For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 262.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 / 1000
Target: 1008
Merry Christmas! Apparently I was off a bit in my calculations, as there is almost another week to go before the year’s end…hmm…
In any case, I managed to hit over 25% of my goal for the year, which isn’t too […]

Personal Development, Game Development | 2 Comments »

Taking Ken’s advice from my previous post, I decided to write a small test program to verify that the RNG method touted as the best really was the best.
To recap, there are three methods:
The first method involves using the modulus operator: int pickedNum = rand() % range;
The better method involves some trickery to get […]

Geek / Technical | No Comments »

Thanks go to Uhfgood in #gamedevelopers for finding the article Using rand(). I thought I already knew about the problems with using rand(). This article was great at clarifying the actual problems people have with using rand() as well as faults with “good” solutions people use. It also documents a simpler way […]

Geek / Technical, Game Development | 5 Comments »

I have been looking into Space Invaders and how it was like to play the original. I played Love Invaders, which has an amusing intro (1978 was all just a big misunderstanding), and Invasion 3D, which actually had some interesting game mechanics, such as exploding UFOs that also destroyed nearby aliens and aliens that […]

Games, Politics/Government | 1 Comment »

I’ve been reading through the source code of a number of games, and I’ve been picking up some good ideas.
Specifically, I had been struggling with the idea of retrofitting a menu system to a finished game. I hadn’t been focused on the task (as I need a finished game first), but I had a […]

Game Development | No Comments »

Speaking of XNA, Mono.Xna “is an open-source implementation of Microsoft XNA”.
It is still a baby project, but hopefully it will actually allow developers to create truly cross-platform games. The source to it is available in the Mono subversion repository. Mono, of course, is the open source, UNIX version of the .NET development platform.

Game Development, General | 7 Comments »

The other day I decided to look through some source code of other games, and I downloaded a breakout clone written using the XNA Framework. It provided the source code, and I figured that C# can’t be that different from Java or C++, so it shouldn’t be a problem. At one point […]

Game Development, General | 3 Comments »

I woke up late, which pretty much set the tone for the rest of the day. I didn’t spend nearly as much time working on the Space Invaders clone as I would have liked. Still, it was progress.
I ran into two bugs, one for each small update I made. The first bug […]

Game Development | No Comments »

For this week’s Thousander Club update:
Game Hours: 241.25 / 1000
Game Ideas: 616 / 1000
Target: 987
Only two more weeks!
So I found that I could still come up with 100 ideas, which was surprisingly difficult and easy, depending on the hour. I managed to get multiple aliens to move about, which involved replacing the single […]

Personal Development, Game Development | 3 Comments »

Did it sneak up on you? It snuck up on me! Game Tunnel’s 2006 Game of the Year awards calendar is up, and two categories have already been published!
The awards have already been distributed for the Best Sports Game and the Best RPG of 2006, and I don’t think who won was a big […]

Games, General | 3 Comments »