Suddenly! (Miner)

Releases a game out of nowhere.

Miner.zip (Google Docs)

Pictuars for once:

Boosh.

Instructions are in game for once as well!

Basically, Terraria with an Elder Scrolls leveling system.

The self-imposed challenge here was, "make a game in two days." I had a final on Wednesday, so I extended the deadline to 2.5 days.

I'm probably going to be updating this over the next X period of time, but doing stuff on a deadline was kinda fun. So, probably going to do more.
Also: No testing. No idea if this'll work on your system. Have fun with it.

Preliminary C++ Ranking System

AKA: C++ Belts
Students must understand/accomplish the following criteria to obtain the given ranks.

6th Kyu: IDE installed; Hello World compiled
5th Kyu: Variables, strings; functions; console I/O
4th Kyu: Arrays; loops; structs
3rd Kyu: Classes; recursive functions; pass-by-reference; using std::vectors
2nd Kyu: Inheritance; pointers; template functions
1st Kyu: Polymorphism; dynamically-allocated variables; template classes
1st Dan: Basic data structures; basic graph theory (DFS, BFS)
...

And so forth.
The basic idea is a way to quantify proficiency in programming languages, aside from an mildly arbitrary "X years of experience". That, and so I can say I have a black belt in C++.

Addendum to Favorite Games

Portal 2

The first Portal was intentionally omitted from the previous list, because even though Portal is definitely a must-play, it isn't one of my go-to games for a list of favorites. Portal 2 was omitted not for similar reasons, but because I hadn't played it yet. I beat it yesterday. Portal 2 isn't necessarily a must-play - it feels redundant sitting next to Portal 1 in that regard - but it definitely goes on the favorites list.

My Favorite Games

In no particular order:

Mass Effect 2

Final Fantasy VI

Final Fantasy X

Super Metroid

Chrono Trigger

Demon's Souls

Disgaea (series)

Half-Life 2

Star Fox 64

Pokemon (series)

Kingdom Hearts II

Super Mario Bros. 3

Short stories

I discovered the programming equivalent of writing short stories and it's kind of addictive.

These six programs (all in one) are roughly 600 lines of code. They're also mostly some type of "cool" or "fun". For me at least they were.

Here's the Google Docs link: QtBeziers.zip

There are six tabs, each of which has a mini-program of its own. From right to left:

Progress - Like Progress Quest, but slightly more graphical. This was me just getting used to Qt. It's even got the Hello World button.

Beziers - The coolest one. The one I spent the most time on. The one I named the program after. The one I made the whole program to make. Generalized Bezier curves. Click the canvas to set guide points. When you've specified order+1 points, it draws the resulting curve. Further clicks remove the oldest point and adds the newest as the end. The program defaults to cubic splines (3rd order), which are the Bezier curves we're most familiar with (if you didn't know; they're used in almost all vector graphics, including the font you're reading now), but the order can be modified (within reason). Subdivisions controls how the curve is drawn; the default should be fine. Time works with the ShowSteps option; this shows how the curve is drawn mathmatically, visually. Animate automatically increments the Time slider.

Mountain - This is an implementation of the one-dimensional Midpoint Displacement algorithm. I would have given settings to modify the algorithm, but it's randomized enough to be interesting on its own, and frankly who cares.

Neighborhood - Click the screen and it'll make points. Then it'll find the relative neighborhood graph of those points. This guarantees connectivity, but also can have cycles. It also doesn't cross the paths, which makes the graph spatially appealing. It also generalizes easily to higher dimensions. When it comes to 3D random dungeon generation, this is the algorithm I'm going to use to connect the rooms together.

Map - Creates a random world-map looking thing. Algorithm straight from here. [I think] the sliders are fairly intuitive; depth controls how much the program iterates, land controls the ratio of land to water, and noise controls how rough the borders look.

Cave - Makes random caves, using a cellular automata method.

3D random dungeons coming eventually!

Hands up, people who saw this coming

So yeah, interest in Duckbill got shot to hell. What happened? At roughly the same time, I burned myself out trying to write complicated networking code when I have only the most basic ideas of how networking works, and my artist got a real job and an internship. Yeah I had an artist working with me on that. Yeah I didn't mention that to avoid getting anybody's hopes up (not that the four of you reading this didn't already know).

Shortly after my desire to program anything hit rock-bottom, I started playing WoW.

Over a month later, here we are.

So, no games coming from me anytime in the near future.

Distaction

What bill? I don't see no ducks.

Here's one of the games I made for game dev that I'm actually proud of: Hoax.zip (Google Docs)

Don't let the name fool you, it's legitimate.

You'll need Python and pygame to run it. Run Main.py in Python (the command will look something similar to "python Main.py" if you do it command-line style)

Z/X rotate, arrow keys move.

Nearly There

Note to self: Networking is very, very hard.

Coming soon:
- An actual update! Really this time!
- A todo list / timeline, for organizational purposes, and so I can continue to disappoint in new and exciting ways.

Actually

Screw it. Here you go: Duckbill-r20.zip (Google Docs)
Protip: Don't use either of the multiplayer options unless you have a penchant for ruination and failure. Or at least, crashes and failure.

Not much has changed for the single-player campaign, except that larger rooms use a different generation algorithm, and item placement has been improved a bit.
Probably 95% of the networking code is done, it's just that the last 5% will turn it from bugsy crashesalot, into actually functional.

Mid-week update coming hopefully soon, once I fix this damn thing. Then I'll talk for a while and it'll be lovely.

More De Lays

It'll be done when it's done, dammit.
Sweet zombie Jesus, this is a headache. Being so close to done and not having stuff work is mildly infuriating

De Lays

This week's update isn't quite ready yet, sorry.

It will be up sometime tomorrow - I know all three of you reading this are very disappointed.

Just know that, this was a huge headache:

Networking Base

Got the basics of the multiplayer in place. Tons of work left to do for it, but the big scary step into the realm of networking code has been taken. Details at 11 (i.e. Saturday).