Game of Life

While watching a show about the universe they mentioned a thing called John Conway’s Game of Life, now I’ve heard about this before but it never really occurred to me to look it up. after the show ended I googled it and instantly wanted to code such a program. so I did, it’s a full screen program so it’s insanely hard to take screenshots of, it uses pixels as “organisms”.

If you have a blank face on right now I’ll explain John Conway’s Game of Life was an experiment by John conway to see what would happen if he put set of very simple rules to a world. the rules are as follow: 

1) Any live being with fewer than 2 neighbors die, like they were lonely

2) Any live being with 2 or 3 neighbors lives on to the next generation

3) Any live bring with more than 3 neighbors die, like they were overcrowded

4) Any dead being with exactly 3 neighbors comes alive, like reproduction (2 to do the deed and 1 to hold the camera I suppose)

The link is in the sidebar as always, just press escape when you want the simulation to finish.

 

Warhammer Server

A while back i made a cool little serer that can add and retrieve text data from it’s files. Well my friends and I got into a hobby called Warhammer 40K and we had a grand idea. A campaign game! Sorta like risk and a cool couple additives to the game itself. Except i had a nagging feeling that the paper we were going to use would get destroyed or lost or otherwise be rendered unusable and it would collapse.
So being the programmer that I am, i decided to use my skills to create a software to track it for us that I could edit and update through my phone while we are playing the game. I started with rough sketches of the design

After i got approval from my friends, I went ahead with the code. I decided since I know next to nothing about C++ network programming and it looks quite complicated for a one week project, i would use Lua Socket for the server and client side of the code but I put that off for later. The first thing i did was load up my SDL library and went to work on the design. Pretty quickly I got up a basic world map

Then i got to work on the modal popup, it was a bit more complicated, it was my first time working with alpha in SDL. However I managed to get it in a day.

As you can see it comes with some lore too, many trips to the lexicanum were needed. However it was worth it, after this i added the mouseover popups. it was pretty simple and i did it within a couple hours.

whoot! now I added the Lua integration code and hoped for the best, I went to work on the server. The first attempts were a disaster to say the least, the server wouldn’t stay up for more than 2 minutes. after some serious debugging and 3 days of experimentation I created a working server.

The client and the server finally meshed and it was complete with a day to spare. If you want the server or the client the download links are in the sidebar, if you want to take a peek at the source code the links are also over there.

 

Boredom

Pew Pew Adventures is frustrating me so I’m going to venture on another hopefully simpler project for a little while until I figure out how to proceed in PPA. it’s a little arcade shooter with art from the user wuhu on OpenGameArt.org. Great place btw, screenshots soon!

 

Movement!

Ok, Time to introduce you to the main character of this game! His name is lance and he’s going through a bit of an identity crisis (meaning we don’t have a definite sprite drawn up for him). He’s a gruff military man while he walks around but when he’s standing still he dawns a cloak and blinks a lot. Anyway as to progress in the game, I’ve got everything rendered and I have Lance moving but I haven’t figured out how to get him to stop… oh well, all in due time. Here’s some screenshots.

After I get the movement fully working I will make a main menu. If you have any suggestions, leave them in the comments!

 

Hello There

Hello, allow me to introduce myself. My Name is Brandon Haley, I’m 17 years old and a senior in high school. I’ve been programming various things since I was 13, starting with a language called liberty basic. After that I dabbled into C++, I had no idea what I was doing and it confused me to no end so i quickly got bored of that and switched to Python.

After a year or two I returned to C++ and did everything horribly, looking back it’s amazing that any of my programs worked at all. I learned from various tutorials that were a little too advanced for me until I turned 15 and took my first programming course in high school, AP Computer Science. It taught me the bare fundamentals of programming in a new language, Java. It showed me not only how to write programs in java but how to learn new languages and I quickly took what i learned back to C++.

I made a couple games in java, simple games such as Pong and Snake, and after I felt comfortable with the basics of Game Programming I started development on my new and current project. Pew Pew Adventures, a side-scroller shooter that is just crawling out of it’s infancy. This will be a dev log for all my projects in the future. I hope you all join me for this learning experience and perhaps learn some things yourself.