Found a sorta interesting iphone/android application from Adobe today: "Adobe Kuler".
The idea is, it allows the creation of "inspirational" color palettes of 5 colors. You can either take photos and find the most important colors of it or create the gamma yourself. Sharing and all included.
So, I'm learning applied C# programming in a part of my free time. Since Im a geek at heart and apparently spent some days (*cough*) playing at the PC in my life, I decided to give game programming a short. Im using XNA (apparently I allready blogged this a while ago, damn, Im bad at remembering stuff and keeping it up to date...).
While, I have some defined examples of some games that probably will be fun to play and sorta innovative, they are pretty complicated, so I want to start small.
Some Jump&Run will do for the first I said myself. So I wanted to look up some simple games I know. Soon enough I re-remembered Canabalt. ( http://www.adamatomic.com/canabalt/ )
The game design is simple, yet amazing and addictive, especially if you got an exam next day. A big part of its charm comes from them music. So after doing some tracing, I soon found out what other games had music written by the same author...
Especially 2 are noteworthy:
Super Meat Boy - Now I know this one since a while. What identifies it primary, is it's difficulty level, that is pretty much absurd. Basicaly it's your good old mario, with the difference, that the fireman is replaced by a cube of meat with legs and arms, princess peach with Bandage Girl and the big fat green ugly turtle boss, by the charmant Dr.Fetus.
(I still have no idea why Bandage girl is called this way, besides considering the fact that she's geting kidnaped ~320 times in this game, they should rather call her bondage girl).
Oh and the world. Basicaly you dont jump on anyones head or shoot fireballs or collect shrooms. The world is mostly grim, bloodred (actually only in the hell chapter, but dying >200 times/hour, covers surfaces with red stain quite a bit and no im not exagerating) and 99% filled with things that move, are sharp and will kill you instantly if you get too close.
To sum it up: here haf a video:
A second game by the same "meat team" (what fiting name), is Binding of Isaac, that features a small kid who is trying to get murdered by his fanatical mother who hears the voice of god... so he hides in the basement, that is filled with horrific things that all want to bite and kill you, starting with flies, over zombies and mutated kids down to the four horsemen and even satan himself.
Luckily there are hundreds of upgrades Isaac can collect, which makes this game so awesome....
TL;DR: this thing distracted me for like 3-4 days from my thesis
It might be the D&D blood (+1) talking in me, but if something can buy me, when it comes to games, its upgrades and randomness. And Binding of Isaac pretty much shows a good level of it.
So i might try to make a project like this I guess.
Sure it wont be even close to this complicated, "good" looking and interesting, but its all learning I guess.
I got bored of programming thesis stuff and since my neurological system programming is sorta in a hold (what do you mean "do other things") because I need a good GUI and apparently the perfectionist in me doesn't feel like the standard windows GUI and a few dots are good enough for such a minor script...
So I started looking up on DirectX (ofc 11 only, because well... nevermind me) and OpenGL
One thing led to another (and its never a good thign, when we are talking me) and I ended up with a version XNA on my PC and me ready to program a small game, in order to learn the graphical aspects of DirectX a bit more and also because im bored.
It definitly won't have any priority over the thesis, but it certainly will provide a bit of change here and there
