Starweb Web Design

Dodge the falling rocks! Or you Die.

(Follow link in Source for the game!)

1. Pong

Everyone loves Pong! The graphic aspect isn’t too complicated. Choose a dark background, add some borders, the paddles, the ball and the score counters and you’re all set! If you want to get fancy adjust the size of the text for the score counters as they increase in digits. To avoid having to make an AI, make a two-player game or just make the paddle follow the ball for an impossible difficulty. Pong isn’t about winning, anyway. It’s just a fun little game to relax to. The hardest part about making pong is making the ball interact with the paddles and walls. I took a short cut and just coded the cases for the inner-facing sides of  the paddles and the top and bottom walls.

2. Moving shapes

Games are fun to program, but did you know that a program doesn’t have to have a clear goal in mind to be fun to interact with? All this idea needs is to take input from the location of a mouse click and make something happen. In this case, I programmed 8 circles to explode from the originating mouse click. The circles don’t even need to interact with each other or future mouse clicks for this program to be fun to play around with. After I made this, I spent hours coming back to it and trying to see how fast I can click the mouse or what happens if I click it in a certain pattern.

3. Bubbles

If you had a computer that ran on Vista, you might be familiar with the bubble screensaver. While it was not as effective as a screensaver, it was sure fun to watch! You can create bubbles upon running the program or use a user input (a mouse click) to create bubbles. You will need to program collision into these bubbles to make them bounce off each others and the sides of your boundary. Once you have everything set up, just run the program and watch your bubbles endlessly bounce around for a relaxing visual stimulus!

4. A simple platformer

If you’re interested in making games, platformers are a solid genre to start with. You don’t need fancy graphics like Mario or extreme difficulty like the Impossible Game. All you need is a shape to be the player’s character, give it a constant speed forward, and a track with gaps. You can make the track manually or design it to be randomly generated. Since the track is one-dimensional, random generation wouldn’t be too complicated. Don’t forget to bind a jumping (or other) mechanic to a keyboard key (spacebar) and you’re good to go! You’re on your way to becoming a game developer!

5. Breakout

Next addition!

Ready to start anew!

Part 4

Part 3

Latest addition to the family!

Part 2

I used a pattern but I messed it up.

Links under cut