Games Posts

  • 03.07.08 GeekGameBoard — Getting closer to iPhone-ready (Games, Computers)

    To encourage development, I’ve started an open source project based on the GeekGameBoard game-development sample code that Apple published last December (which, by a strange coincidence, I wrote.) I hope to have it ready for iPhone game development soon.

    You can browse the Mercurial repository online, or download the current source code. It’s BSD-licensed, and your contributions are of course welcome (emailed patches are preferred.)

    The changes since Apple’s original sample-code release are:

    • It no longer requires garbage collection. I love GC, but it’s not supported on the iPhone, where I am definitely planning to use GGB.
    • I fixed some memory leaks of CoreGraphics objects.
    • I fixed an assertion-failure when kinging a checker.

    What Is GeekGameBoard?

    GeekGameBoard is a small Objective-C framework for implementing the user interface of a board or card game. Many games can be implemented in less than 150 lines of code.

    It also demonstrates generally-useful Core Animation techniques like:

    • Hit testing
    • Dragging CALayers with the mouse
    • Loading images from files and setting them as layer contents
    • 3D “card-flip” animations

    Framework classes include Bit, Piece, PlayingCard, HexGrid and more. It comes with sample games from Klondike solitaire to Checkers and even Tic-Tac-Toe. It’s all ready for you to add AI, network play, new game definitions…

    GeekGameBoard runs on Mac OS X 10.5 or later. iPhone support is coming soon.

    … MORE

  • 12.20.07 GeekGameBoard (Games, Computers)

    Santa has an early Xmas present for all you good Leopard programmers: GeekGameBoard, a new piece of sample code by the anonymous engineer elves at Apple.

    GeekGameBoard is an example of using Core Animation to present the user interface of a board or card game. It implements a small framework for implementing such games, with domain-specific classes like “Grid” and “Piece”, and examples of several game definitions built on top of the framework.
    Some of the … MORE
  • 11.01.07 Review: ZackAndWiki (Social Software, Games, Humor)

    It’s a sure sign that wikis are going mainstream when one appears for a video-game console. “ZackAndWiki” has the requisite goofy name (like TikiWiki or WikkaWiki), but once you try it out, you’ll find it approaches its job very differently than you’re probably expecting.
    … MORE

  • 08.06.07 The Hero Passes (Fiction, Games)

    We love to play the Hero — exploring dungeons, grabbing treasure, saving the world from evil. But I started wondering about the reasons behind some of the actions in such games, and especially about what my Heroic deeds looked like to the ordinary people of the lands I passed through. (As my wife once put it: “Why isn’t there a Hug button?”) The result is this story.… MORE

  • 05.05.06 Only Known Instance Of Zork Slash (Fiction, Games, Humor)

    My friend Tanya asked her friends to write her a short bit of Slash fiction as a birthday present. Which is not something I’m accustomed to, but here goes…… MORE

  • 05.01.06 your sword is glowing with a faint blue glow (Games, Languages)

    I dabbled in Interactive Fiction, aka Text Adventures, long ago—- I played Adventure on my Apple ][ and Dungeon/Zork on a VAX; I wrote a primitive game in BASIC and later in college partially implemented a language for building games in yacc; and then after graduating, my first serious Mac program was a souped-up and nearly finished version of that language. After that I was too busy with “real” jobs, but others kept the … MORE

  • 05.19.04 Anagrams (Games, Humor)

    Way back in 1989 my friend M@ and I used to work at a font company called Kingsley/ATF Type Corporation. One evening after work—actually we were still at work, physically speaking—we began to consider the subject of anagrams of the company name. After running off the necessary letters (in 100pt ITC Galliard all caps from an Adobe Type 1 font, using Microsoft Word 4.0 on a Mac SE, printing to a … MORE

  • 12.08.03 Super Leaf Blower 64™ Official Players’ Guide (Fiction, Games, Humor)

    Yesterday I got acquainted with our leaf-blower. It’s electric, thank Cthulhu, but not what you’d call “whisper quiet”. We got it as a gift several years ago, and I tried it once back then and it just blew the leaves into a huge swirling cloud that settled down exactly where it began. So I disappointedly put it in the shed and forgot about it.

    This time, though, I treated it as if it were some new … MORE

  • 09.04.02 A Koan For Video Gamers (Fiction, Games, Humor)

    The Zen master Yoshi was playing a video game. Seated in the lotus position, he expertly maneuvered the controller with his gnarled hands. Nevertheless, on the screen Mario failed to leap from one block to the next and plummeted screaming into the void.

    Again, Yoshi began the same level. Again, the moving platforms eluded the sprite onscreen.

    Seventeen more times, master Yoshi caused the hapless plumber to fall into nothingness and lose another life.

    Still, … MORE