Battle Box: Online!
The original intent for Battle Box was to be a cloud based game you could play against other people (at random). That dream is now a reality.
You can play Battle Box Online here!
I have a bit of clean-up for mobile browser fitting and hooking up the two versions so you can switch between them on the title screen, but other than that, it’s done! Enjoy!
Note: Due to restrictions on the Parse framework, Battle Box online won’t work in IE, try playing in FireFox, Chrome, or Safari. Thanks!
Mikeware Enters ‘Battle Box’ into Ludum Dare #26
For those of you who may not know, Ludum Dare is a 48 Hour game making competition. A game must be made from start-to-finish in the 48 hour period. Entries are then played and voted on by the other participants in the three weeks following.
Originally, I wasn’t going to enter, but had a brainstorm for a simple game yesterday morning. That turned into the ‘Battle Box’.
You can see my Ludum Dare posts and entry here.
You can play Battle Box here.
There’s still some more work on it to come, but the two-player hot-seat version was ready to go, so seemed like a good announcement.
Update 4/30: Online version is now live.
‘Pellet-Man’ in GridWorld Materials
As mentioned previously, we recreated a classic arcade game in the Advanced Placement Computer Science case study GridWorld.
GridWorld involves programming ‘Actors’ within a grid system. This was a natural fit for ‘Pellet-Man’ and is a good exercise for students to work on something exciting and challenging while reinforcing their new knowledge of inheritance and practice using the system found on their AP exam.
[Release] Gamius Type IV (v2) ships on OUYA
Mikeware is happy to announce that “Gamius Type IV” will launch exclusively on the OUYA as it ships this coming weekend. The ONLYOUYA game will be available, in full, for free during the launch period.
Gamius Type IV is a unique, retro styled, truly one button/one switch shmup (no analog sticks here). It is primarily meant as a multiplayer game and includes both co-op and asymmetric play. Players must navigate their ship using only the single button to avoid terrain and enemies as they try accumulate the highest score. Those of you familiar with Mikeware previously, may remember the Gamius Type IV prototype (available in our old project section). The game has been significantly revamped with bug fixes and added features for the OUYA.
If you’re unfamiliar with the term or genre of ‘Shmup’, then checkout Gamasutra’s or Racketboy’s great articles on their history and evolution.
Gamius Type IV was developed in C# using XNA and ported to OUYA using the Xamarin tools and MonoGame. Want to thank ‘slygamer’ from the MonoGame team for his quick replies and assistance in using the framework on Android.
‘Pellet-Man’ in GridWorld
GridWorld is the Advanced Placement Computer Science case study acting as a project culminating the knowledge students learn over the course of a school year before taking the AP exam.
In this year’s class, we’re providing a ‘Pellet-Man’ framework to aid student’s learning about inheritance in computer science. If you are an educator and this is of interest to you in your class, please contact us for more information.
[Preview] The Gauntlet – Minecraft Skill Challenge
This is an older Minecraft project of mine from over a year or so ago. Figured it was about time to post some more info about it. Enjoy the video!
The Gauntlet is basically a series of tasks which two players can perform in parallel (spectators can watch from above as well). The idea is that it never ends, you can just continually add to it as your challengers become successful. Each challenge gets more difficult as the race progresses. The last player ‘standing’ wins. What makes this a little different from other Gauntlet’s we’ve seen is that each combatant has a mirrored track and can occasionally see one another without interference while spectators can watch the action from above.
Once the 1.5 Minecraft update comes out, I’ll look at making sure it’s compatible and adding some Command Blocks to make it a little cleaner before posting. Probably expect some more videos in the meantime before a posting of the server files in April.
Road Construction Down
The Game Crafter recently updated their site and we haven’t updated to their new template yet. Thus, Road Construction was automatically unpublished.
Have no fear though! A new edition of Road Construction with an improved box will be on it’s way. Look for it in late April along with more info about our next ‘Board Game’ project. You’ll know a bit about it already if you follow our Twitter feed.
Open Source WPF Chess Example Coming Soon
I worked on this Chess program for another project. I had started by looking at numerous available chess programs written in C# and using WPF, but alas did not find anything I felt was up to par as a basis for what I needed. They either made the chess/UI logic really complicated or had it tightly integrated or didn’t use WPF strengths.
So, I put this project together to use proper WPF data separation techniques through data binding and templates as well as using a MEF back-end to give me some flexibility with the piece creation (my project used this a bit more intensively, but I wanted to simplify the example that I release for demonstration). It just cuts to the chase.
I’m just adding some more comments and cleaning up the code a bit and hope to have it posted by the end of the month.
[Preview] Dead Wool – Minecraft Zombie Apocalypse
Welcome to Dead Wool!
Set in a city ravaged by a zombie outbreak, the player must survive as they trek though the infested streets and reach the only escape – a helicopter at the top of a skyscraper across the city!
Many hours were put into building the city from the ground up and even wiring triggers for in-game-events over the course of 4-5 weeks. Players are given the option of exploring the city or fast tracking it through to the escape route. Players decide at their own pace when they want to complete the level. Exploring the city yields interesting side-quests that supplement the main story and many item-drops will give the player an advantage against the undead citizens.
This project was completed by four of us for a night class in game design. It was completed by myself (Michael A. Hawker), Melissa Henry, Howard Smith, and he who shall remain nameless…
Hit the jump for more project details and a breakdown of responsibilities of each team member. As well as additional photos.
Reach for the Stars: Educating the Next Generation Using Games
Had a great weekend at PAX and PAXDev! As you may know, at PAXDev we gave a talk on our space simulation project given after the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam this year at Issaquah High School. It was requested that we post the slides to our talk. So without further ado…
questions at mikeware dot com