After 24 hours of solid development, we successfully created a Tower Defence game controlled by the Kinect, it was really good fun, especially when testing (although I have to confess it became a pain having to stand up and move 3ft away from the keyboard to test it, so we may have implemented mouse functionality too…).
The game turned out quite nice, with map generation being left out in the end (though we did have forests drawing randomly on parts of the map, they offered nothing to the game), a lot of the art resources were sourced from Lostgarden which were incredibly useful, so massive thanks to them!
The Three Thing Game 24hour session starts tomorrow morning, and I’m working on some map generation stuff at the moment, forests are nice if I can get the trees to order correctly. Things are going pretty well, for myself at least – I can’t get hold of any other members of the team so I’m on my own for now, which is annoying because I really wanted to work on the agents behaviour today which was Mikes speciality.
I’ve tidied up last years UStream channel a bit ready for the weekend, now all we need to do is go live! I’ll post up an embeded player of the stream tomorrow morning before things kick off so keep an eye out for it!
Other teams will be streaming their development session too, so keep an eye out for those (I assume they’ll be on twitter #threethinggame)
A few days ago I wrote about Three Thing Game and the Kinect Tower Defence game we intended on making, since then, we’ve got the ball rolling a bit and some code which does things (but nothing interesting). We’ve also had the Thing Auction, where every team was given 530 credits to bid on words they wanted (or if nobody wanted to bid, your team would be stuck with that word, this happened to us twice..).
Our team got assigned the words “Fruitcake” and “Word-Processor”, we also spent all of our credits so we could use a wildcard, so we can have whatever word we want, a wise choice it turns out. These words initially were a pain, but we’ve came up with an idea which ties in really quite nicely with the Tower Defence aspect of it all, but I don’t want to give away any more spoilers just yet!
Quite recently I put up a post about Random Map Generation and my first attempt at it. The results were interesting, but not great. At the time I decided to leave it there and focus on my project for my third year amongst other coursework (which, by the way is coming along really well, I might even make a video about it). Since then, things have changed a bit and a competition entitled “Three Thing Game” was announced earlier this week.
The competition is quite a simple concept, based on three words alone, make a game, we will work throughout the week and have a final 24hour session at the end of it all. The competition ran last semester (which I did not enter due to work commitments and the inconvenient timing), however I did enter the competition when it ran this time last year with a few friends, we decided to not do any work until the 24hour session (as we wanted to make a challenge for ourselves, and we thought we’d have more fun), we also decided that streaming us live on the internet whilst being geeks for 24hours would be a cool thing to do, so we did exactly that over at my UStream channel and a few people watched us.
We didn’t really make anything worth noting last year – I partly blame my 5 hour shift at work I had halfway through, along with our lack of serious approach. However, this year I decided to get the weekend off work and have another go at it, I even intend on working on it before the final 24hours this time! Last year my team included three friends – Jack Middleton who was responsible for artwork, and keeping us up to date on the Formula 1, Rory Spencer and Mike Dean, who were programming along with myself. The words we had to work with were “Spanish, Kumquat, Bike Ride” – making a game on these three words in 24hours proved harder than we thought, we ended up producing some shoddy 2d RPG which made no sense, but in our sleep deprived state thought it was hilarious. I’ll try to dig it out sometime and release it… not that anyone will want to play it. (It is worse than BolloKong – my finest piece of work yet).
I’ve done my exam for this winter on Languages and their Compilers (which was surprisingly not bad), I’ve wrote a report on my Wireless Game controller project and I’ve applied for an internship in San Francisco! Now that I don’t have much to do (until lectures start tomorrow), I thought it’d be nice to work on something fun (rather than my project which desperately needs work, but I can finish that quite quickly now). I read a few posts about RPG games and how dungeons can be procedurally generated on the fly to offer a unique user experience, something you may find in roguelikes. That was pretty interesting, but I thought how simple it was, so I wondered how random maps are generated for RTS games, and games like Minecraft.
Initially I wanted to start off simple, so generate one fixed size map and leave it at that – no joining of parts or anything like that. I began to do a bit of research and found a nice page on noise generation, well, it was nice once I applied a nicer stylesheet to the page to remove that god awful background and make it easier to read.
After reading the article, I had a rough idea of how I could implement a simple 2D random map generator, so I began working on it. So far I’m using two textures (Grass and Water) and lighting them slightly differently to show a “random map”. It’s in its infancy at the moment and I do intend on adding things such as trees and what not as I generate the random generation algorithm more.
Creating an IRC bot with some basic functionality may seem like a scary thought, you have to connect to connect to the server, join channels, and respond to commands. It isn’t as bad as you may think, once you learn the basics of the IRC protocol and some the basics of socket programming in C#, in fact it actually becomes extremely simple.
In this tutorial it will be a fairly static bot which responds to commands such as “!say message”, “!join #channel”, “!part”, and “!quit”. Anybody will be able to send these commands and the bot will respond regardless of who sends them. If you wish to add aditional security it is up to you to add that functionality in.
I will be using Visual Studio 2008 in this tutorial to complete the code, if you are a student you can receive a copy free from Microsoft Dreamspark or you can download Microsoft Visual C# Express Edition for free, both of which will work fine for this task.
So all the way back then, when I was active on my blog, I wrote about my project for the year, which is about Wireless Game Controllers on PCs and how I would be using Bluetooth Input since then, my posts have been… well pretty much non existent, I got hooked on a game called 8Realms for a bit, which was a pretty cool game so I made a toolkit for it, I have no idea if it is still useful because I lost interest in the game once I hopped on a plane and went to America for 3 months, where I blogged about it for the first week, and since then haven’t done anything. For the record, it was awesome, saw some awesome sites, I will upload the photos to a flickr account or something one day. Anyway, before I ramble off too much I may as well get to the point, I’ve done some work on my project about Wireless game controllers!
So far I’ve submitted the first report for grading and am hoping to get feedback on it tomorrow afternoon which will be nice, I’ve also done a significant amount of research and found direction for the project. During my research I discovered a similar project called GlovePie which is pretty cool, however I also decided way before discovering GlovePie that I want my project to be exactly like GlovePie… Annoying, but its good to see something out there does exist so I know my project is now possible!
Upon initial research I noted a few things which will result in weeks of staring at a screen of code with no progress. After about 30 seconds of reading, I immediately ruled out the use of the Xbox 360 controller which uses radio frequencies, and not Bluetooth, this is especially annoying given the only console I own is a 360, and the only controller I own is a 360. Sort of annoyed that I’d have to by controllers for consoles I have no intention of owning, so I asked around and I managed to borrow a WiiMote and a PS3 Controller from a friend, and everything was back on track… except no.
My first week in America is almost over, luckily I’ve got another 10 to go (or there abouts). Its been a pretty hectic week, started off in London Heathrow last Saturday, felt it was necessary to have my last alcoholic beverage before I left, so I promptly went to the bar and had a pint or three, with a couple of friends…. I’m not going to drink by myself, that would make me an alcoholic.
After having a couple of drinks we boarded our plane and all was going to plan, until we got onto the tarmac and we had a 2 and a half hour delay, once we were on the tarmac we were stuck on the plane. Not Cool. We eventually got in the air and that is when the summer started to get fun. Delta gave us complimentary beer on the flight, which we took full advantage of and may, or may not have, got a little bit tipsy whilst 30,000feet in the air – it was pretty damn awesome until we were landing into JFK and wondering if we were going to get through customs or not (Wrigley’s extra saved the day).
Once we cleared customs and got our bags it was around 10:55 – we had a train from Grand Central Terminal to Chapaqua, NY, exactly an hour later, pretty mad rush but thanks to some mad French man we made it, and it only costs $20 (with tip!), at this point we were all pretty exhausted, so we got our selves on the train and tried not to fall asleep, I was the only one of our group who was successful at this – the snoring on the train was hysterical, I wish I could have taken a photo.
