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Posts Tagged ‘games’

Projection party game (Things)

This was a small project I put together for my girlfriend’s birthday party. She wanted to play a party game whereby:

  1. a topic is presented
  2. each player writes out a response
  3. all the responses are read aloud (with ensuing hilarity)
  4. everyone tries to guess who said what

I put together a web-based version of the game that we then projected onto the wall of her living room. The game is controlled by a strip of controls along the bottom of the page which, when presented fullscreen, is cut off by the way I had the projector set up.

The controls allow for a new entry to be entered, with both the name of the person that said it and what they said. Only the actual statement is shown, with the name being hidden. Once everyone has submitted their answer, the ‘Reveal N’ button steps through each answer, revealing who said what.

The topics come from a simple MySQL table, but new topics can also be entered on the fly via javascript (to allow for audience suggestions). If you would like to try it, head here, or click on the image above.

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Game Roller

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

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Cryptogram solving interface

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:

  • User can touch a letter to highlight all occurences of that letter in the ciphertext
  • User can (with a ciphertext letter higlighted) select a letter to replace it
  • The selected letter then appears over all occurrences of the ciphertext letter
  • The selected plaintext letter is greyed out to indicate that it has been used
  • Once all the letters have been filled in correctly, the app recognizes that the puzzle has been solved

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Corona SDK- first steps

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.

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Soldering minigame

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.

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Hacking Mechanic demo

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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Experimenting with HTML5

Just spent the evening watching Dexter and playing around with the canvas tag. I made a small game-like experiment that lets players control a man in black to capture aliens. Not terribly polished, but it’s a decent example of gameplay for a couple hours of messing around.

Click here to see the result in action.

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Node-based crafting mockup

I’ve started in on a project that I’ve been kicking around for awhile- an approach to gameplay based on the node-based interfaces in apps like Maya and Pd.

What I’m thinking is to have a game world in which players can build things by “hacking” (in the Make-magazine sense) things together to create useful items. But rather than having some pre-determined set of possibilities (as in games like Notrium), I plan on having it be completely open-ended (a ‘la Pd), by keeping things as modular as possible.

What I have so far is a working mockup of the object-creation interface, implemented with Python/Pygame. A list of objects is given at the bottom, and the user can click-drag any of them to the workspace to create a node. Then, the user can create linkages from the outputs of a given node to the inputs of another. Links update automatically to maintain themselves as the nodes are moved around the work area, and deleting a node (by clicking on the X) also deletes any linkages attached to it. The nodes themselves are declared in a separate text file and can be easily added to. So far, all that’s stored is the name of the node, the image to use for its icon, and the number of input/output connections. As the object-model grows more complex, I’ll be adding information to the nodes, such as what kind of connections they require (electric, mechanical, etc) and how much of each.

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Second-Person Shooter

This was a kind of game design one-liner- a second person shooter. Instead of “I shoot”, “You shoot”- the player selects a character that then shoots them. In the application, you select a character from a typical character-selection screen. That character then shoots you, the screen goes red, and the application starts over.

If you’d like to try it, you can download it here. Note that it’s all 2d (though implemented with OpenGL) and uses Quake3 characters.

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Little Slave

My first exploration of arcade games as a medium. I wanted to create an experience that was the antithesis of the conventional game experience, emphasizing stillness and having a meditative mood. I built a mannequin into a conventional arcade game housing. When a user inserts a coin, a light comes on, and the mannquin begins to shake. There is a single button on the front of the box. Pushing it causes the mannequin to stop shaking, and a looping tape with sounds of bells and mules being driven is played. After a few minutes, the machine shuts down and awaits the next coin.

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