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Tuesday, August 05, 2008

:)

Tuesday, August 05, 2008

:)

Smilie

A game by Mordechai Buckman

Posted @ 8:59 PM     See this post on TheBuckmans.com

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8 Comments:

Well done! It's fun to play.

May it be the first of many. =)

 
I hope people who play this game and don't enjoy it have the courtesy to tell me.

 
I can't say that I didn't enjoy it. Very impressed. Let me play it a few more times and think about it a bit and I will come back with more thoughts about it.

 
Hey Mory. It's not that I didn't enjoy it, more that I didn't understand it. It did bring a smile to my face for a second, which I'm not sure whether is meant to be the irony of the thing or not. But when it was over I was kind of wondering what the point was.

At all events, a first try was this? Well done then, and I second the best wishes. :) (the smilie is not ironic :D ).

 
Nu... what's your development platform? Java?

 
John Silver: The intent of Smilie is no deeper than it appears to be. There's no irony here, no intended message. It's just something I wanted to make. Actually, maybe that's a message in itself. You can certainly read all sorts of things into Smilie, if you really want to. I think certain aspects of its personality are like me.

Eric: I programmed it in an obscure language called BlitzMax. It's a version of BASIC specifically designed for 2D games. It's not all that far removed from QBasic, which I've got some nostalgia for. I don't particularly like learning new programming languages, so years ago I intended to make games in Visual Basic 6 like I used to. But you wouldn't believe how hard it is in VB to get DirectX to rotate a silly little 2D image. It's actually easier to deal with 3D! So the main appeal of BlitzMax for me is that I can just write "SetRotation(45)" and have it rotate whatever it draws next by 45 degrees. It's refreshing. But I also don't feel like the workings of the program have been taken out of my hands, since I'm programming the main loops and the backbuffer flips and all that myself.

On the other hand, it's a bit buggy and has irritating quirks with how it deals with variable types. So I'm not sure I'd recommend it to other people, but I like it.

 
Well after playing it some more here is a link to my review. Smilie

 
Well, I've joined the ranks of people who have experienced Smiley.

I find it intriguing.

Like real life (sometimes), you find yourself in an environment with no instructions. You just have to experience it and experiment a bit. You find yourself wanting to play it more than once -- you are motivated to compile a body of results to help you to feel that you understand what is going on and why. You find yourself trying to understand what makes the Smiley react in certain ways and you even find yourself wanting to get it to smile. Why?

There are elements at work here that I think could be interesting components of a game of broader scope.

Cool!

 

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