The iPad, DS & PS Vita all have a touch screen. This article sheds some light on the two main types.
Category: Games Development
Code Year
Well Code Year is underway and there is still time to learn. It’s part of the Code Academy program that aims to get more people creating websites and games.
Sign up and each week you will be sent an email, it takes about an hour to complete the tasks. No previous experience is required and the tutorials are interactive, so no boring sitting about watching videos.
Kodu
This is a fantastic game development environment is free on Windows PCs. We started to create a game and within minutes we had a working version.
Kodu lets kids create games on the PC and XBox via a simple visual programming language. Kodu can be used to teach creativity, problem solving, storytelling, as well as programming. Anyone can use Kodu to make a game, young children as well as adults with no design or programming skills.
There is a lot of information about Kodu online and youtube has lots of Kodu videos and tutorials. One of the best ways to learn it though is to download a project and just jump into the editor and have a play about. There are built in tutorials and I found these to be very helpful in learning Kodu, however, if you want to watch some videos you can do that here.
Here are some helpful links.
Play My Code
I have just been told about Play My Code. What a great little site.
You learn to program in Quby which is a Ruby like language, this is fairly easy to learn, although it is text based rather than Scratch’s more intuitive graphical interface. You can view the code of the games on the site and this allows you to learn from people who have developed games.
The site would benefit from some tutorials but the chances are that these can be found in youtube (I can’t check this from work though)
Vampire Physics
I love “Physics” games, where you have to set up a sequence of events to do a task. I found a little cracker over the holidays, Vampire Physics, you have to convert all the humans to vampires while at the same time making sure that they don’t get killed by all the normal things.
What make the game great is the built in level editor, where you can create your own levels for other users to play. Great fun and it keeps the game fresher for longer.
Story Design
Today the topic was story design. There are lots of great stories in video games, some are hidden, some obvious and some virtually non existent. Good game design has to try and blend the story into the action.
There are a number of links on this topic and even an entire BSc(Hons) around it.
I found this site which tries focus on the story which makes the action take a back seat. What do you think?
Can you think of any games that make you come back time and again, not for the action but for the story?
PHP game scripts
I know this is a bit early for this course but I thought that some of you might want to try this in your own time.
PHP is a scripting language for web pages, it runs server side, the output is in the form of a web page.
These scripts can be used on web pages to create games for visitors.
