Simple Googly

Pictorial Dreams

2012-01-25T12:39:00.000+05:30

Yet again I had some awesome dreams. Like previously mentioned the details have all slipped away. Here is a summary of what I do remember:-

1) A cigar riding a bicycle. I tried to stop it by putting my hand in rear tyre. All my fingernails got cut off. The cigar laughed and said its the thing it always have had to endure.
2) In a vibrant kingdom of apples, full of colors and ants (slave to apples). The king and queen, in their majestic hall, are hearing the pleas of their subjects. A small child comes forward. He tells that he was at the beach yesterday morning and humans were getting a tan. He asks for the same. King replies "Well for the tan you do not need to be in the sun. Just get rid of your skin to get a tan"

In retrospect this was way cooler in the dream, maybe it would be better in pictorial representation rather than in writing.

Weird Dreams

2012-01-16T12:48:00.001+05:30

Last night I had a fair few dreams. Each one has a potential to be made into a feature length movie. Anyways here is a rant on how they presented themselves:-

1) The first dream was a nightmare in its own sense. The setting (note:- just the setting) was like any final destination movie. It started out with twelve people (including three couple) meeting in a desolate resort for vacations, each from different background (the details of that are now hazy so I will leave it out). Surprisingly I am not present in my own dream.

Everything is serene, cool breeze, lush green fields and trees all around the resort they are living in. Soon though, everything goes downhill. They all have same nightmares about a group of ghost who only have shining white eyes and rest of their body is like silhouette of white. Two of the members are found dead in morning. They have been killed brutally, their stomach lined up and stretched and their guts out on floor beside their bodies. One of the couple plans to leave immediately. An officer of some kind shows up, I think he was from standard police, and detained all of them in resort until the case was investigated. He falls in love with a woman who was in that group (he becomes a part of the group so to say). It is evening now and the light is fading. The electricity goes out. Everyone gathers in the hall. The most sensible thing would have been to find out the manager and ask him what was going on. However, none of the staff can be found anywhere in resort. The police officer also votes to get out of the resort as soon as possible. He is also getting the shivers of fear now. But the jeep he arrived in won’t start and there is thirty miles distance to nearby road/community. They all agree to spend the night in resort itself and in morning call a cab or something. After a few hours a deadly shriek is heard. Everyone rushes to the place where it came from. They find a girl (of fifteen something) yelling and crying up on balcony. She was originally a part of group. As soon as they arrive, she points skyward. Every head turns in the direction but they are unable to see anything there. The policeman has his torch in hand, he turns it skyward and in the beam of light they see the ghosts they all had seen in their dreams last night (eyes white and silhouette of white for their bodies and they appear to be swirling on top of balcony and can only be seen in torch light, not otherwise) . Everyone acknowledges the fact that they all had same dream. They all go back to the hall. They try to get some help now but find that there is no signal in all phones. The police officer then explains a recent invention, which can make people share dreams or have same dream. He proposes the theory as the plausible explanation why everyone had same dream. However, other still tends to think in terms of spirits and ghosts. Everyone is scared. I do not recall the next part pretty clearly but it happens that one by one, everyone is killed brutally until only the police officer, the woman he loves, the girl from balcony and another couple is left. They decide to run to nearest police station. All of them leave together. The nightmare continues to haunt all these people even when they reach the safe post. The guy (the one who is part of couple mentioned earlier) goes missing. His lover confesses that she had only met him last week and do not know much about him. Soon she starts hovering in the air. The others are so fearful that even as they try to stand and catch hold of her, she is split into two. The police officer finds some kind of rope that was attached to her back. He deduces that rope was causing her to hover in air and it must come from somewhere high up. As it is she had been sitting directly under the open sky window (dunno their names actually). The striking thing was that there was no platform above that window. As if with a sudden enlightenment, he proceeds to instruct the fifteen-year-old girl to go hide under the bed and he declares his love to the woman asking her to do the same as girl. However, the woman persists and asks where he going to go. He says that he fancies a stroll on balcony. Woman asks him to let her accompany him. He refuses but she is persistent and finally they both go out in balcony. Soon both of them feel a rope attaching to their backs. The police officer takes control and starts swinging on the rope. Soon ropes get entangled with other electric poles and with a huge wrench breaks. Both of them fall to the ground cracking some of their bones. High above there is a fire burning. Soon an airplane comes into view and goes on to crash nearby. The police officer rushes out to airplane. He finds the missing person unconscious in it. In addition, I forgot to mention that this missing person was a scientist and... fade to black here (I forgot to complete this 2 days ago, and can't remember anything further at all, not even what I was going to write there to finish the sentence :( )

There were two dreams after this. However, I left this for too long, cannot remember a thing. The thing with writing a blog on dream is do it as soon as possible otherwise the details leak away. I remember a little of the third dream. I was a simple person and falsely accused of killing some prominent minister, when I just happened to be passing by that place. I hope you can imagine what ensued next because I sure do not remember it all. Here are a few hints and snatches: - number of mercenaries/soldiers/officers killed hither and thither. A couple of friends join up to party up. Spattering blood. Smoking ashes. The place probably might have been New Delhi in future. That is all I remember of that dream. Let this pass into oblivion.

P.S Grammar might not be perfect everywhere since this was edited from points to sentences.

Jigsaw 3D Cube

2011-11-23T14:41:00.001+05:30

A game play video of our upcoming title.

How do you find it?

Flash CS 5.5

2011-11-23T10:51:00.001+05:30

Finally got my hands on Flash Pro CS 5.5. Nothing much has changed, except for packaging of android and iOS devices is now an integral part of Flash. Havent used that feature yet but it feels good to be using the latest Adobe product.

Randomly controlled AI (Sneak preview)

2011-11-21T11:11:00.000+05:30

This is a sneak preview of AI that I am creating for my next game. It is right now completely random but controlled. Next stage is to add some sense like dodging other cars and chasing them too.

Surprisingly, the current AI works really fast. Even at 120 FPS it runs to the mark. In the current video it is 60 FPS.

Can you tell how many cars are there?

Save Toshi Reviewed

2011-09-24T19:42:00.000+05:30

I just wasted two hours on this game "Save Toshi" made in unity 3d.

Objective of the game is to help Toshi reach the dancing floor. She is really addicted to dancing but somehow have forgotten how to walk (in my opinion she also have forgotten how to jump down a place) and you (the player) have got tennis balls in their arsenal to shoot at objects, so that Toshi falls/goes to dance floor. After she reaches the dance floor a really soothing music starts and Toshi starts dancing. (Although dance moves are really good a couple of changes in the facial expression are needed to make it better, specially the hair and eyes which look as if they are made out of plastic and pasted) There are regular elements in game like rubber, ice, stone, etc nothing special there. Although I was impressed initially by the mechanics and sounds, clearing level pack 1 was a breeze. I started getting slightly bored at end of level pack 2.

Although the game is fine and re-playable but the developers have desperately tried to grab the attention of player by making Toshi's face look smaller age wise but having body of a teenager wearing skimpy clothes, I was slightly offended by this cheap tactics. Another thing I dont know is why developers chose such a large resolution for this game. I am sure most people wont be able to see the whole game at same time. Another confusing aspect is the number of stars you get when you clear a level with 3star+ rating (its 4 stars). I think that sums up why the game has got only 3.5 rating out of 5 on kongregate.

Overall I would give this game a 7.5 out of ten.

Walkthrough/tips for hard badge
For the hard badge, try to finish the level in one or more less shots than required for 3 stars. you will get a 3star+ rating and that adds another star to your account. The levels I got 3star+ rating are 1-2, 1-3, 1-6, 1-7, 1-8, 1-9, 1-10, 2-3, 2-9, 2-11. I think most levels which have greater number of shots than 1 can be completed in lesser shots. Also remember wood takes one shot to break completely (make the shot such that ball hits wood and then rebounds back on the wood).

Timmy vs. music demon

2011-06-23T09:51:00.001+05:30

Hey all another of my game is released Timmy vs. music demon

Done for Project Eden: Experience The Music. This game is a rhythm platformer with multiple possible storyline. The player plays a day in timmy life. All the events are generated by music (all enemy movement and firing of bullets)

The game was a bit rushed but its still will give you a few laughs and fun time. Hope you enjoy it.

Picma Squared Finished

2011-04-11T20:42:00.000+05:30

Here are some images to help others in achieving hard badge on kongregate.

Click slowest thing

2011-02-06T11:35:00.002+05:30

So finally I decided to compete in game in ten days competition. Here is the result http://www.kongregate.com/games/simplegoogly/click-slowest-thing

Do play, enjoy.

Layout of the site updated

2010-10-18T00:52:00.000+05:30

Things got out of hand when I posted a large image. To accommodate that I increased the width of the main posts which led to total distortion of widgets. In any case, I was bored of the old template. So here is the new layout. Lemme know your feedbacks.

Warming upto old basics

2010-10-17T23:48:00.001+05:30

Found out some cool videos for flash art designing. Used the pen tool only to make mickey mouse (one of the easiest to be drawn cartoon character).

Warm up.

Work in progress!

2010-10-17T05:56:00.003+05:30

My very fist drawing with pen tablet

2010-10-17T05:52:00.000+05:30

Hmmm, I got a new pen tablet today and here is my first drawing that I made with it. Was to lazy too add the finishing touches. You can still see some of the lines which I used for alignment and stuff but in any case here it is.

Scribbled!!

Trip around the heart of city

2010-10-03T22:31:00.001+05:30

Just on impulse today, I decided to catch a shared auto after I had my lunch parceled. I alighted last, having no idea of my location. Went about roaming, saw a govt. institute of micro, small and medium business. After roaming around for an hour and a half, I was damn hungry. Decided to walk into a building called "siri towers", this was like a flat based system where everybody owns a flat. On my way in I saw that the parking place of 301 was empty. So I figured if the guard shows up I will tell him that I wanted to meet someone at 301. I started eating on guard desk itself. After my first dish, the guard came back from wherever he had gone. He asked me what I was doing, I said I came to meet up someone at 301 and they are not at home, so I decided to wait. He said ok. But unlucky for me the the guy from 301 turned up shortly after. Guard asked him, if he knows me. I made some gestures telling him let me eat, I will be gone. But perhaps he didn't notice those and told guard that he doesn't know me. Guard asked me to leave, in any case my lunch was mostly finished, so I wrapped my belongings and went out. Like a moral citizen I looked and looked for a garbage bin after a long search I found one in front of a shop. Got rid of my garbage there. Then started walking again, got totally lost but adamant that I will not ask for directions. Now I had a serious desire to go and attend the nature call. But there was no place to do so, damn people everywhere. Finally came up to a govt. type of building having a big garden, jumped the fence went inside and did my stuff. Good thing nobody caught me. After a couple of hitch hiking and turning at random intersections I came to a road. Having never seen this road before I decided to call a friend. Asked him to choose left or right randomly. He chose left, so I took another shared auto to the left hand side. The driver asked where I was headed. I said till the place you go. He replied he can go really far and asked me for 50 bugs. I said I don't want to go that far, so drop me after some couple of kms. Finally I reached a place called hoshipur. Never been there before but the place was ok, having a lot market places. After roaming for another half and hour I decided lets head back home. Since it was already getting dark and all I had were my sunglasses and after dark I needed my other specs. On my way home, I shared the auto with 3 other girls. They were laughing their head off at something. Having recently seen a video in which a bartender laughs really loud at a couple of girls who were giggling at something and then said "its disgusting". I did a same kinda thing except my last comment was "go ahead, its nice entertainment", that shut them up for good. Then I got a call from office friend to meet up at a particular place. And after lot of phone calls and discussion (since he was also on move with another friend from office itself) as to where to meet we finally met at barista. Had some coffee and a real nice discussion about all this adventure of mine. Back home finally.

BioShock2 first impression

2010-09-18T23:53:00.000+05:30

Having played singularity some weeks back, bioshock2 feels just the same albeit some new powers that you can throw from hand. Coincidentally, one of the messages on the wall said "Lamb is watching" and when I read it I was wearing a t-shirt having a message saying "Mary, had a little lamb. And it was delicious"

The story so far sounds interesting, possibly one of the main feature of the game which will keep the players hooked until they finsih it. The game start in 1958 under the atlantic ocean with you knocking on some door and a small girl comes out having complete yellow eyes. She points to a doll and says "Look daddy, its you. Lets go out today" You follow the girl while watching reflection of yourself (the hero is in metal scuba diving suit complete with cylinders on the back) and fishes outside the glass. On the way, your daughter picks an injection from some guy who apparently is dead/knocked out. She drinks a little from the injection then runs into a hall saying "look daddy more angels". You come out into the hall and some people are shocked to see you. Suddenly there is a scream "DADDY". You run toward the direction of the scream. You come out into a balcony and below you is a stage of some kind. There are four people man handling your daughter and forcefully taking the injection from her. You jump landing and squashing a guy. The middle guy drinks the stuff from injection and tries to eletrocute you by throwing electro bolts at you. You become enraged and drill through a guy, smash another with your drill and just as you are about to kill the guy who threw electro bolts at you, he throws something green bomb thingi. You fell on the floor trying to recover. A woman comes and explains that the small girl is not your daugghter and that she is hers. Then she makes you shoot yourself. Ten years later you wake up by sounds from a radio but the signal is not proper. Everything is in ruins. This is where you gain control. Some keyboard controls tutorial are shown. And you can see some people like you are out side the glass (in the ocean) trying to mend holes.

I must say that the water reflections and the dropping water effect on visor are awesome and looks absolutely real.

Soon you will get power of electrocuting others and a lousy gun called rivet gun. You can pick people dairies to know more about the place and its people. You get powers whenever you find plasmids and the fuel these things use is called eve. There are some eve dispenser. Make sure you carry as much as you can whenever you see a eve dispenser.

There are so many things to interact with. This is good. Not many games have this feature. For eg. you can use the electro bolts and aim toward a pool of water, this will electrocute anyone who is standing in it. Drill uses fuel to run. And most of object wear a dent if you hit that object with anything.

Overall I will say that the story, interact-ability and graphics (altho some things might seem a bit old) are cool. The only con of this game is that it is too much similar (maybe 2K Marin peeps were trying to keep it similar so that it is easy for players to adjust). I will give this game a solid 8/10. (I am loving story driven games a lot more than I used to, hehe).

My First Satire

2010-09-18T02:58:00.000+05:30

The online social communities are rapidly growing and it is helping people from all sorts of fields.

Take the case of Shirley Wilson who was bailed on her own recognizance after she said "I really need to go and update my facebook" in court. The judge Alex Darlington stated that he made his choice according to the law book which states that if the defendant has strong ties in the community and has members in it then that person be released. And shirley's statement proved that she has strong ties in facebook community.

In another case, my good friend Vib got movie ticket for Inception. As he reached the theatre, he remembered that he had forgotten to update his twitter account about the movie. And since this was a big event he decided to go into cyber cafe. A couple of hours later he realized that he missed the movie and remorsefully updated "Missed the movie" on his twitter account. The twitter community rose up and gave him blow-by-blow account of the entire movie. He later commented "this was even richer experience since there were so many people to explain what was going on, a person watching the movie alone would have been totally confused".

And lastly take Klok Jam case. In his own words he told me that he lives all alone. Goes to office at different timings, sometime even taking days off. But he does frequently use twitter to update whenever he is going off to sleep/waking up etc and if by chance someday he doesnt tweet, just remember to raise the alarm, some tragedy might have happened. Furthermore he gave me his password too, just in case something happens and he is not able to tweet about it.

Lol, my first satire. I know it is ridiculous, stupidly/ill written and impossible to understand. Ah well, I wont get any worse. Hehe.

Prince of Persia - The Forgotten sands

2010-08-26T11:13:00.002+05:30

First impression/quick review

The gameplay style is back to warrior within kinda. The 2008 Prince of Persia's artistic background/landscape/graphics have been dropped and open world theme too. The cut scenes are more realistic in any case. Again the camera is controlled by game itself. As far as the story goes, our renowned Prince-having-no-name come back home to his brother to find a war raging. The brother calls up soloman army in-spite of Prince warning not to call them. And all hell break loose. I like the water freezing effect that we can use. Plus fighting with 50 people at a time is also cool. There is nothing to defend/block an attack, this makes the game more fast where you have to keep jumping/running/doing-some-freestyle to kill enemies/reach a place in time. The ability to rewind the time is also back. All in all 7/10 from my side.

Knowing I wrote two instead of many

2010-06-28T12:10:00.002+05:30

As a kid, my pulse used to rise every time I lied, knowing full well that mom will see through the lie. Slowly I adapted to it, lying perfectly without hesitation.
Then it was jumping from heights. Knowing, it will hurt when I land. It became a passion.
Then it was the tiniest moment before fights. Knowing I might get injured really bad. But I overcame that fear.
Then it was the trips to places unknown. Knowing there is not enough cash. Somehow managed.
Then it was (and still is) the games. Knowing there are endless possibilities. Might win might lose. Always tried to keep the stats as clean as possible. (Now contributing to the gaming world :D)
There, thats my life in a nutshell. Crazy, mad, psycho call me whatever but I have enjoyed every moment of my life. There are two things left which I may have forgotten to write, didn't on purpose or maybe never experienced. For those still reading, I tried to keep this small. :D

MinMax Pseudocode

2009-12-24T15:17:00.001+05:30

As promised here is MinMax Pseudocode/explanation

MinMax Pseudocode

function minMax(board_state,current_depth, maximum_depth,whoseTurn) returns a number
{
   first of all check if the game has ended or maximum depth has been reached.
   if so, then evaluate the board and return a value for its importance.

   otherwise proceed
   {
   generate possible moves on the board
   if there are no possible moves then evaluate the board and return its value
   else proceed
   {
   for every possible move
   {
   apply "move" depending on whose turn
   update the localBoard details and state if necessary
   call minMax again with new localBoard details and current_depth+1 and whoseTurn
   store the value returned from minMax into a variable local_value

   check to see if this local_value is better than best value
   if it is then make assign the best_value = this local_value
   and also assign the corresponding best_move = this move (it is highlighted in para above)
   }
   }
   }
return bestMove;
}

I hope that is all clear, if you have any doubt ping me. :)

EDIT: all the variables used in this function should be local, if you are using some global variables either store them into local variables or "undomove" after every minMax call.

GOOGLe Wave Test

2009-12-16T14:13:00.001+05:30

MinMax

2009-12-09T17:50:00.000+05:30

Last three days I have been struggling and fighting with MinMax, I conquered it finally and made a demo game using it but still there are lot of things to learn in a simple MinMax Algorithm. I will try to explain what it is :

In a normal two-player board games the general scenario involves each of the opponents trying to minimize the others gain and look to maximize their gain. There is no "both win situation"/"co-operative mode", so when making the computer AI for such games, one has to look ahead and choose suitable move that will pay-off in favor of computer. The computer is programmed to look ahead and see all possible moves that can possibly take place from the current scenario and weigh each of the moves, finally choosing the one that will benefit in the long run. What exactly happens is that we make a tree, starting node is the current position of the game and its children basically show the possible next moves that can happen, we weigh each of the node from their children. These algorithms are called MinMax or MiniMax, generally applied to board games like chess, tic-tac-toe, go, zerosum etc.

Apart from normal MinMax there are other algorithms too that help dispense of the moves which will not happen at all. Like take example of chess, there are always so many moves from current position and then if we try to make the tree for all possible next moves and then possible moves from the player, the figure can become too large in matter of depths(levels of children). Alpha-beta pruning is one such method in which those possibly never happening moves or bad choices are discarded early on, so that the computer can spend time working out only the best moves from given position. There is also an algorithm called NegaMax which does exactly the same thing but is a lot faster. I will explain more of this later, possibly with some code and graphs/images to assist. Till then chow!! and keep checking this space. :)

Project 1

2009-12-06T13:39:00.000+05:30

So finally after coming to tiger tail studio, I've got my first project. I will be working on three or four multi-player board games. I already did the design for one of them yesterday, wasn't easy to figure out all the properties and behaviors in one go. Iteration helped get all the objects, their properties and behaviors. After that got into trouble with functions, several functions had multiple objects linkages (meaning they worked on three or four objects but they should start at particular event) and they had to be placed only once, later figured the right places of all the functions. I am not that good at designing. This is the first time ever that I designed before writing down any code, usually I just implement my ideas by coding and then later figure out what all to place where and if the code can be re-adjusted to perform better. I know that in the long run designing phase help, and especially since I have to do multi-player then all should be known beforehand otherwise it would take a lot of time to fix bugs later. Hopefully the design I did would withstand the whole duration of the project and maybe it will help save some time.

Phase

2009-12-04T18:15:00.001+05:30

(Yesterday) : The best phase in making a game is coding according to me, the worst part: testing and polishing a game, which actually takes more time than actual coding and all other phases put together.

Just started testing three new games made by co-workers in my company, one of the games is quiet good (something about a war), actually meant for 4 players, it can support up to eight players and four more bots over a simple internet connection. One of them has a lot of bugs(really old game remake), would need to change that. That's the problem with most multiplayer games. Shit happens. Actually it is not until you test the game over internet connection that you would know what all is missing or buggy.

Did I mention that all the three games tested are multi-player!! :D

EDIT (Today) : Testing continued today, and we did all kind of maneuvers on the game, tried to crash them intentionally, and checked of all the aspects, lastly we checked all kind of species against each other.

Degration: ActionScript 3 to 2

2009-12-03T15:16:00.000+05:30

When I started off with AS2 at that time it looked impressive. Now that I am fluent in AS3, I have been asked to make a game in AS2, seriously looks crap if u come down from AS3. And the code management is pathetic, code is everywhere. Need to unlearn some good stuff, and learn AS2 instead, Baaahhh... :|

What I really need is AS3 to AS2 converter, so that I can still code in AS3 and the output fla file will be AS2. Anyone know of such a converter?

Monday

2009-12-03T12:01:00.000+05:30

From Monday on, I'll be making multiplayer board games, might be 2-3 games in all.