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Stridesdev has released its game creator for general download, along with a movie capture of Jedi Wings 2, a proof of concept for the creator. The Strides Game Creator allows designers to create games without touching C++ or other programming languages and uses a MadLib instructions style (like the Starcraft editor) to create games.

Over at SDLTutorials there is a competition going on. <cue dramatic music> And the theme ingredient? R-Type, the classic side-scrolling SHUMP game. Of course, as the site’s name implies, the game has to be created with SDL. Prizes include $200, chance to moderate the forum and your own personal SDLTutorial.com email. Maybe you would also win fame and honour as well too, if you ask for an email like “iron-gamecoder”

Incidentally, the site is also great to get tutorials on…..SDL (with a side-dish of C++). Also there is something called sdl.net for those who like to work with managed code.

A lot of game developers are afraid of the big P word – “programming”, and so I find this a good introduction to programming. This is a series of lectures from the Stanford University, course CS106A, programming methodology. The emphasis is more on writing good code, understanding the basics of programming more than haxor ugly code. The lecturer is dynamic and humourous too. Take a look if you are stumped on programming, or wish you have a much better programming lecturer.

Over at libtcod-net you can find the .NET binding for the The Doryen Library which allows you to quickly develop RogueLike in colour! The demo showcases a “print to any part of the screen” library (or typically known as curses), viewports, scrolling menus and much more. Check it out!

The Bard of Valiant posted about a note-worthy RogueLike – an anime-ish, graphical RogueLike with some network capabilities. It even looks accessible to boot too (something most rogue-likes are nefariously bad at)! Who says you can’t teach an old dog new trick? Old genres can be brought back to life again!

Sometimes you want to play a sequence of animation using movie-clips – this implies that you need to detect when is the end of the clip in question. You can place a variable inside the movie clip inside, but with ActionScript 3 there is another solution – using the enter frame event of the movie clip to run a function, which then proceed to check if the movie clip has reached its final frame (or any frame, for that matter). This solution is discussed at the lower half of the article at Flash&Math.

With some work, one should be able to write an observer pattern for this.

If you need a Math Library for C# which can do statistic calculations and plot values of various graphs and curves, there is the Extreme Optimization Math Library contains a full suite of function for those who wants something ready to go.

Meanwhile, over at the LS Grimorie, you can find a way to implement a simple yet effective diminishing return function.

XNACommunity has released the source code to a couple of full featured games, such as a 3D hack/slash style RPG known as Dungeon Sorrows, a 2d scrolling game, a Guitar Hero clone and more besides. Want to see how those games are done, and perhaps learn a few new techniques at the same time? Head over and find out then!

Dungeon Sorrow

XNA Rock

If you are building a simulation game, chances are that you would need distribution graphs of all types – linear, diminishing returns, increasing returns and the good old normal distribution. Coding one would take some time and here’s a pretty good implementation over at CenterSpace. It’s a simple class to use — check out the example included.

The Flagship has sunk – the ship in question here refers to Flagship Studios and how even ex-Blizzard greats could make mistakes. At GDC 2009, there a session which goes through at great length what independent game developers could learn from the mistakes of this sinking of a titanic proportion.