Start with something small, like a puzzle game. They aren't sexy, but they are doable in your time frame. The game mechanics for things like tetris or minesweeper are pretty easy to understand, which will allow you to spend more time focusing on other things like the basic inner-workings of a game, how do sound engines work, how to best utilize graphics libraries, etc. Plus with puzzle games your need for hitting 100 frames per second is reduced.
The biggest mistake I have seen people make is they want to build a FPS or a RTS as their first game and they get so bogged down in artwork, tweaking frame rates, AI, etc. that they finally just give up. I almost fell to the same mistake. I thought "turn based strategy game, how hard could that be." It took two years of late night work to get PocketWar to the point it's at today, and many times I wish I had started with something simpler.
Almost all games are written in C++ so if you are looking for experience to apply toward the future break down and learn it. As most the post above say, SDL is also a wonderful thing. There are tons of samples on the net that you can use as references.
Its pretty easy to port code to Pocket PC devices. The APIs are almost exactly like the windows APIs so code that workds on windows can be moved over (minus UI unless you planned ahead for smaller screens) fairly easily. The other good thing is MS is somewhat ridged about what the hardware has to be like for the Windows Mobile OS, so if it works on one device it (to a large extent) will work on all devices.
Palm is another matter. Its pretty screwy in the way it does a lot of things (memory handling, data storage, etc.) and because the device manufactures have a lot of freedom in the hardware it can be hard to support all the devices (on the flip side though that freedom has allowed for some pretty cool devcies, ex. the treo, in the past.)
Also, the MS gives away the tools for the Pocket PC, but I have yet to find a good free IDE/compiler for Palm.
Japan's economy stagnated because they don't have a large enough workforce and enough natural resources to sustain the growth rate. China has neither of these problems.
I'm the person that makes Pocket War (and yes there is only one of me.) It is a lot like the old text based empire game, but I guess that could be said about all games in this category to some extent.
I have been told it is also like Empire Deluxe but I never played that one some I'm not sure.
Re:This doesn't make any sense...
on
Java Faster Than C++?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
If you are going to do that just make it run through and compile the entire thing in one shot rather than doing it a small bit a time. Then the end user won't have to experience the "just in time" part of the compile.
I don't understand why if you can "just in time" compile it, you can't just compile it at build time and get it over with.
Number ratings work ok when they are an average of many people opinions. The reason is people tend to give a 10 or a 0 (tend to gravitate towards the edges of the system.) When you average out a bunch of those then the rating will start to fall somewhere inbetween and have meaning.
Some examples of this would be amazon (which applies this to products) and the bloated yak which applies it to websites.
Someone needs to start a rollup review site that takes the video game reviews posted everywhere else and averages them out. There are a million monkeys on the internet so its probably already been done.
I have been involved in hiring at the last three companies (all software related) that I worked for. Your resume would not have made the cut. Get someone professional to go over your resume. It needs to be cleaner, clearer, and it needs more content.
A lot of people don't realize that its not what they know or dont know that is keeping them from getting a job. Its the fact that they have really bad resumes.
Actually, the standard of living is much higher than it was 50 years ago. Houses are larger, people have multiple cars, TVs, phones, etc.
Most people choose to work longer / harder to make more money. At any point you could change jobs and do something like become a teacher. You would get plenty of time off every summer plus school holidays, but in turn you would only make a third (maybe less) of your current salary.
You have chosen to work more to get more stuff instead of living a healthier, more joyous life.
Most current phones already support J2ME, Symbiam, SmartPhone, BREW or some combination of the above.
I was able to the hacker cable for mine at radioshack and was writing my own apps in no time.
It is only a matter of time until the medias find some way to merge. The Matrix tried by having part of the story told by the game. TV is more like an MMORPG so maybe someone will find a way to hook a TV show into MMORPG.
Everyone can write software... not everyone can write it well (Chinese, Indian, or American.) It is like any other industry, if you are good at what you do you will be ok, if you are not good at what you do find something else to do.
I write Pocket War a Pocket PC based war game so, I have some experience here.
The portable game market (exclude GBA for the moment) is not big enough right now to support a real company. The titles price points are low as well as the number of sales. There are discussions about this on Pocket Gamer, in my forums and at Gamespot.
GBA is a different beast but it also requires more money to participate on that platform.
Having said that I still love writing games for these platforms and maybe they will come into their own one day.
Exactly, and the filing is the same way which is why you should only have a fixed amount of time to file it. Some companies file for a patent and then keep filing for extentions for a very long time. Then wham finish the patent and start suing.
1. if you don't enforce the patent in the first year you lose it
2. whatever the terms you make for anyone using a patent are the terms everyone gets
3. you can never change the terms of use for a patent after they are established
4. you get a fixed amount of time to submit a patent with no extensions
5. have the patent office actually do a check for prior art before accepting the patent
Those few changes would stop companies from broadsiding us with patents, but allow things that really deserve patent to continue to get them.
I used to have different style sheets for different browsers in an effort to make my websites look good for all of them. More than once I updated some of the html and only tested the pages in IE where they looked fine (I know, I know, but programmers are naturally lazy.) It turns out the style sheets for the other browsers totally made the pages look broken.
I'm not defending MS. It would not surprise me if they did it on purpose, but I am saying it is easy to do.
Now I just have one style sheet and I made sure to use simpler html that would look good on all browsers. Sometimes simple is better.
Already exists in malls
on
Robocoaster
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· Score: 1
One of the malls near me already has something like this. Two people get in and it surrounds you with coaster video then it rises up, spins, loops, etc. It is almost more fun to watch the thing run from the outside then the ride it.
Look at the SIMS. You don't need blood and gore to have a VERY successful game. Of course having said that, I did write Pocket War a umm, well, er... war game.
On this same note, my 9 month old likes banging on my laptop's keyboard. I wrote some simple software that will react (flash the screen different colors, etc.) when any of the keys are hit so he can get some kind of feedback, but I am worried that my laptop isn't drool proof. Does anyone know of a brightly colored keyboard for kids that is water (milk, crushed Cheerios, etc.) proof?
Kodak quit making theirs, but at the very end they blew out their inventory for $99. I bought one and I wish I had bought 20. You can still get them on the internet, used, but the price is $300 plus now.
Ceiva does make all their money off the subscription. $48 a year and if you dont pay them for the rest of your life the frame becomes worthless.
Pacific Digitial is coming out with one early next year. It will also be around $350.
Those are all 640x480 5x7inch frames. There is another company that makes larger, higher resolution frames. They cost thousands of dollars.
If you really want to make a quick buck on digital frames, write some software that will let a computer with a null modem cable upload photos to the Ceiva frame Then you could buy the Ceiva frame for $150 and this software for $20-$30 and have a usable frame forever without the subscription. Ceiva might not like that though.
I looked into this idea. The real problem is most of the cost in making one of those picture frames is the LCD panel, not all the other little frills they add on. So getting one in at under $150 and still making money would be hard to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Start with something small, like a puzzle game. They aren't sexy, but they are doable in your time frame. The game mechanics for things like tetris or minesweeper are pretty easy to understand, which will allow you to spend more time focusing on other things like the basic inner-workings of a game, how do sound engines work, how to best utilize graphics libraries, etc. Plus with puzzle games your need for hitting 100 frames per second is reduced.
The biggest mistake I have seen people make is they want to build a FPS or a RTS as their first game and they get so bogged down in artwork, tweaking frame rates, AI, etc. that they finally just give up. I almost fell to the same mistake. I thought "turn based strategy game, how hard could that be." It took two years of late night work to get PocketWar to the point it's at today, and many times I wish I had started with something simpler.
Almost all games are written in C++ so if you are looking for experience to apply toward the future break down and learn it. As most the post above say, SDL is also a wonderful thing. There are tons of samples on the net that you can use as references.
Its pretty easy to port code to Pocket PC devices. The APIs are almost exactly like the windows APIs so code that workds on windows can be moved over (minus UI unless you planned ahead for smaller screens) fairly easily. The other good thing is MS is somewhat ridged about what the hardware has to be like for the Windows Mobile OS, so if it works on one device it (to a large extent) will work on all devices.
Palm is another matter. Its pretty screwy in the way it does a lot of things (memory handling, data storage, etc.) and because the device manufactures have a lot of freedom in the hardware it can be hard to support all the devices (on the flip side though that freedom has allowed for some pretty cool devcies, ex. the treo, in the past.)
Also, the MS gives away the tools for the Pocket PC, but I have yet to find a good free IDE/compiler for Palm.
Japan's economy stagnated because they don't have a large enough workforce and enough natural resources to sustain the growth rate. China has neither of these problems.
I'm the person that makes Pocket War (and yes there is only one of me.) It is a lot like the old text based empire game, but I guess that could be said about all games in this category to some extent. I have been told it is also like Empire Deluxe but I never played that one some I'm not sure.
If you are going to do that just make it run through and compile the entire thing in one shot rather than doing it a small bit a time. Then the end user won't have to experience the "just in time" part of the compile. I don't understand why if you can "just in time" compile it, you can't just compile it at build time and get it over with.
Number ratings work ok when they are an average of many people opinions. The reason is people tend to give a 10 or a 0 (tend to gravitate towards the edges of the system.) When you average out a bunch of those then the rating will start to fall somewhere inbetween and have meaning. Some examples of this would be amazon (which applies this to products) and the bloated yak which applies it to websites.
Someone needs to start a rollup review site that takes the video game reviews posted everywhere else and averages them out. There are a million monkeys on the internet so its probably already been done.
I have been involved in hiring at the last three companies (all software related) that I worked for. Your resume would not have made the cut. Get someone professional to go over your resume. It needs to be cleaner, clearer, and it needs more content.
A lot of people don't realize that its not what they know or dont know that is keeping them from getting a job. Its the fact that they have really bad resumes.
The answer to CVS is not to use CVS directly but to use the hundreds of other programs people have written to make CVS easier (like TortoiseCVS.)
Actually, the standard of living is much higher than it was 50 years ago. Houses are larger, people have multiple cars, TVs, phones, etc.
Most people choose to work longer / harder to make more money. At any point you could change jobs and do something like become a teacher. You would get plenty of time off every summer plus school holidays, but in turn you would only make a third (maybe less) of your current salary.
You have chosen to work more to get more stuff instead of living a healthier, more joyous life.
Ok, that is enough games will cell shading in them. I hate it when a technology becomes the "in" thing and people put it in just because it's cool".
Most current phones already support J2ME, Symbiam, SmartPhone, BREW or some combination of the above. I was able to the hacker cable for mine at radioshack and was writing my own apps in no time.
It is only a matter of time until the medias find some way to merge. The Matrix tried by having part of the story told by the game. TV is more like an MMORPG so maybe someone will find a way to hook a TV show into MMORPG.
The Bloated Yak (www.bloatedyak.com) is a list of ranked websites. One of the ranked lists on it is a list of child friendly websites.
Everyone can write software... not everyone can write it well (Chinese, Indian, or American.) It is like any other industry, if you are good at what you do you will be ok, if you are not good at what you do find something else to do.
I write Pocket War a Pocket PC based war game so, I have some experience here.
The portable game market (exclude GBA for the moment) is not big enough right now to support a real company. The titles price points are low as well as the number of sales. There are discussions about this on Pocket Gamer, in my forums and at Gamespot.
GBA is a different beast but it also requires more money to participate on that platform.
Having said that I still love writing games for these platforms and maybe they will come into their own one day.
Exactly, and the filing is the same way which is why you should only have a fixed amount of time to file it. Some companies file for a patent and then keep filing for extentions for a very long time. Then wham finish the patent and start suing.
It seem like a simple fix for patents would be:
1. if you don't enforce the patent in the first year you lose it
2. whatever the terms you make for anyone using a patent are the terms everyone gets
3. you can never change the terms of use for a patent after they are established
4. you get a fixed amount of time to submit a patent with no extensions
5. have the patent office actually do a check for prior art before accepting the patent
Those few changes would stop companies from broadsiding us with patents, but allow things that really deserve patent to continue to get them.
I used to have different style sheets for different browsers in an effort to make my websites look good for all of them. More than once I updated some of the html and only tested the pages in IE where they looked fine (I know, I know, but programmers are naturally lazy.) It turns out the style sheets for the other browsers totally made the pages look broken. I'm not defending MS. It would not surprise me if they did it on purpose, but I am saying it is easy to do. Now I just have one style sheet and I made sure to use simpler html that would look good on all browsers. Sometimes simple is better.
One of the malls near me already has something like this. Two people get in and it surrounds you with coaster video then it rises up, spins, loops, etc. It is almost more fun to watch the thing run from the outside then the ride it.
Look at the SIMS. You don't need blood and gore to have a VERY successful game. Of course having said that, I did write Pocket War a umm, well, er... war game.
You know a drool proof keyboard might also be important for some software developers before they get their first massive dose of morning caffeine.
Using this research, I will be able to write advertising jingles that you can never stop singing. I'll make a fortune.
On this same note, my 9 month old likes banging on my laptop's keyboard. I wrote some simple software that will react (flash the screen different colors, etc.) when any of the keys are hit so he can get some kind of feedback, but I am worried that my laptop isn't drool proof. Does anyone know of a brightly colored keyboard for kids that is water (milk, crushed Cheerios, etc.) proof?
Kodak quit making theirs, but at the very end they blew out their inventory for $99. I bought one and I wish I had bought 20. You can still get them on the internet, used, but the price is $300 plus now. Ceiva does make all their money off the subscription. $48 a year and if you dont pay them for the rest of your life the frame becomes worthless. Pacific Digitial is coming out with one early next year. It will also be around $350. Those are all 640x480 5x7inch frames. There is another company that makes larger, higher resolution frames. They cost thousands of dollars.
If you really want to make a quick buck on digital frames, write some software that will let a computer with a null modem cable upload photos to the Ceiva frame Then you could buy the Ceiva frame for $150 and this software for $20-$30 and have a usable frame forever without the subscription. Ceiva might not like that though.
I looked into this idea. The real problem is most of the cost in making one of those picture frames is the LCD panel, not all the other little frills they add on. So getting one in at under $150 and still making money would be hard to do.