GamesTopica.Net

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.

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.

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

Sometimes in an arcade game where you have different types of entities, the most difficult part is to resolve the collision. Nope, the issue is not detecting collision (which is already one big headache by itself), but rather – “So something did collide; so what’s next?”
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A type-safe, object oriented method of resolving the aftermaths of a collision detection using double-dispatch.

Doing a platformer in Flash can become rather hairy if you consider the physics and gravity involved. Don’t lose hair over it without checking out this discussion on Kirpua about programming platform games physics and gravity.