Aug/080
Collideascope Core Gameplay Prototype
After nearly an eternity, I have something resembling gameplay for Collideascope. The game consists of a central ring towards which colored blocks fall from all directions. You rotate the ring to try and form groups of like-colored blocks, which then disappear. There are a lot of bugs still and not much in the way of functionality, but it gives the basic feel.
If you don’t have XNA Game Studio 2 installed, you’ll need to install the XNA 2.0 runtime and you might need updates to .NET or DirectX. The “Additional Files” link below contains everything you might need to install to get the game working. Once everything is installed, just run Collide.exe to play. I’ll work on packaging this all up into a proper installer at some point.
Update 1 – I uploaded a newer version of the game with a lot of bug fixes. Most notably, blocks now fall when other blocks get cleared under them. Rotation feels a lot better too.
Update 2 -More bug fixes and you can now use the space bar to invert the ring (i.e. switch the blocks on the outside of the ring to the inside and vice versa).
Downloads
The Game
Additional Files
Mar/081
The LolSharp Compiler part 1
Last Things First
In this part, we’re going to build a very simple compiler to turn a subset of the LolCode language into a .NET executable. I’ve decided to take a depth first approach, as opposed to a breadth first approach, let me explain. I could starting by writing the whole parser and then building each part of the back-end one at a time. While that’s certainly one way of doing it, I’m not that patient. In order to have something shiny to play with faster, the approach will be to build a working-but-limited program from end-to-end. Then, in subsequent parts, we’ll add new features and look at what that means for each part of the compiler.