aesthetic programming
Just threw together a small tool to help generate game design ideas. The page presents two game mechanics (drawn from the excellent list at Board Game Geek), and two subjects. Mousing over either mechanic shows the description, and reloading the page presents a new combination.
To check it out, either click on the image, or go here
I recently gave a workshop at the Academy of Art University on the CoronaSDK. After a brief overview of the Corona environment and the Lua scripting language, I led the attendees through the creation of a simple game.
The game demonstrates image loading, the use of display groups to offset rotation, simple physics, and dynamic text. It’s simple, but provides a decent introduction. If you’d like to download the files (images and source code), head here.
I just put together a small demo for the Experimental Interactivity class that I’m teaching this semester at the Academy of Art, and thought I’d post the result. It’s meant to demonstrate:
Pretty simple demo, but not bad for a few hours. All of the earthquakes in the past week are rendered on the map, with a dot that is scaled based on their magnitude. Moving the mouse from left to right across the map causes different quakes to become hidden or visible, depending on magnitude- move left to see small quakes, and right to see larger ones.
To see it in action, and to have a look at the source files (if you want), head here
Last week, after two years of valiant service, my macbook HD finally died. Fortunately, I had everything backed up and/or committed to external repos, so I didn’t lose anything. I did have to reinstall everything, though.
So, while waiting for things to install, I whipped up a small IRC bot (“howard”, so named after the dolphin sidekick in my favorite book of all time) that can be used to send love (of the Linden Lab, love machine variety) amongst my fellow Cull.tv compatriots.
The bot was written in PHP, using NetSmart_IRC, and stores love in a really simple little db table on my site.
I sat down to work on the cryptogram solving interface from the last post a bit, only to find that the CoronaSDK API reference site was down. So, I decided to spend the allotted time working on a support tool instead. I wrote a simple Python script that:
Nothing spectacular here, but it will make testing a lot easier, and will eventually grow into a proper content-creation tool. It’s almost usable as such as-is, but I want to add in some heuristics for estimating (and perhaps even adjusting) the difficulty of the resulting cryptogram.
I recently started work on a mobile game for Android and iOS using the CoronaSDK (which I’m loving so far), and one of the mechanics in the game is the solving of cryptogram puzzles.
I just put together a first draft of what the cryptogram solving interface will look like. Features:
I’ve started playing with the Corona SDK just recently. It looks to be a great way to develop games for both iOS and android devices, and (as a bonus) relies on Lua. Finished a simple demo last night, where a player character responds to a screen touch by walking over to the point indicated, playing one of four different directional walk cycles.
The code isn’t the cleanest, but it’s enough to let me start to get a feel for the way Corona deals with sprite sheets. All of the art assets were lifted from Open Game Art– an awesome resource for game demos.
This was an experiment with a soldering mechanic that I put together a while ago, implemented as a java applet. I’ve long felt that crafting mechanics in games could stand to be a lot more fun and a lot more interesting, and possibly even teach players something about how such a thing functions in the real world.
This demo was an experiment in implementing a soldering mechanic whereby players have to control the distance between solder and a soldering iron in order to make solder joints. This isn’t really a full game at present, and it would require both target areas and some form of time limit to make it so. I still think it stands as a proof-of-concept, though.
To try it for yourself, head here.
I was thinking about hacking and lockpicking minigame mechanics, and it occurred to me that it would be possible to modify nonogram puzzles to provide a fun “hacking” mechanic. I threw together a demo using HTML5/javascript, which can be played with here.
It ended up being more of a 2d Rubik’s cube than a nonogram variant, but I thought that that provided a more enjoyable experience.
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