Programming: Week 2

Arrays and functions … this has long become the “traditional” point in learning a programming language where I would quit it altogether.  This was the case with Pascal like 12 years ago and then with C++ a few years ago.
But this time it’s serious – it’s part of formal studies so there’s no way I’m quitting now.
Ex. 1
Write a program that calls a function called Square. The function takes a float parameter and returns its square (also a float).

#include “stdafx.h”
#include “iostream”

float square(float a)
{
a = a*a;
return a;
}

int […]

Programming Course Begins

Programming Course began yesterday. I enjoyed it so far. Yesterday’s lecture was a general introduction to computers and today we were introduced to variables.
I’m not new to programming. Though I’m no expert but I do know the basics (see one of my old posts where I wrote a guessing game in C++). As such, I’m skipping the talk about what a variable is, so that you won’t die of boredom.
Instead, I’m going directly to the exercise list intended for this week. Let me cover […]

The end of the first half-term

Glad sjö
Sorglig sjö
Solen skiner
Jorden brinner
Slut på haikun kommer nu.
Just a useless piece of haiku I made up on my way to the campus one day. It doesn’t even follow the established structure of a haiku rhyme.
Anyway, the first half-term is over now, and with it the two first courses, Introduction to Game Analysis and Design and the Swedish Communication Course.
The Swedish Communication Course ended with the fourth assignment,
* to give a speech on a freely chosen topic (in Swedish)
This last assignment […]

The First Game Jam

A little belated post about the impressions of the first Game Jam as I was busy with other university assignments.
The topic for the Game Jam was Addiction X. Every team could use their own imagination to interpret the topic as they saw fit. Afterwards, in the span of about 6-7 hours every team had to produce a playable game using Game Maker (GM). Game creation was intended as a cooperation between programmers who would write the code in GM and graphics artists who […]

Completing the scrolling shooter in GM

The scrolling shooter game whose creation steps I described in one of the previous posts was the first really playable version – i.e., you had a challenge (approaching enemy planes) and an action to overcome the challenge (shoot/avoid the enemy planes).
However, that version was pretty bland. There was only one kind of enemy planes and hitting any one of them meant losing the game. Boring.
In this post I present the next version of the game, here. I’m not going through the […]

Update statūs studiōrum

Almost a month A reasonable amount of time has passed after the previous post. Here is some update about what happened during that time.
Swedish communication course:
* compose a scientific article about a topic related to your studies (in Swedish)
I decided not to oversimplify things and composed a text that could really qualify for something that (at least in form) is close to a scientific article. You know one with formulae [sic!], citations in square brackets [ ] and a reference/bibliography list at […]

Preparations for My First Game Jam

Quite unexpectedly, I got an email about an upcoming planned Game Jam event (as part of studies). After some investigation I learned:

a Game Jam is an event when game developers (designers, artists, programmers et al.) come together to create a playable game over a short span of time;
we will be divided into smaller groups of 5-6 people;
we will use Game Maker and have approx 6 hours to build the game;
the topic for the games will be announced at the start […]

4-week milestone

I hit the 4-week “milestone” in the studies of game design. What did we do in the four weeks’ time? Below’s a summary.
Swedish communication course:
* compose a popular science article about a topic related to your studies (in Swedish)
* discuss the article in a group of 5, make the suggested changes; provide a brief summary of what you changed (in Swedish)
* compose an essay about a topic related to your studies (in Swedish)
* read an essay about an author’s personal relationship to writing and […]

Getting used to Gotland and the studies of Game Development

OK, time to replace the “Test ABC” entry with some actual content.
I’m two weeks in my Game Development programme. I will use my blog to  describe what the studies and personal experiences here are like. (If time permits, I may post a thing or two from actual game projects we’re working on. Anyway, that won’t happen anytime soon as we will only start working on real game projects at  the end of year one.)
I have some plans for documenting my […]