Saturday, January 13, 2007

Small games

I recently discovered Pang Zero, a small game in which you try to avoid getting hit by balls and at the same time shooting them away. I have been playing it a couple of times lately. It reminds me of another game, AckAck!, that I played back when I was using Allegro. Unfortunately, I can't find it anymore.

Could be interesting to try speed programming small games like these with something like Pygame. I've always spent too much time mulling over the details with my game projects. Perhaps that's why I only got Monster Masher finished enough to actually release. I have the source code for a Spacewar game, a Scorched Earth-like game (we called it Gnome Tanks) and a clone of Helter Skelter stored somewhere, none of them complete enough to be really playable.

Still, I'm secretly proud of Gnome Tanks. The AI can aim perfectly in all terrains, even when it is windy. Wind transforms the equations into something that cannot be solved analytically so I had to research and implement a numerical solver. When I wrote the code, it was the only Scorched Earth-like game that could do this. I wonder if others have figured out how to do it by now.

No comments:

Post a Comment