This is my new processing self teaching project. In this project I wanted to built a mouse control spaceship that would shoot and crash if it reaches the celling or the floor. It’s not object oriented at all and the code is quite messy ~ and I won’t clean it up until I reuse to code in another project.

Again it’s not a complete game, just a learning tool or a proof of concept for a space shooter scrolling game. I was happy to create my first pixel art creation ~ the subject of the game, my spaceship ;). I used a processing library called gifAnimation which enable the use of animated gif. This give me some inspiration to create more games based on some gif sprite. Searching around the net I came accross this mini rpg sprite based game which is really fun and simple and also came across the pixel joint, a lair of pixel junkie artist that makes a lot of video game inspired graphic!

Explosion and laser beam was also something I explored in this project. You can fire the laser with the mouse click but shooting doesn’t do anything. You can even hold the mouse to hold the laser beam ~ again it doesn’t do anything ;). Explosion are also tricky because you want the ship to disappear and the action to stop yet you don’t want the main draw loop to stop. The explosion I ended up doing is really basic and lack refinement, but serves it’s purpose for now.

Also to simplify the creation of the floor and the celling I used a Perlin noise generator that create a semi random value that create a natural behavior to the randomness.So no more talk for now and play the game – there is no lives or score or counter of any sorts which remove any competition ;) Click here to play the game!

EDIT: Just so people are aware I am using the excellent book Learning processing written by Daniel Shiffman, which I forgot to mention since this article is part of a series of article about my self taught Processing training. END OF EDIT ~ This is my second project for processing fish pond. It’s not a game or anything, more an interactive pond where you control a fish that grows every time it eats food.

It’s mainly to practice object oriented programming with arrays and arrays of objects. With some random rain drop, I also practice with the rotate and translate function. Understanding that when using translate, your 0,0 coordinate becomes that translate. In order to draw a X and rotate it from it’s centre, you need to use negative value.

int r = 0;
void draw(){
translate(100,100);
line(-10,-10,10,10);
line(-10,10,10,-10);
rotate(radians(r));
r = r++;
}


Would create a X shape that rotate from it’s centre. The radians is used in order not to have to ply around with PI which is the default for the rotate function. I also used the % modulo to try to add some visual to the rotating X. The modulo is what remain after dividing a number by another number. So 10 % 3 is 1, and 9 % 3 is 0. It’s an interesting function to be able to create pulsing images.

In my last project blood in order to calculate if the mouse was on top of the first drop of blood I used a simple if mouseX to check if the mouse was over the drop. This time I used the dist function that calculate the distance between object. That created a cleaner code to verify if the fish was near enough of the food.

There is no goal to the game, simply to eat the food and grow the fish ;) I guess my next project will combine a goal as well as an interactive part… stay tune!

So continuing my quest to learn processing. It’s a beautiful language really simple and well structured. I think it’s a really great way to learn programming at large.

This is my first ‘game’, or an interactive program that has a goal, a score and where difficulty increase the higher the score get. Now bare with me, this is not object oriented, I don’t use any fancy codes and now that I am learning about object oriented and class and array this code doesn’t really make sense at this point.

But it’s a great learning. If you are learning processing it’s a nice example of what can be done quickly without much knowledge.

BLOOD – the goal of the game is to mouse over the first drop of blood. There is so many drops that it would be impossible so the first drop get brighter and brighter the more drops fall. It’s a really simple randomization of translucide ellipse, and every frame an if check if your mouse is over that random first drop. In order to make it easier, the mouse position check is larger (+/- 10px). Every time the mouse position align with the first drop the screen clear, the drop starts small again and the speed increase. If the size of the drop gets bigger than the screen then you ran out of blood = you are game over !

Click here to play the game!

So I embark a new programming language. Processing .

It’s a fairly simple language, and I am using Daniel Shifman’s really good bookLearning Processing. It remind me when I was learning basic on my Vic0-20 when I was 8 years old. It’s really really really fun and since I always have been a half assed programmer, I am glad to welcome such a simple language. I’ll be posting my ‘homework’ here, but I tend to get off trail a lot during class.

My first interactive display is call grey hot dog grey hot dog and I am finalizing my first video game (since I programmed ski! in basic when I was 10, I mean I didn’t invented, just coded it).

more to process…

Nice new game from altus. It has quite the same feeling as the world ends with you but with a nice twist. It’s the first game I play from the Shin Megami Tensei series. After few weeks of casual play it’s still enjoyable, so I can place it in my best of 2009 ;)

Interesting game, I tried it few months ago in japanese version and didn’t like it. The story is really what keeps it together, since the game play is quite basic, a bit too basic for my taste. But the story is fun, and the demons you play with are fun!

Ha ces petit blob sympa, locoroco est un des meilleurs jeux qui existe ! Voici la chanson thème qui me reste dans la tête toute la journée maintenant !

02-locorocos-song-locoroco-yellow-version

Et un petit film you tube:

Some movie and pic from the 8bit party in montreal a few weeks ago!   (more to come)  

movie

movie