It is an interesting exercise, trying to tune the world in while not adding to the noise. For programming I think this is an essential skill, it is how one learns new things. Lately I have found that having a good cup of hot tea and sitting back to take in things (bugs, new ideas, etc.) really helps me to move forward.

I’ve been hanging out at my favorite independent coffee house Tazza doing some programming work and thinking, and I have to say its a really cool place to hang out. I love the hot tea there, and from what everyone has told me the coffee is really good. The staff (hi everybody!) is very friendly and love to chat. That along with the cakes and cookies combined with the great (and free!) WiFi makes this little coffee bar the ultimate place for me to get away from the grind of the office.

I always wondered why some developers hang out in coffee shops, and now I think I know why: its a good place to be in order to keep your perspective. I might be the only programmer in there, so hearing other people talk about other things helps me to keep things in the right light.

So if you are in Atlanta (especially the Buckhead/Midtown/Georgia Tech area) you owe it to yourself to drop in to Tazza and enjoy a good cup. (The address is 1700 Northside Drive, Atlanta GA 30318 or just use this link)

Overall I found myself agreeing with the various comments and evaluations of each game type (pacman, tetris, etc.). But when I got to the end of the “Advanced” topics section, I laughed out loud:

RPG – if you hate your life (and some apparently do), this obviously final year attempt at video game programming glory is likely to end badly.

That pretty much sums up my experience so far with my attempts to make a “simple” RPG. There’s a lot going on in a typical RPG, and it takes a lot of effort and attention to detail to pull it off and make it look good and play well. And even then, if you manage to get the mechanics of the game engine working semi-decently, then you have a tall order to fill by creating the contents (scripts, maps, graphics). Needless to say it can quickly become a huge time sink. Which isn’t to say it isn’t fun, because it is. But when you get overwhelmed on a project like this where you are working for yourself (i.e. not getting paid to work on it) it becomes very difficult to get your motivation back.

Personally, I’m hoping to get my motivation back to work on my little project some more. I think what I’ll probably wind up doing is working on it in-between other projects.

Easter Eggs are little hidden things in side of a bigger program. Some times it just the developer’s names, other times it can be something totally unexpected like a flight simulator hidden in a spreadsheet program. With the power of Javascript and nice tutorials like this one, there’s a lot of opportunity to have some real fun!

Just think, with all of the computing power a modern browser affords us developers, it should be very easy to recreate tons of games from the Atari 2600, early Nintendo systems. The imagination can very easily run wild….

One of the best parts of the show is when the developers are either talking about or pitching their new games. Just from hearing the titles of the games I wish some of them had been made! Cool titles like “Monkey vs. Cobra” or “Hobo Killer” or “Family Ties: The Video Game”. Plus some of the shots of the games looked pretty funny too. Check out the whole list here: Games featured on Code Monkeys

All of those wacky titles reminded me of all the times in other movies, TV shows, games, etc. I saw a “fake” video game and thought it was the coolest idea ever. Like “Billy Graham’s Bible Blaster” on the Simpsons. Or “Astro Chicken” in the Space Quest series. Classics!

And thanks to the wonders of the internet/web2.0/lazy web/wikipedia, there’s a massive list of all of these fictional games! Check out the list here: Fake Games

Seeing all of those games there got me thinking: Wouldn’t it be cool if someone made some of these games based on just the title? (Or in the case of shows like the Simpsons, take the clip of the game and expand it into a full fledged game!)  That would be so cool. So cool in fact, I think I’m going to start doing that, looking at a title and then trying to come up with a game. Cheesy, yes. Wacky, you bet. Fun? Lets find out.

As a side note, if you try to install pyglet on a Mac, there is a small catch. I’m running 10.4 Tiger which uses Python 2.4. Pyglet.org does offer a dmg file to install itself, but it doesn’t work. The reason for this is that Pyglet does need ctypes, and ctypes did  not become a standard part of python until 2.5. So, to get pyglet to work on your Mac, you’ll need to get (and build) ctypes, or install Python 2.5. I installed ctypes and found it to be pretty painless.

Its still in an alpha state, but I thought it sounded interesting so I decided to take a look at it. Compared to pygame, it seems to be a little more streamlined. I’ve never really push pygame to the limits, so I can’t really compare the two as fully as I would like. One thing that I did like were the demo apps and the examples in the documentation. They were concise, yet demo’ed useful things that I would want to do in an app.

I started reading the documentation after lunch the other day and within a few minutes I found myself modifying the code as I read through the docs. Within 5 minutes I decided that I would try a sprint: Could I implement a quick and dirty game of pong within an hour using pyglet? Well, the answer is Yes!

After playing around for an hour I had everything except the computer’s paddle in place working. A few days later when I had some time I spent and additional 15-30 minutes (while watching the game on TV) and knocked out the “AI” for the computer player. This isn’t award-winning code or game play (the bounding box collision test is pretty crappy), but it did show me that I could get something done quickly using this framework.

So, check out pyglet. Here’s the code to my craptacular version of pong. (There are 3 files, two images for the paddles and the ball, and the source file pyglet_pong.py)

Check this out, its got a cool sci-fi sound to it: Whitney Music Box

This is a really cool idea. Its a hard problem (otherwise everyone and their brother would already have done it), that looks like it has no solution. But just because it looks hard doesn’t mean there isn’t a solution!

To help out Netflix has supplied a data set of user recommendations. Looks like its time to fire up Eclipse, break out the python, and put on my Data Miner hat, and start reading those AI books.

It seems hard to come up with something new and original to base you game on, but if you think about it, it doesn’t have to be. Most movies, books, and games are based on a couple of ideas that have all been used before. They just take a couple of them and mix them together in a new way.

Think about this: How many movies and TV shows have you seen that centered around a stolen treasure? And how many books have you read that were set in outer space? And… how many featured a smart ass outsider as the hero of the story? See, combine those things together and you have “Trent and the missing Jewel of Titan”.

Need bad guys? Think of 5 typical bad guys (gangsters, thieves, corrupt politicians, etc.) and think of why they would be involved. Pick the two best and put them in the story.

Now think about how Trent would react to meeting these people (assume they aren’t going to kill him right away because he seems like he’s not worth the time of day). Imagine the weaknesses of the bad guys, how would this work in Trent’s favor? Where’s a place you’ve always wanted to see? What would Trent say if he wound up there?

Answer those questions and it should give you a lot of possible locations and situations for your game. Pick the best few out of the bunch, and use those as your starting points for your levels/adventures. Start with those. If they are working, go back and look at what you threw out. Can it be changed or salvaged? Did you come up with new materials or ideas?

Its not hard. You just gotta practice. Take a favorite story, and take the best elements out of it, and scramble it up a little bit. Then branch out and add new elements (the stuff you find yourself saying, ‘it would have been better if X had happened…), the next thing you know, you’ve got an original story!

That’s kind of the feeling I had when they announced the cancellation of Stargate. I enjoy the show immensely, its just about the only thing on TV worth watching (other than The Office) and having it leave made me think that there would be a void.

And to and extent that is true. Stargate Atlantis will still be there, and its actually been growing on me this season. Its true that some episodes of SG-1 have been rather… uhh… well, not really fan favorites. But ya know what? That’s ok.

You can’t win every battle. In fact I think just the fact that we the fans had 10 years of SG-1 is great. The show has really raised the bar for what a sci-fi show can be. Hopefully it will inspire the next generation of shows to be as good (or dare I say, better?) as SG-1 is and was.

Besides, thanks to DVD’s and syndication I think SG-1 will be around for a looooong time.

Also, last week’s ratings were up for both SG-1 and Atlantis. Last week’s episode on Atlantis was pretty cool, and this weeks looks interesting. Richard Dean Anderson (aka MacGyver) will be guest starring in both SG-1 and Atlantis, so I’m sure that they will rock harder than usual.

Anyways, tell your friends, tell your family, tell anyone who will listen: Stargate is gonna rock this Friday!