As I one day want to become a games programmer I’ve decided to take it upon myself to create some short little games to learn the basics of games mechanics before I step up to programming something worth while.
The first of these games is Pong, a classic and the best way I thought, to start learning games programming techniques. It’s taken me a few days (thanks to work) to finish it and a playable (no sound due to a processing export screw up) version is up and running in my newly made portfolio folder. I had originally had some awesome sound effects along with the game but for some reason I couldn’t export it with the minim intergration (you can download the folder here if you want)
The game is the classic Pong with 3 difficulty modes, the colours pulse from black to white (for fun more than any game play reasons) I have noticed a 1 bug, but its nothing major (when choosing hard it takes the ball one bounce to come upto the correct speed). If you do come across a bug please leave it in the comments.
The source is fully commented if you wish to learn from it. I’ll be uploading the audio file that was supposed to be accompanying the game
I’ve decided to release Vimeo for Wordpress 1.2 without the Visual Editor intergration, this is because to add this intergration I will need to add a hell of a lot more code and I want to clear my Today list in Things….
1.2 is a minor update to 1.1.9 (it basically just sorts out the colour picker) but I’m hoping to release 1.3 next week with the visual editor ‘greatness’
I’m gearing up for the 1.2 release of Vimeo for Wordpress now. There’s a few features I’d like to add before I let it into the wild but this latest release adds comments to the videos ( so you can tell what the embed code actually does), It fixes the issue of the colour picker’s box being at the bottom of the page (though the CSS isn’t quite perfect yet) aswell as a few other things.
As usual I’ll put up a few examples of how it all goes plus some screenshots.
So Here’s the first one:
Using the new commenting system it’s easy to see what your videos are and it’s even easier to select them and delete the code
Here’s the second:
When you add a video in the manual entry box there’s no way of the plugin knowing what the video is so it just gives some default code
A while back I was googling to see if any bright spark had come up with a way to get the trophy information out of the PS3. I had recently found an old tutorial on how to use xbox 360 achievement data to create a custom gamertag in Flash so I wanted to see if there was a Playstation based project. It turns out there is.
I found this post on the Playstation forums which led me to the GetInfos project. Using the data the project outputs you can get the PSN user’s trophy data, profile avatar, country and recent games they have played. I have a little example with some basic code over at http://gimpneek.com/downloads/psnapi/ Just type in your PS3 username and it will change the background color to RGB(255/number of gold trophies, 255/ number of silver trophies, 255/ number of bronze trophies), it will tell you the different types of trophy and then print the trophies out in a massive block of trophy glory.
I’m still deciding where to take this, A facebook app is an easy idea but I want to try and use it with processing to create some art.
I just got back from rainy rainy cornwall. While I was down there I got my university results, I got a first, so I’m a happy bunny.
While me and Leanna were stuck in doors we began working on a game idea, we’re creating a game called Gumzilla, I’ll have some more info on it when we knuckle down and do some more work on it, but let’s just say it’s going to be epic!
I saw about 2 days ago that unity were having a summer if code contest. They want indie developers and students to propose projects that will create reusable assets for unity. One of the catergories was social network intergration. This is something I’ve been thinking about for a while ( see the post in which insaid I had a great idea :p) so I built a little test which sends a tweet to Twitter when a character collides with a spaceship. The demo is available at unity test use the arrow keys to walk the character towards the spaceshipt. Then jump on it. This will the send the tweet to http://www.twitter.com/unitytest. If you have unity you can Download the project at http://www.gimpneek.com/unity/twitter/unity_twitter.zip.
I’ll be posting some more stuff on it. And hopefully if my proposal gets accepted I’ll be posting much more :p
I’ve added some new options to the Vimeo for Wordpress plugin.
The user can now set the width and height of the player, the colour of the player, wether or not the player shows the title, the video owners name, the video owners portrait and if the player let’s people go fullscreen.
I finally got round to uploading my Vimeo for Wordpress Plugin at 1am this morning and already 66 people have downloaded it. I know this doesn’t seem huge but I’m amazed that in the space of 12 hours 66 people decided to give it a try. Mega happy points there, I’m sure the hype will die down though.
I’ve also just posted up my tutorial on how to make a Facebook App with as much ease as possible over at www.webmonkey.com if anyone wants to go check it out.
I’ve just finished coding my first plugin for Wordpress. I’m calling it Vimeo for Wordpress (original huh?).
The plugin is simple to set up, it uses your Vimeo user name to grab your videos and your friends videos but there’s still an option to enter the URL of the video (the plugin takes the http://www.vimeo.com/ part out of it).
Anyways you should go try it out!
