The aim of the game is to find sequences of horizontally and/or vertically aligned gems. Once you have found these gems you can select the sequence and they shall be removed from the grid. New gems fall from the top of the grid and slide down to the bottom. You can rotate the grid 90 degrees left or right and all of the gems will move accordingly. You can also slide gems across.

Hopefully I can add some spiffy effects before completion.

This game is just a technical demo for the SDL and OpenGL integration and as you may have guessed from the actions performed in the game, I plan to port this over to iPhone/iPod touch at a later date. Hopefully I’ll have the code all ready to post up in coming month and a bit. I plan on adding OpenAL, Boost and FTGL support too.

The Games Development Club is a club that has been formed at the University of Adelaide about game development. While this club was formed at Adelaide Uni and is affiliated the AUU Clubs association, the club is open to everyone not just those who study at the University of Adelaide. Currently the club has had its AGM, a Meet and Greet, a Project Brain stroming Session and a Special General Meeting. The club also has plans for talks, workshops and group projects. We’ve recently put a call out for any interested parties who want to be apart of these club projects. You can read more information here.

That’s pretty much all I wanted to say. I suppose it did turn out to be just a plug for the club. Be sure to check out the site and follow the happenings of the club. There is heaps of potential here waiting to be unlocked.

The source code has been provided under the GPL so feel free to enjoy the freedoms that this license brings. You can download the source code here.

Today I am happy to say that I’ve finished creating this Spelling Bot. You can download the source code here. This spelling bot has a few nifty features including:

• Spelling suggestions offered to users that misspell words in a channels that the bot has joined
• Predefined(Aspell) and Custom Dictionaries
• Following orders from a master such as adding custom words, joining and leaving channel

So be sure to put your those poor spellers to the test with this bot! I’m sure that you probably know a few.

One of my biggest inspirations for game development, Everyday Shooter

By the end of the night however we all agreed upon several ideas that we wanted our game to incorporate. The feeling of true consequence in a game and the sparing use of color and sound to signify importance of things in the game world. Over the weekend we all individually thought up potential game concepts that were based around these ideas. One thing that became quickly apparent to me while brainstorming is that having real consequence, consequences that makes the player feels guilty or sad about is hard. After this realisation I removed this idea from my mind and focused on an emphasis on color and sound. After some more brainstorming I came up with a concept that I thought was interesting but not entirely a good representation of what we had discussed. I discussed this with the group who also shared this enthusiasm for my idea. Another idea had fluctuated to the surface that was also interesting. The aim of my next project is to develop a prototype for the idea that I had designed. I want to keep the details of this idea behind closed doors for now because it is most definitely not concrete.

Paint, so much game potential here.

Currently I am intending on creating the prototype in C++ using my old pal SDL. Before finish I will tease a clue, it involves paint and a lot of different colors. I will keep you posted.

To explain my point I want to refer back to an incident that happened a few weeks ago. My brother and I were buying some virtual console game via the Wii Shop Channel, the digital distribution service for the Nintendo Wii. We wanted to buy around four games that we’d previously missed out during our youth. We searched the store to find our first game, Super Mario RPG which was valued at about 800 points. We then followed through the prompts to purchase the game since we couldn’t add it to a shopping cart and bundle it with our other purchases. We were soon arrived at a screen saying that we had to buy a block of points to buy the game. The lowest increment of Wii points was 1000 at $15 AUD. This means that we had to spend $15 to get a game that was really valued at $12 AUD. If we were buying a NES game that usually sell for 500 points then we would have to pay twice the price for it. Overtime we will likely buy more games and use up those points but it is highly likely that we will get to the stage where we don’t want to buy any more games and have several hundred points sitting in our account.

Let’s play with some numbers to get a rough idea of how much Nintendo are profiteering from this concept. According to VG Chartz there are about 48million Wiis sold around the world at the time of writing. Let’s make the assumption that only 5% of Wii users are online and of those 3.75% have some Wii points left in their account. Lets continue with some more assumptions and assume that on average there are 120 unused points in an average account. If my figures are correct this means that 1.8 million Wiis have a total of 216 million Wii points sitting in their account. This works out to a total of $3.24 million AUD and they are making this money for free. Do you feel a little cheated now? I know I do. Of course the Wii user base will continue to increase in the future as will the amount of users buying content for the Wii Shopping Channel so this figure will surely increase.

Don’t take these numbers too seriously but do take note of the extremity of these values. I believe that the Xbox 360 Marketplace uses a similar sort of system so Nintendo is not alone on this one. To heighten the amount of unused Wii points the current bundles of Wii points are not easily divisible in common pricing structures for games. Of course for cases where you buy a point card at retail this problem is inevitable by design but could be avoided by a more realistic point allocation. So the next time you invest in a block of points think about how much you are really paying for that 800 point game. Be back soon.

I have only provided the source code for Draughts since I didn’t want to have to deal with request about any compatibility issues. You can however compile the source code yourself and play. The game requires the SDL, SDL_image, SDL_ttf, SDL_mixer libraries. Here is a great tutorial about compiling SDL applications for your system.

Download Draughts Source Code

Everything provided in this zip file except for the background music is under the CC-GNU-GPL license. The background music is owned by Roald Strauss and he’s permission has been granted for use in this game.

If you would like to leave feedback then you can enter a comment below or drop me an email. I have a few ideas floating around for what I want to do next, probably something more ambitious with SDL since I enjoyed using it. For now my brother has a few web related things for me to do which I should get to. Hope you enjoy playing.

One of the fundamental concepts behind AI is the Turing Test as discussed in Alan Turing’s 1950 paper “Computing Machinery and Intelligence“.

A human judge engages in a natural language conversation with one human and one machine, each of which tries to appear human. All participants are placed in isolated locations. If the judge cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. In order to test the machine’s intelligence rather than its ability to render words into audio, the conversation is limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen.

With this in mind I decided to brainstorm several things that would cause my game to fail this Turing Test. The first notable thing is moving a piece into a position in which the opponent can jump that piece when there are other more advantageous positions on the board. The second is if the computer player doesn’t take the obvious jumps and double jumps. To put these into play I decided to assign a priority to all of the possible moves that a computer opponent could take. Any moves which resulted in capturing an opponents piece would would receive an increase in priority and any moves that resulted in being captured by the human player resulted in a decrease in priority. The computer would then take a random move out of the list of moves with the highest priority.

The system described above is the crux of the AI. Overall effect works really well towards the start of the game but sort of falls apart as the pieces become scattered across the board since the AI moves pieces at random. I’d like to think that the aggressiveness of the computer early on makes its flaws less apparent towards the end but this not always the case.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully towards the end of this week you should be seeing the source code of Draughts here. For now enjoy some of these screen shots.