems like I've been here before, and I don't like it. This time I had a bit more control over the whole situation but it's still not quite good enough.

Anyway now when this is all finishing up I can start to relax again. But then the thought creeps up on me: what's next?

I'm probably gonna program, make a game or two, go through a language, read some books, train a lot... Urr I'm getting all stressed out just thinking out loud like that!

No I need to relax. Maybe read some more manga? Yes, that is indeed a good idea...

manga...