Ideas for a game? (before episode 17)

The Partridge Family were neither partridges nor a family. Discuss.
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Zedtho
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Ideas for a game? (before episode 17)

Post by Zedtho » March 28th, 2017, 6:38 pm

I'm a person that really benefits from the homework we get in the episodes, so I wanted to ask if there was a game I could program that requires the things I have learnt by now.(if possible with a harder thing to solve, something with maths possibly) Simply because, every game I think of is rather easy to program and I don't need to use some of the newer things in them.
If you're at it thinking of a game already anyways, if the game is a little bit harder to program, it would be nice to hear about that too, to have a project to look forward to being able to do :P

Nevertheless, thanks for reading and contributing to the forum!

Edit:
Simply because, every game I think of is rather easy to program and I don't need to use some of the newer things in them.
I worded that wrongly, I never meant it's easy to code something, I meant that I didn't need to know all the features we'd gotten to do the stuff that particular game would need.
Last edited by Zedtho on March 30th, 2017, 7:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Manieknr1
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Re: Ideas for a game? (before episode 17)

Post by Manieknr1 » March 29th, 2017, 5:50 pm

You should do these "easy to program", you may find them harder than you expected. The old chinese saying is "The shit is where you do not expect it to be, like under your shoe ". If you really find them easy then you should think about something harder.

albinopapa
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Re: Ideas for a game? (before episode 17)

Post by albinopapa » March 29th, 2017, 7:22 pm

Well, 2D side scroller platformers might be within your grasp. Just use rectangles for all your objects for now until you get to loading and drawing sprites ( I say this to avoid the massive compile time of the thousands of lines of putpixel calls ).

You have already covered rectangle collision
You have already covered loops and arrays
You have already covered functions
You have already covered control flow using if statements

These should cover most of the mechanics of a platformer, the only thing you would need to figure out is how to move a camera so that it only draws what's in frame as the player moves from beginning of the level to the end of the level.
Then I suppose there is level creation and loading. You could figure this out on your own, there are plenty of ways to go about it, or you can wait for chili to go through file and string manipulation.

Anyway, not a whole heck of a lot of complicated math involved in a 2D platformer, but it will get your feet wet enough to move toward 3D stuffs if that's what you are looking for.

Another idea would be a top down space sim where you can freely move in any direction and fire in any direction. Again, using a "camera" of sorts to offset the players world position to view position. Plenty of collision detection and some vector math ( linear algebra ) for you to experiment with like acceleration and velocity ( speed AND direction ).
If you think paging some data from disk into RAM is slow, try paging it into a simian cerebrum over a pair of optical nerves. - gameprogrammingpatterns.com

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chili
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Re: Ideas for a game? (before episode 17)

Post by chili » March 30th, 2017, 2:11 am

Manieknr1 wrote:You should do these "easy to program", you may find them harder than you expected. The old chinese saying is "The shit is where you do not expect it to be, like under your shoe ". If you really find them easy then you should think about something harder.
This is literally what I was gonna say, and then forgot to reply later :P

Basically, how many games have you made to completion without rails (without a guide)? I'm guessing like, not many at all. So the statement 'every game I think of is rather easy to program and I don't need to use some of the newer things in them. If you're at it thinking of a game already anyways, if the game is a little bit harder to program, it would be nice to hear about that too' sets off red flags in my mind. Don't assume something will be easy, not when you're still a novice. If you think it's easy, code it up and see. You will often be surprised.

As for ideas for stuff, tetris is a good one. If you want a real challenge, you can try coding up mancala (not so hard), and then writing a decent AI for it using minimax (challenging). The minimax algorithm will be good practice for recursion, which we just learned at the end of beginner.
Chili

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Zedtho
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Re: Ideas for a game? (before episode 17)

Post by Zedtho » March 30th, 2017, 6:59 pm

Thanks a lot for the ideas!
I guess I worded it wrongly, I didn't mean it was hard, but that it didn't require all the features we had learnt.(I guess the usage of the word easier wasn't very good, but I couldn't find an adjective with my limited vocabulary)
Even "easy" games are hard to code! I had a hard time coding Pong. (The Pong ball wasn't hitting the paddles)
Sorry for making a confusing statement there.

Nonetheless, I've gotten some good recommendations here! Will update as soon as I've gotten something

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