Heres what im doing while im doing nothing.

So you may realise im currently doing no work on ZS (words cant tell you how much i want to, im even travailing back to my home early so i can get a good day of work on it), but i thought id show you what i am doing during my easter break. Be prepared, its nothing fancy, and its certainly not a polished application, but it is an iphone game.

The game is for a university project, the idea of which is the reveal hidden symbols under tiles, find the matching tile and drag the tiles that match on top of each other (im sure we have all played these before). The main menu screen is basic and will have buttons to a game screen and a leader board (maybe a settings screen too!)

Here is what the main game looks like, we have a load of tiles, pressing a tile reveals what symbol the tile hides. If we drag our finger from one tile to another and the hidden symbols match our score increases. 

 The game goes on forever, until time runs out. Once you have matched all the tiles the game resets, goes to the next level and reduces the time you have to complete the game. The tiles alos obviously switch there symbols.

I still have a moderate amount of work to do on the project before its hand in, in a few weeks. The background of the game will change dependant upon the weather in the area you currently are. I also need to implement the leader board system (mainly, i need to save the score, and pass it to the menu correctly using a delegate), and give it a bit more polish, like have a good system for dealing with the application when it exits etc.. but all in all its going well! This only took me a few days to create,so i cant wait to continue on it.

Light bulb moment!

Its 2:31am 19/03/2013, as i lay in bed i thought of an idea, and idea that seems so simple and yet i feel like a fool for not thinking of it sooner.

ZS should have not just zombies, but humans too! It will add more variety to the game, as players that kill humans will be subject to an in game penalty (such as a loss of score, or life loss). My framework is already set up for other entities such as this, so it will be simple to include!

Ive also been thinking more and more about the leader board. You know how on the Facebook app, you can go to someone profile, and from there go to another profile and so on, but from there you then have to go back about 100 times? My app may have the same problem if im not careful (due to using a navigation controller as my view controller), i should be careful about what links i place on the leader board screen. Also, it is possible i will need an addition screen for writing a name to associate a score with, although i think there are other ways this can be done.

Who knows, maybe ill think of more ideas tonight, ideas often jump at me when i just lay in bed.

I need to plan more.

Being away from my computer for three weeks you would have thought id come up with an ingenious solution to work away from home. I did not, because im a fool.

I did try to sort out a Remote Desktop Solution 30 mins before i was yet to leave, but i couldn't sort it before i left. So because im doing no work and have nothing to blog, i feel at a loss about what to post...

Anyway! I did try and do some research into a few problems i encountered with ZS (zombie squash, its got an acronym now!) and i think i have found some good solutions so at least that's something! I also had some great ideas about a common AI - Langtons Ant. If you reading this (and i expect no one is). Search Langtons Ant on Google, its a simple AI that looks very realistic.

Thats it for now, nothing else to post, maybe ill do some research and post that.

The joys of my sleeping pattern

Although this could be a tad off topic, I have the worst sleeping pattern in the world.

Seriously, I'm like a sloth, I'm busy for 4 hours, sleep for 2, busy for 4, sleep for 2...
And the cycle goes on! So I'm now in "wide awake mode".

In news that relates to anything remotely interesting, most of the basic class implementation for zombie squash is complete. Animation works, movement etc (touch events yet to work, sort this out Jamie!). I'll be away from my computer for a few weeks soon, but it will give me some time to think about other ideas for the project as well as do some work for my degree.

Time to sleep! Well most likely not.

Mac Rage

Ill try keep update short (mainly so i can be bothered to read them back myself).

Work is going both very well and very badly on Zombie Squash. Im loving being able to use C# with VS2012 in order to create my iPhone game (Base classes like Enity have been made). However, the framework im using (Xamarin) requires you build your application over a network using a Mac as a build server. This seems perfectly sensible, if not for the fact i own the shitest mac in the universe.

The wifi on it is very temperamental, and because of this, breaks my iOS simulator when trying to build. The solution is to do this through a wired network, but it just costs money to get a Ethernet switch so that i can connect both my mac and pc to the internet as well as each other.

God damn Macs.

Beauty.

Visual Studio. C#. iOS.

That is all.

Ill make a game now, promise!

Today i attended a lecturer from a member of Microsoft studios and there educational department. The guest spoke about why us as students should publish to windows 8 and windows mobile platforms. Now while i dont agree that windows 8 is a great OS, i believe having a game up on one of these stores, as well as on Google play and the app store should have already happened.

As of today, i will be starting on a new mobile game, Zombie Squash! (Working Title)

The game will be a face paced game you will be able to play for one minute or one hour. It will involve protecting a camp of survivors from countless zombie hordes to raise your score and beat your friends. More details (as well as hopefully some screenshots!) will be coming soon.

For anyone interested in the technical side, it will be built in C# using frameworks from http://xamarin.com/ . It will enable me to write one version of code for multiple platforms and even future platforms easily.This will also be a good test of what these frameworks can do for the stealth project i will be making later this year.

Im really looking forward to the project and hope to post more soon!

Quick thoughts on AI

Recently, ive been working with pattern matching heavy languages such as LISP and ERLANG, but today i wrote a Auto Typer/Spammer programmer for a popular web mmo, and it got me thinking about a certain point.

The smarter AI's are the ones that are dumb

Now, i know that makes no sense, but let me talk you through what i mean.

Lets say i have a character for a game, and i want to move him from point A to point B. Simple right? I could simply make a function called MoveToPoint(Point pB) and set the position of our character to B.

So the character is moved, but that's super smart. The character will have teleported from A to B!! Now as amazing as that is i don't know anyone who can do that, so our AI isn't very realistic (unless teleportation is what you are going for, in which case fantastic!) so we are going to want our character to move towards point B. Now the easiest way to do that would be to move our character a constant amount until we reach the point. But that's pretty smart as well..

Hopefully you can see where this is going. Our character wont wont to move at an exact pace, its pace might want to have a range so it walks at a pace a bit like humans do. Our character shouldn't move in an exact strait line, it might want to move a bit like humans do.
Human error it seems to me at least is the key to having smart AI systems or at least ones that work well enough into tricking people to think they are intelligent.

So when i say smarter AI's are the dumb ones, im not saying that they are AI's with only a few lines of code and very little functions, but an AI who has a vast amount of different things it can do, and that it will definitely not always do those things perfectly, just like a human!


I think if i ever post some thoughts again, i should post pictures of some sort as well  They always make things better :)

It begins!

So, work on my next project has begun, well at least ideas and designs anyway.

The game idea in its current form is a cross between a stealth and puzzle game, 2D top down style (think a bit of Portal while avoid guards MGS style). I have begun creating UML class diagrams to give me a clear picture of what i'm going to need, i may even post them here.

I've also begun research into what im going to write it with. Im almost certain it will be written in C# using XNA of some form (possibly Monogame, XNA 4.0 or maybe a new Microsoft framework if they release one for the new xbox).

It doesn't really have a name (yet!) so its going to be hard to label. I guess ill label it as "stealth project". More coming soon! (Although, it could be 3 or 4 months before i start work on the game).