Fun stuff.
On the upside, running your own code on the iPhone is really cool — I haven’t felt this much like I was “hacking” (in the classical sense of the term) in a long time. The upshot of it all is that I’ve just released my first game, Levelheaded, for the iPhone. It’s a port of my old Global Game Jam project from last year, Jarhead, updated for the iPhone’s touch input and limited screen real estate. Now, onward with the marketing!
]]>Hurrah!
In PopCat you are given a series of words and have to come up with a category for each one. You might say that "apple" is a "fruit", for example, or that a "'57 El Camino" is a "car". Your score is based on how close your categories match the most popular categories for each word -- the more people play the game, the more accurate the list of popular categories gets. If you guess the most popular category for a word you'll get a card, which might give you a hint (the ? card), a really good hint (the magic 8-ball), or let you skip a word altogether. How far are you from popular opinion?
At any rate, please let me know what you think could be improved, as I'm hoping to use game for nefarious research-y purposes, and want it to be friendly and fun for as wide an audience as possible.
~/Library (open ~/.profile. This opens up your bash profile in TextEdit; add this line to the end of the file:
export PATH=~/Library/flex_sdl_3.4/bin:PATH (if you put the flex_sdk_3.4 folder somewhere other than ~/Library, use that path here instead).
Save the file and quit TextEditsource ~/.profile, either works), and make sure everything works by typing mxmlc -help. You should get a screenful of text, starting with the line “Adobe Flex Compiler (mxmlc).” Success!cd ~/Downloads/flixel_v1.25/.mxmlc Mode.as. You should see something like: Loading configuration file /Users/doches/Library/flex_sdk_3.4/frameworks/flex-config.xml
/Users//Downloads/flixel_v1.25/Mode.swf (380608 bytes)
open Mode.swf in Terminal).Ok — that’s everything we need to build Flash games using Flixel. Stick around for more tutorials on actually using Flixel to get things up on the screen!
]]>From the post:
]]>Wikirunner is an a chase game inspired by Jeremy Bushnell’s Wikipedian Tag. Created for Mini Ludum Dare #12 (the theme was ‘Wikipedia’), two players are given a random Wikipedia page each, and then ‘the chaser’ must try to navigate his or her way to the same page as their opponent, while ‘the runner’ must try to stay off the same page as the chaser for as long as possible.
Both players can only move to another Wiki page if it has some relevance to the page they are currently on - so for example, you could move from ‘London Olympics’ to ‘2012’, but not from ‘Russia’ to ‘kangaroo’. The chaser also gets two goes for every one of the runner’s goes, to give him a fair chance. The game can be played in a 2-player hotseat style, or 1 vs AI, or AI vs AI (if you want to watch how the program thinks).
By far the most fun mode is an AI chaser vs a player runner. It’s interesting to see the choices the AI makes - at one point I changed to ‘Canada’, so the AI jumped over to a page on ‘Dumbledore’s Army’. Escaping to the Wiki page for ‘Iraq’, the program then tried to follow me by bringing up the page for ‘The Manchester Evening News’, which just so happens to be my local newspaper strangely enough.
Not this time, though.
I’ve got a pretty good set-up going: screenshots every two seconds under both windows and linux, autostarting on login for both (No forgetting!) and saving to an empty harddrive formatted to fat32 so both OSes can access it. Images are tagged with the time in a consistent format, too, so I can make sure they’re all in the right order after the dust settles and I get around to encoding the thing. In case you’re interested in repeating this feat for yourself, let me describe the software and hardware setup: One desktop, dual booting Linux and Vista + one Macbook, running OS X and equipped with built-in iSight camera. On Linux (Ubuntu, 64bit) I’m using scrot with a custom makefile, dumping JPEGs of my screen every 2 seconds. On Windows I’m using Keeyai’s excellent Chronolapse, a tool that I’m pretty sure came out of an earlier LD. I’m also using Chronolapse to merge everything together in the end, because it works with screenshots saved as a series of images and can do picture-in-picture compositing. For OS X I’m using EyeSight to take pictures with the iSight camera every 2 seconds. The laptop is sitting off to the side when I’m not using it, so that image will either show me working on the desktop, on the laptop, or not working at all (e.g. sleeping).
Not bad, eh? And all free software to boot.
]]>This ought to be a good compo, and for a slew of reasons. The last compo, back in may, netted over a hundred submissions — breaking records we didn’t even know we were keeping. As for me, I’ve been all fired-up about this sort of indie development lately, partly thanks to mvromer’s influence, and partly due to attending the splendiferous Edinburgh Interactive Festival. Hopefully I’ll get enough work done during the week, meet all my goals and whatnot, that I can participate without inducing too much research-guilt. I guess we’ll see.
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