Hallow Games

West Virginia video game development

Archives for February 2016

Snake

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For my game development class this semester, we were required to make an arcade game using Python and the Pygame library.  Since my group is in the process of designing an arcade cabinet for our semester project, I wanted to make something that would play well on an arcade machine, yet was also easy for people to pick up and didn’t require too many controls.

For those that have never played any version of a Snake/Worm game, the player controls the snake and the object of the game is to eat apples (in my game gold pieces) and grow as big as you can without going off the edges of the screen or running into your own body.  (This becomes very difficult as your worm gets bigger and bigger.  The speed of the worm in this build never changes, so once you get used to the speed of the worm, I found that the difficulty was not too challenging until after your Snake has reached about size 60.

I plan to eventually add high scores to the game for the version that is put in the arcade cabinet and potentially mess around with difficulty and adding a second player since our arcade cabinet will feature two player controls.

You can download and play my version of Snake for free here:
http://hallowgames.com/snake.html

All you have to do is install Python on your machine and the matching version of Pygame software from their website.

Global Game Jam 2016 / Keeper’s Fate

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So one of the first thing’s that the advisor of our club, Dr. Frances Vanscoy, mentioned when we had our first few meetings was about the goal of eventually being a host site for the Global Game Jam.  I personally had not heard of the event and as soon as I figured out what it was, I really thought that would be a good goal for the club to be able to make our university one of the many host sites.  Up to this point, the nearest site was Pittsburgh (which also happens to be one of the biggest I believe).

I was elected President in May of 2015 and personally made it one of my goals to make this happen.  In October we became an official site and by early December, we were able to open up our registration.  With the help of the officers, we were able to get Dr. Jaime Banks, Professor Jeffrey Moser, and Dr. Nick Bowman to speak at our event in addition to our club advisor Dr. Vanscoy.  After they spoke, we played the Global Game Jam video keynotes and theme announcement, then immediately began brainstorming and spliting into teams.  By the time it was 10pm that Friday night, we had two teams formed and I had heard some exciting ideas related to the theme from both teams. (We also had Dr. Vanscoy making her own game as well).
I was not originally planning on participating in this Jam, but after I got home and was able to think about the theme and the opportunity to motivate myself to learn Gamemaker Studio (I got it for a good price when they had it in the humble bundle a few months prior), I had to at least attempt to make a game.  This game ended up being Keeper’s Fate, which is a top down 2D maze game.  I drew all the sprites myself (I’m sure you can tell, up to this point I had very little experience drawing sprites) and worked through several Gamemaker Studio tutorials to learn how to implement all the games features, menu functions, and artificial intelligence.  I will be the first to admit that my game is the least related to the theme at our site, but my goal was to learn the basic functions of Gamemaker Studio and I believe that I have succeeded at that.
By the end of the jam, we had four games submitted and from what everyone told me, it sounded like everyone enjoyed the entire event and said they would do it again next year!  I’m glad it was a success and I am looking forward to helping to organize it next year.  Now that we know the process of hosting a site,  I believe that we will be able to do a better job reaching out to the community next year, which will help us in getting more people to participate in the event.
Keeper’s Fate page on my site: http://hallowgames.com/keeper-s-fate.html