public marks

PUBLIC MARKS from bcpbcp with tags 2006 & game

28 January 2006

21 January 2006

PC Logic Games: Bug Brain

This is part three of my five part series on programming logic games. This week's game, Bug Brain, uses neural nets as its programming model. Neural nets are a mainstay of machine learning in computer science and of science fiction stories. In each Bug Brain level, you have to construct a neural net to guide your bug to complete some task. For example, in the level pictured below, you program the lady bug, and your task to have it eat the three bugs without falling off the branch.

Living Game Worlds 2006 | A Symposium | Home

(via)
Digital designers for the past two decades and for the foreseeable future are faced with inventing their medium at the same time as they invent particular applications. What have we learned that can speed up the process of harnessing the power of the computer as a medium of human expression? This Symposium brings together leading designers from several traditions – to share their own processes and to reflect on the future of design.

The Essential 50 Part 44: Parappa the Rapper from 1UP.com

Graphics and images have been an integral part of every game ever made -- it's a visual medium, after all. What you see is what you get. Even the most primitive games that couldn't draw proper images onscreen at least gave you ASCII art or text. And so it went, throughout gaming history, until Parappa the Rapper finally brought a new sense into play: in NanaOn-Sha's PSone masterpiece, you had to rely on your ears as much as your eyes.

Atari Gaming Headquarters - Atari Touchme

Atari's token entry into the handheld market during the classic era was actually a portable version of its unsuccessful coin-op game. Touch Me was a simple yet addictive game but never caught on, but its fun factor was confirmed by the popularity of Milton Bradley's Simon (an imitation of Touch Me by Ralph Baer), which proved to be a runaway best seller for the toy giant.

Music video game - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A music video game, also commonly known as a music game, rhythm action game, or rhythm game, is a type of video game where the gameplay is oriented almost entirely around the player's ability to follow a musical beat and stay with the rhythm of the game's soundtrack. Since the game play for this type of game is largely aural rather than visual, this type of game is similar to audio games. However, music games generally require a visual component as well.

Vib-Ribbon - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vib-Ribbon is a rhythm video game in the style of PaRappa the Rapper and more recently Amplitude. The game was unique in its execution, the software loaded into RAM enabling the user to remove the game-disc and insert a music CD.

A History of Video Game Music

video game music is now a legitimate industry of its own.

19 January 2006

Raph’s Website » Masaya Matsuura’s foreword

the Japanese edition of A Theory of Fun for Game Design is out now. Masaya Matsuura was kind enough to write a foreword for this edition

Gamasutra - Book Excerpt - "Patterns in Game Design: Using Design Patterns"

The following is a selected excerpt of Chapter 4 from Patterns in Game Design (ISBN 1-53450-354-8) published by Charles River Media, Inc.

Video Game Development: Learn to Write C# the Fun Way

by 1 other
Learn the concepts of 3-D video game production as instructors from DigiPen Institute of Technology demonstrate the key stages of developing a game engine using Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Edition, a new development environment for beginner programmers.

game girl advance: The Five Biggest Trends of 2005

The end of the year is upon us, and enough blogs and news sites have already written great articles on the best games of the year. Therefore, instead of being lost amongst the white noise of award features, I'd like to point out a few trends which I felt were especially important during 2005.

jay is games: Best of 2005: Top 20

The Best of 2005 is a celebration of the best games reviewed here at Jayisgames over the past year. It is not an exhaustive list of all the best games available since we can only review the games that we come to know about. If you have a game, or are part of a team that produces them, and would like to have your game considered for a future review here, then please use my email address in the sidebar to submit a link.

Philips revela game que mescla tabuleiro com computador

A Philips anunciou que mostrará ainda esta semana seu protótipo Entertaible, um jogo que mescla um tabuleiro tradicional, de mesa, com um jogo de computador.

18 January 2006

Game Tycoon » Guitar Hero: Interview with Greg LoPiccolo (Harmonix)

(via)
"I recently chatted with Greg LoPiccolo, VP of Product Development for Harmonix and one of the brains behind Guitar Hero, an innovative game with great reviews.;"

Amazon.com: Indie Game Development Survival Guide (Game Development Series): Books

Guide to designing, developing, and publishing your own game. Discover new and innovative ways to use the Internet to market, test, and deliver your game; explore the Indie game development business and find out if you're ready to develop your own game ideas. Softcover. DLC: Computer games--Design.

17 January 2006

MGS User Research - Home

Games User Research at Microsoft Game Studios

16 January 2006

Multiverse

by 2 others
Independent game developers, the revolution is here! For the first time, you will be able to: * Make a complete Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG) or virtual world for less money and in less time than you could have dreamed possible.

Blobs in Games

Black and White 2 AI I played Black and White 2 for many hours yesterday. The computer player and I were in a stalemate. The computer kept sending armies against me and I kept defeating them. I had built my town with walls around it, and then put archers on top of the walls. I was building up my strength while defending myself, in preparation for a big attack. I felt pretty safe. After around 40 attacks, I realized that they weren't all the same. The computer wasn't using the same attackers each time. It tried the creature, archers, swordsmen, and catapults. It tried combinations of them. Sometimes it would come through my main entrance, and sometimes it would come around the back entrance to the city. The computer player also destroyed major sections of the city using the “earthquake” power, but I recovered from these too. After a while the enemy creature figured out that he should kick my wall in. His archers and swordsmen stayed back, out of range, while the creature came up and destroyed my wall, including the archers on it. After it breached the wall, the army swarmed into my town and killed half my people. I rebuilt my wall and started to recover, but the computer's newly discovered strategy worked well. It tried several variants but kept going back to the same approach: kick down the wall, then swarm the town. This forced me to try some new strategies. Although being on the wall has advantages, it leaves the archers vulnerable when the enemy creature attacks the wall. So I moved them behind the wall. I've also learned to open my gate, wait for the enemy army to get close, then close the gate and set their army on fire. I have no good strategy for the creature knocking down my wall though, and I'm constantly losing townspeople and then rebuilding. After a long stalemate, the computer AI learned how to attack more effectively, and now I'm having trouble keeping my city safe. I'm very impressed by the AI. I'm not sure how it's programmed, but it tried out many different things and learned which ones work the best. From the game AI techniques I've learned (genetic algorithms, neural networks, fuzzy logic, state machines, etc.), the AI in Black and White 2 seems to match most closely with what I know about reinforcement learning. It's a technique that uses online learning (observing results as the game is played) instead of training (from examples constructed ahead of time), allows both exploration (trying new things in order to learn) and exploitation (taking advantage of what you've learned), and associates rewards (like whether the attack was successful) with actions (like kicking down the wall and keeping the army away from my archers). I recommend Sutton and Barto's book if you want to learn more. It's entirely possible though that the game uses something much simpler that just happens to look impressive, but my guess is that it's using reinforcement learning. — Amit — Monday, December 12, 2005 Comments: Post a Comment Links to this post:

Slashdot | The Earliest Documented Video Game

"The first documented video game was created in 1952 by a scientist who felt the need to give his work relevance to society.