It may be the death of me, but I’m going to complete the Screamride game. I’m enjoying the game and thought I’d video the gameplay and upload it to YouTube.
Gaming
Valentines Day Game I Created for My Sweetie
I have recently switched from being a full-time employee from a company for the last decade and a half to running my own consultancy services company. It has been great so far. I’ve been able to focus on some of my passions like creating video games and creating content for folks to consume around video game creation.
But running your own business also comes with some challenges. Having a steady paycheck every two weeks for the last 20 years is comforting. Not knowing exactly where the next project will come from and how the next month’s bills will be paid takes a little bit of a mind shift. Due to this mind shift, I decided to make my wife a game instead of buying her a card. It was sort of a geeky thing to do, but my wife has come to expect the geeky ways I express myself. (When we were in college, I’d send 3.5 floppy disks to her through the college mail system for her to run different applications I had made. These included instructions like, “on the DOS prompt enter iloveyou.exe”. Yes, she can’t say she didn’t know what she was getting into!)
The Valentines Day Game
Anyway, even though I haven’t changed my cheesy ways all that much in 20 years, the technology has. Unity 3D makes it really simple to get something going. I spent about 2 hours getting the Valentines Day game to work as I wanted to.
The game is simplistic and randomly puts candy inside of the 3 heart boxes. It plays one of 3 random songs when it starts and tapping on the flowers makes it switch songs. If you find the candy on the first try, you get 3 points. If you find it on the second try, you get 2 points. If you didn’t find it until the last box, you get no points and you get a strike. If you get three strikes the game is over. It also keeps track of the high score and updates the screen (and storage) if a high score is achieved during the gameplay.
The game won’t win any awards to be sure, but it was fun to do over the course of a couple of hours this past weekend.
If you haven’t tried out Unity yet, I’d highly suggest you give it a try. It is really easy to get into and after a little bit of a learning curve, you can be creating awesome games – even a Valentines Day game like this one.
The game in its current form is using a font that is only licensed for personal use and I’m using songs that I have rights to listen to, but not to redistribute. So I’m not releasing the game’s source in it’s current state.
That being said, if getting your hands on this Valentines Day game is something that interests you, please let me know in the comments below. If I get 20 comments asking for the files, I’ll spend some time to rework the game with assets I can actually distribute and make it available to download. So if you want to see it, let me know (and let others know too so they can comment as well.)
Game Development Contest – $28K Up For Grabs
Game Development Contest from Microsoft has $28,000 up for grabs!
Already have a game developed but it isn’t on Windows and Windows Phone? Or are you thinking about making a game? You should check out the Windows Game Development Contest from Microsoft!
The contest started on January 21st, but applies to any games that were already published to the Windows Store or Windows Phone Store on or after January 1st. The deadline to submit your game and apply it to the DVLUP challenge is March 20th, 2015.
The game entries will be judged on the following:
Quality of Submission – 50%
Creativity – 30%
Technical Excellence – 20%
Get all the details on the Windows Game Development Contest
Windows Game Development Contest
http://www.wpdevcenteroffers.com/home/contest
So if you’ve been wanting to get started in game development, but needed a little motivation, perhaps the cash prizes would entice you.
First Prize: $10K USD
Second Prize: $5K USD
Third Prize: $3K USD
10 Honorable Mention Prizes: $1K USD each
If you are just starting out, you may want to check out the webinar I gave on my game development tutorial site, devgame101.com. The webinar has been made available for a short time as a replay. If you are interested, you can sign up for the game development webinar replay.
Are you excited about this opportunity? If so, let me know in the comments below!
What game are you thankful for?
So I found Brian Fisher of Lion Root today. As I looked around I ended up on his Facebook page where he posted the question – What game are you thankful for?
I started to type in a comment. But then I went to add a picture and then I realized I needed to dust off my blog and create a post. I have several partially written blog posts that I’ve created over the last couple of years. They never seemed to make it to the interwebs though.
So in an effort to actually get a blog post created, I decided to take my comment and turn it into this post.
The game I’m most thankful for is…
…Police Quest from Sierra
The screenshot is of Police Quest from Serria – That is when I realized I could type in commands to the computer and have it do something. It’s what sparked me to get into programming and I’ve had a wonderful career in software development for almost two decades.
I picked the above image because it actually shows typing in look in the prompt at the bottom of the game. I also played Deadline, Witness and other Infocom games on an IBM compatible machine with an Intel 8088 chip after playing this game. My dad picked up the PC a few years after it was out from a co-worker. I had an Atari 2600 game console, but my friend down the street had the Atari 600XL computer. It was at his house, while we played Police Quest, that I realized that you could tell the computer what to do as long as you told it in a way it could understand. Of course, I was just telling the interpreter of the actual game and not the computer itself, but the concept was still valid. Later, I was able to buy that computer from my friend as he got the Atari 800 XL. I upgraded the Atari 600 XL from 16K of RAM to 64K to have the same amount of memory as the 800 and the Commodore 64.
It was on this machine that I had my first programming experience using Atari BASIC. I could even save my programs to disk!
I don’t recall the exact years I played the games or even in which order, but I do know that I had the Atari 2600 first to play, then I got the 600XL and wrote my first BASIC code on that and finally got the IBM Compatible PC. I believe this would have been between 1985 and 1987 right when I was becoming a teenager.
It was during this time that I fell in love with video games. I always wanted to create video games and it was the reason why I got into computers.
Within a couple of years, I spent many hours trying to get games to run on the IBM and fighting with IRQ numbers on my Sound Blaster Pro and trying to get games like Doom to run. The following quote from Remembering Doom 20 Years Later sums it up nicely:
In the early 90’s memory was a precious thing. Games were meant to be squeezed into the 640k of conventional memory. DOS4GW allowed you to use some extended memory to boost this but you still needed to maximize your free memory. That meant assigning some XMS to smartdrv to boost performance. That meant moving the mouse driver into the right partition. It turned us all into programmers.
I spent as much time trying to get my games to run as I did playing them sometimes. Still, this ‘hardship’ is what really helped me understand the different aspects of a computer and how it all worked together. I like to think that my love of playing games is ultimately what led me to take 5 computer courses in my last 3 years of high school.
I had the opportunity to take BASIC, Pascal, COBOL, Fortran and C++. (COBOL and Fortran were each 1/2 of a year and I had the privilege to be the first student to learn C++ in our school.) Well before high school, I would create BASIC programs on my Atari 600XL. Later, on my IBM, I used GW-BASIC. I remember upgrading my monitor from monochrome to CGA to EGA and finally VGA. Then came the graphic card upgrades. My first HDD was a whopping 10MB. Life was awesome.
I’m very thankful I grew up during that time. And if I had to choose just one game to be thankful for, it would have to be Police Quest. While many games were played through the years and I enjoyed the Space Quest games even more, it was Police Quest that flipped the light on in my head that I could actually “program” a computer.