New Coding Ventures and Addicting Games

Hey guys,
Steve here.
I’ve become addicted to an old game. And when I say old, I mean before I was born, old. So old that even though it’s a video game, most of you don’t even know about it I’m sure. the game is Quake. But of course, I don’t play the video version – some one made a modified version for the blind.
The thing I like about Quake, well Audio Quake anyway, is that the weapons and tactics used surpass those on modern audio fps games such as The Road to Rage and Swamp. With actual bombs, rocket launchers, grenades, projectiles, poison, and much more, I have to say that Audio Quake is a unique gaming experience for me.
Well anyways, even though I’ve only been playing for two days, I’ve really been owning Danny, the awesome friend who got me hooked on this game. I’ll give him credit, he’s thrown me a lot of good ones, but I’ve only played for two days and I’m already getting good. Needless to say, thiss is going to be the demonstration game for this week’s podcast, and I really can’t wait to record this one.
Moving on, I managed to squeeze in a bit of programming as well. The new coding venture I mentioned in the title of this post is a set of Pure Basic scripts designed to help audio game developers code audio games quicker and easier.
This has been an idea of mine for a couple of months, but there were a few reasons I didn’t so much as blog about this:
1. There is already a scripting language that is specially designed for easy audio game creation, so why make another?
2. I had no working idea of how to go about coding this.
However, despite the reasons outlined above, I ended up starting on it last week, and so far the project is going quite well. I’ve coded a menu class, which allows for the creation of game menus in pure basic, as well as an audio form class which allows for the creation of virtual, off screen forms read by screen reader and Microsoft SAPI, again useful for audio game developers since everything is off screen anyway and it was previously quite difficult to request information from players in audio games coded in pure basic. There are still a few tweaks that need to be made, but once those are sorted out I’ll release this set of includes to the blog.
In other news, S Quad Racing wasn’t worked on all that much. I coded a vehicle structure, and made my code more flexible for changes to cars such as gears and such, but I haven’t added in the gears yet. I’m still not exactly 100% sure how I want to code them, but I’ll post an update once I get it figured out. Anyway, once I figure out how to implement gear shifting it should only take an hour, perhaps less, to get it fully working without bugs, that is assuming everything goes smoothly.
That concludes tonight’s post. More details, as well as possible releases for my latest projects will be in my next post. Also, be on the lookout for Episode 36 of the Steven D Podcast.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

Another Small Release and a Few Updates

Hey guys,
Steve here.
I said I’d have a surprise for you all, and that was not an empty promise.
Over the last week, I’ve been sporadically coding on a little game, one which is similar to the classic Pong, but with quite a few twists. And not only did I create this game, but I included the source code, which is heavily commented, so that anyone interested could have a look at how games are actually coded in Pure Basic.
Similar to flamity flame, you are placed upon a side scrolling grid that is twenty squares wide. Your goal in this game, however, is to run after the ball and hit it to prevent it from hitting the ground.
To accomplish this task, you are given a paddle, which you will swing once you are beneath the ball and it is low enough to hit because, after all, you can only reach so far.
Since the ball can go just about anywhere when you hit it, it is impossible to develop much of a strategy. Plus, the game gets difficult, rather quickly. So quickly, in fact, that the likelihood of you lasting over two minutes is nearly zero.
Fortunately, though, there is help. Firstly, you don’t really have to worry about centering yourself exactly beneath the ball; you will hear a beep when you are centered. Secondly, there are platforms. If you are not near the ball when it is coming down, and it happens to be above a platform, it will bounce off of it rather than making the journey to the ground.
Initially, you start out with three platforms, spaced out evenly in intervals of five. However, as you play, additional platforms will spawn, though considering the level of difficulty in the game it’s likely you’ll only get one, if any, platform spawns before the end of the game.
While the fact that more platforms will spawn might enspire you to work your hardest, there is one thing to bear in mind about platforms–they are not the nutral, happy-to-help objects you might think of them to be. When the ball bounces off of a platform, it will rebound faster, and you must work a lot faster to get to, and hit the ball. This affect is called catapult, and only lasts 3 to 10 seconds after the ball bounces off of a platform. So while it is true that platforms can be a life saver, you might want to avoid letting the ball hit them as much as possible, otherwise you’re going to lose more than you gain.
Well, if you’re interested, you can Click here to download it.
Also, I have recorded an audio demonstration, which you can listen to below.

There are a few things I might change, such as how quickly the game gets hard, and the interval between platform spawns.
In other news, I haven’t worked much on S Quad racing, in fact I’ll confess I didn’t work on it at all this week. I was mainly focused on coding the game released in this post, which I named “Bouncy Ball” because I was too bored to name it anything else, to code something as complex as S Quad Racing. I probably won’t open it up tonight either, as I’m rather tired, but hopefully tomorroww I’ll get back to work. I think that before I implement dynamic weather, ambiance, and cheering into the creation of tracks, I’ll go ahead and see what I can do about implementing gears, as that is a task that I’ve put off for several weeks now but needs to be done.
Well, that’s about all I have to report. I’ll blog again later this week. As far as pod casting goes, I’m not quite sure. I want to do an episode tomorrow, but we all know me. So who actually knows–but hopefully tomorrow.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.

An Audio Editing Experiment and Some Updates

Hey guys,
Steve here.
I know it’s been a bit longer than ten days since my last post to this blog, and I’m sorry about that. Fortunately, this period of extended silence has not been counterproductive.
First of all, I generated an audio file. This was originally supposed to be an oscillation of about fifty different sound waves going up and down the frequency scale–an attempt to annoy people. However, after some heavy editing, and by that I mean using eighty percent of the audio affects in audacity, I was able to turn it into… a “Sci-phi frequency storm gone bad!”

I’ll admit it’s a bit annoying, but it’s one of the most captivating things you’ll ever listen to! That is, if you actually listen to it.
Moving on, after all that work I did on S Quad racing last week, I mostly fixed the winning system. It is now possible to win races and lose them respectively, that is, if you only race with one opponent. Even though I haven’t figured out why the game won’t work properly with multiple opponents, I will be releasing an audio demo by Wednesday that demonstrates a fully working race!
Also on the subject of gaming, I returned to the swamp universe last week, though I haven’t been quite as addicted as I was in the past. Don’t get me wrong, Swamp is still by far the best game I’ve ever played, but I for one don’t want to end up having to renew my account at the same time I pay for the website, and not to mention I have a game to code.
By the way, speaking of games to code, I might just have a small surprise in the works. This is far less substantial than S Quad Racing, but, judging by your reactions to Flamity Flame, it has the potential to get quite a few of you hooked for several minutes, or even hours, perhaps. Stay tuned!
That concludes the posting for tonight. Stay tuned for updates and/or releases on that “secret surprise,” and be looking out for the next podcast episode, which might just be my demonstration of Psycho Strike, the new Grand Theft Auto-like rpg from VG Storm and Blastbay Studios.
Thanks for reading,
type you later,
Steve.