21–30 of 30 posts
If you're interested in simple game design, you should consider experimenting with Flash. Websites like http://www.kongregate.com/ and services like http://mochiads.com/ could help with distribution and revenue on what might otherwise be just a hobby.
That sounds exactly like my story... in 1995-1996 I started to develop a clone of Football Manager That I had on C64. I used Turbo Pascal and the game was running under DOS. Like you I had no internet connection at a time and I found only a small book about a few graphic functions. I was never able to do a fluid animation of my games. It was too laggy only to draw the ball on the screen ! Then I dropped and unfortuna…
There are plenty of guys (and girls) over 30 in my undergraduate CS class. A few over 40, as well.
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Knowledge of JavaScript is transferable to ActionScript but I was quite specific about the use of JavaScript. There's a large amount of code and documentation which is ideal for the task.
Any pointers? I have considered creating games in JavaScript (OK, arguably my boobs memory is a game in JavaScript), but I still would not consider it the obvious choice for action games. For a beginner, I would rather suggest something classical, where you have a screen/bitmap/whatever that you can draw to?
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I completely agree with you but I would rather recommend Pyglet ( http://www.pyglet.org/ ) than pygame.
pygame obviously has better coverage (10-to-1 hits on google)... this is the first time I saw pyglet. What's better about it?
Pyglet has no dependencies and I just found it a lot simpler than pygame to get started with.
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The distinction interpreted/compiled is largely moot these days, since most popular interpreted languages are actually compiled (or at least bytecode-compiled) before they are run. The real question is whether you would want to use a modern, abstract, weakly typed language like Python instead of a strongly typed and machine-code compiled language like C++. The latter is , usually, considerably slower. The decision al…
Thanks for your reply. One more question, I am maybe old fashionned, but weak typing kind of scared me. I am more used to strong typing and I find it weird when I look at python variable declaration. In my point of view, strong typing helps avoid bugs and write cleaner programs. What advantages do you see in weak typing?
- Code is shorter and potentially easier to read.
- While static typing can identify some bugs at compile time, these are usually the easiest bugs to find regardless of the language you use. The hard bugs -- the ones not caught by the compiler -- only become obvious through testing. So if you have a good suite of tests, you will find both classes of bugs, whether or not you use a statically typed language.
- In a dynamically typed language, you spend less time wrestling with the typing system -- instead of casting in C or Java, doing long template-related declarations in C++, or convincing ML or Haskell that your program should be allowed to run.
- And, more theoretically, a statically typed language limits the space of programs that you can write. While most of the programs disallowed by static typing are buggy, some are useful, and a statically typed program with the identical useful functionality is longer.
Of course, static typing has its benefits as well. It's the reason our fastest languages are as fast as they are, and it's a comforting safety net, especially in large projects.
Unless you really want to deal with all this blitting stuff, I recommend that you look at making flash games. You get to deal with the more interesting problem (to me) of making a fun, playable game vs. dealing with the nuts and bolts of graphics programming.
Also ask those guys at popcap how their financials look. I bet they aren't doing too poorly :)
For about 3 years, I've said that the minigame will rule the world and it it beginning to turn that way. Look at 90% of the Wii games and they are all minigames. Games like Peggle and the downloadable content for XB360 are all minigames that make bank.
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Any pointers? I have considered creating games in JavaScript (OK, arguably my boobs memory is a game in JavaScript), but I still would not consider it the obvious choice for action games. For a beginner, I would rather suggest something classical, where you have a screen/bitmap/whatever that you can draw to?
A good example to start would be BreakOut. You have a grid of tiles. Some are bricks. Some are spaces. This you can implement as an HTML . The bat and the ball can be implemented as floating s. You can detect the x position of the pointer and use this to control the position of the bat. When the ball hits a brick, you want the brick to disappear. If you label each tile in your grid then JavaScript can replace any til…
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What are the advantages of an interpreted language for game programming? My idea is that it is probably much slower. I can't see the advantage. Is it that there are a lot of usefull libraries or else? ( I almost don't know python/pygame ).
The distinction interpreted/compiled is largely moot these days, since most popular interpreted languages are actually compiled (or at least bytecode-compiled) before they are run. The real question is whether you would want to use a modern, abstract, weakly typed language like Python instead of a strongly typed and machine-code compiled language like C++. The latter is , usually, considerably slower. The decision al…
If you're interested in simple game design, you should consider experimenting with Flash. Websites like http://www.kongregate.com/ and services like http://mochiads.com/ could help with distribution and revenue on what might otherwise be just a hobby.
Do you have an idea of how much renenue you can do for an average game on that kind of websites?