Games
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Programming |
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I have been Game Programming since I was 10 years old
and taught myself BASIC. I started out with an Atari 800, and used to type in all of
the games that were listed in an old magazine then called Compute. It was a great
magazine, and I credit all of my early computer experience to it. Five or six years
later I upgraded myself to an Amiga 1000. This computer had great graphics and sound
capabilities. I was still using BASIC as my main programming language, but I created
many good games with bitmaps and sounds and such. About four years ago I bought my
first PC compatible, and have been using them ever since. Today I two games which I can consider "real" games, or at least shareware quality. One is a dart game I wrote a while ago in which you can compete against friends and computer players in cricket, and _01 games. I developed a "true swing" type motion in which the mouse is used to throw the dart. This consisted of a view in which you would see the dartboard as if you were looking at it from the throwing line and a large dart as the mouse cursor. You would move the dart to the appropriate location and click the mouse button to "lock" it in place. Then with the push of the mouse, the dart would fly towards the board. The game would sense the speed in the x and y directions of the mouse and vary the flight accordingly. It works very well, and I have yet to see a dart game on the pc that betters it. Unfortunately, I worte this in C with dos routines, and I have never bothered to find more update ways of using the mouse drivers. For if I run the game on a non-DOS based os (Win95/98) the game just locks up. Just laziness on my part. Some day I will port it to a win32 app. The other game I wrote not too much longer after my dart game is a clone on the popular arcade standup called "Bust-a-Move". This was a game made by Taito. I loved it so much, I just had to make my own version. The challenge of getting it to work was the most fun. Lots of graph theory and recursive procedures were used to get the game to work correctly. It is as much of a blast to play as it was to write. This project was more of a "see if I can do it" type of project. I never added sound, and again it is a DOS game, but it works semi-well in win95. It runs faster if it is run in a DOS-mode though. Drop me a line if anyone wants a copy of any of my games. |