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Application Development for Windows |
Programming in DirectX |
Life, Chaos & Virtual Worlds |
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This was one of the four subjects we Games students were placed in for our first term of our first year at uni, in 2001. It was also the uni's first year of running the Games Tech course. A lot of us who'd never programmed in our life (myself included) were literally thrown in at the deep end, coming into this subject that assumed prior experience with C or Java programming! I got through it somehow, and learnt an awful lot in the short space of time that uni subjects run (only a handful of months), and got a whole lot of fun programs out of it, some of which are provided below. They pale in comparison to the stuff I'm doing now, but this was back in the days when it was achievement just to get my name to display on the screen! I guess it just goes to show that you can teach any idiot how to program!
About mid-way through the term, we were given a 'maze' game to tinker with, and had to add extra functionality to it for a test. I was distinctly unimpressed with that maze - it was only a half-dozen blocks wide and deep! - so I came up with this far more, erm, involving version. All you've gotta do is steer the marker from the entrance at the top left to the exit at the bottom right, using the arrow keys. Amusingly enough, it does something I don't remember programming - once you've finished the maze, if you press an arrow key it starts again with a different coloured marker!
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Download: MazeGame.zip (17.5 KB) |
One of my favourite programs (though I freely admit that I'm no good at playing it!). It gives you a grid of icons, and you click on pairs of them to turn them over. If you get a matching pair they stay turned up; if they don't match, they're turned back over and you can pick some different ones to turn over. Once you've found all the matches, you've won the game and will be given a tally of how many clicks you took to solve the game. For this game, I found an icon of a Dodge Viper and repainted it to produce a half dozen or so different variants - different colours, some with stripes, some without - so you're matching lots of Vipers (I sure wish I owned a garage full of matching Vipers!). It also uses a custom mouse cursor, and gives you the option of playing with a 4x4, 6x6, or (for real fanatics) an 8x8 grid of icons.
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Download: Concentration.zip (23.2 KB) |
Come on. I know you know what Hangman is.
This is one program we had to write for our assignment. Not much to say other than it works. It's 'vocabulary' is limited to those words that I hard-coded into the program, although some of them are quite difficult. Even though I wrote it I still have trouble guessing some of the words!
It uses sound files from an old demo of Maxis' Full Tilt! Pinball 2 that I have. The pinball table ("Mad Scientist") is themed around creating a Frankenstein monster, and has all these funny sound clips of Igor and the Doctor, some of which I 'borrowed' for my game.
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Download: Hangman.zip (131 KB) |
Another program that we had to do for our assignment. This one is actually quite detailed - you can change a number of parameters including player names and time limit per turn. I also wrote a rudimentary AI for a computer player, which I'm particularly proud of - though it's far from being intelligent, it does have some degree of common sense for determining where to move and will block you and even win if you give it the chance. It can be mildly amusing to set both players to Computer and then watch it play the game by itself.
Again we had to make use of sound, and for this one I pinched some wav files from the old side-scrolling action/shooter game Thexder by Sierra. So you'll hear a robotic voice congratulate you on winning, prompt if you're not paying attention and chastise you if your performance is particularly bad. (I'm not sure if it actually uses all the sound files included in the zip, but at least they're there if it needs them).
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Download: TicTacToe.zip (235 KB) |