No Name Games

Ok, so my Arkanoid wannabe obviously isn’t anything fancy, but I had a little fun with it last night. I got a particle system functioning (somewhat) for when the blocks break, and added gravity to the particles and the ball.

Also added sound - although I’m recycling sounds at the moment. Maybe one of these times I’ll actually make the thing available, if I put in enough effort on it to make it more interesting anyway.

Seriously, I think I’ve been doing too much of it lately. Every day I’m feeling my brain expand a little bit more and a little bit more. Every day I’m reading hundreds of pages and every day I find myself wondering what to do when I run out of pages to read. Then I start going back and trying to write down tidbits of information from what I’ve been reading to use for later in… whatever.

Today I read a book about Ninjas (lossa nifty information). Yesterday I read the entire series of I Luv Halloween (in hardback edition - with a bonus comic). Day before that I read the entire Silent Hill series in an omnibus edition. Friday I killed off a 1062 page book, which was a collection of books written by Charles Fort that were release between 1919 and 1932 - so many awesome tales of bizarre happenings in real life, good times… Before all that I read a book called Energy Work that was all about raising your spiritual energy levels and crap like that, a book called ‘Your Inner Fish’ (details physical evidence of human evolution down to basically pond scum - though not everyone agrees of course), a book about plants and the various reasons people grow them along with how the plants seem to be manipulating us (it’s not as whacko as that makes it sound).

Seriously… I’m running out of stuff… tomorrow I’m gonna be killing off a book about ancient egyptian myths. I’m reading ghost stories on the side. If I don’t find more to read, I’ll be stuck with ghost stories and programming manuals from classes I took like 6 years ago.
So… anyone have any suggestions? I’m almost scared to think of what insanity I shall pick up next…

Btw - if anyone can stand a book that’s over a thousand pages, Charles Fort is DEFINITELY worth it. His theories are outlandish, and very outdated concepts by today’s standards (not to mention, kind of laughable sometimes) but the points he makes are absolutely spectacular, and the stuff he found through research is simply unbelievable. You will find no better collection of strange, inexplicable, sometimes macabre, events than that book. It’s called the Book of the Damned - the Collected Works of Charles Fort.

I’m hoping to get a book on XNA, so I have something to follow along with that I can have in my hand I guess. Maybe that’ll stall out my book binge for a bit. >.>

*sigh* Thank god Barnes and Noble keeps doing these weird massive price reductions on books they haven’t been able to sell…

Ok, so as I think I alluded in the past, I’ve been practicing really crappy stuff, to make sure I’ve got the basics down. And there was one thing in particular I was playin around with making that was really… really crappy looking. I spent a little bit of time on it last night (probably a total of about a half-hour’s time, not including spacing out here and there) and it started to look semi-decent.

Mind you, this is, by no means, anything revolutionary, nor even interesting, of a game. In fact, I acknowledge fully this game has been built a million times over by god knows how many people, but I’m just practicing basic concepts, so gimme a break, eh?

Anyway, here’s how it looked after miniscule tweaking and actually becoming mildly playable for a minute or two. And I certainly hope you have no trouble recalling what this game is. It should be reeeeeally obvious.

Overly simple, no?

Me playing the mini-game like it was never intended. :)

This involved no cheating whatsoever, just a bit of exploiting.
Without movement, it’s kinda hard to tell, but there are HUNDREDS of shots on screen at once, although you can clearly see 3 different explosions in 3 different places all going off at once as asteroids are blown up.

I’m just that creative.

Since we’re putting our game up now, it’s about time we actually do the roll-call, so to speak… so-

A quick list of the stuff I did on the game (in order of prevalence in-game):

User Interface
Programming
Music
Sound Effects
3D Modeling
Image Work

And for details:

I mostly worked on the user interface, and ohhhh how much time I had to spend on it. I also did some other programming in the game, like the movement of the ship, and some optimization of code, engine-type-stuff you can’t see… *sigh*
All the music you hear, I threw together with some loops I found online. I really would have liked to spend some time actually creating the loops myself, but that would have taken too much time.
I did the sound effects too, and actually spent a good bit of time manipulating the sound files to make stuff sound just right. I hope I got a good blend of sounds. Joe did one sound effect, too. The ship’s 3D model was done by me as well, though the other models I built got scrapped. Other than that, I did little bits of work making some images, although you mostly won’t be able to see the images I made. They were almost entirely utility images to accomplish specific goals. The most visible image I made is the little rotating emblem on the HUD. I’m sure you can tell I’m not the most spectacular 2D artist out there…

-Eli