November 7, 2003

New poll. I’m thinking of posting writing exercises here, that I would do along with readers. I’d post my results, and provide space where you all could post yours. Please vote, over there on the right. No, the right.

According to the last poll, the vast majority of you saw and loved Kill Bill.

So. What did you think of Ghost Story? Please send me your thoughts.

 

I spent a little time last week fiddling around with programming in MacOS X. The default tools are quite nice, really.

I developed a little game, Colony. It’s nothing, really; just text boxes and a button. Click the button and see the numbers change. Oooh!

It’s based on a project I had in my Visual Basic class. I’ve always felt that game programming is a great way to learn a programming language, because there’s so much to learn and so many features you can add. Practically any language feature can be used to enhance the game. The trick is to pick a simple game idea, something that can be implemented with minimal knowledge.

So, Colony is a resource-management game. You lead a colony of miners; the mines produce ore, which you sell. You have to buy food to keep the colonists from starving. And that’s about it for the basic game.

So I slapped together the interface, then used the included tutorial to figure out how it all fits together.

OS X has a rather interesting system for managing data. You create a “Controller,” and attach GUI widgets as inputs and/or outputs to it. You can then dive into the code for the Controller and, within it, read data from/send data to those widgets. That allows you to create multiple controllers, each for a different purpose.

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