GEEX Game-In-a-Day

Last weekend I entered to the GEEX Game-In-a-Day competition with my dad and brother. It was miles better than the TSA competition, but not quite perfect. Maybe someday I'll try the Indie Game Jam. We saw all the other games and got to play them, so we knew what the competition was like. We knew the criteria for winning- get the audience to vote for your game- rather than having a floaty list of bullet points like "social value." Most of all, it was great to talk to the other contestants during and after we made our games.

Our game, which placed second, was Loony. The randomly-chosen themes (of which we had to use two) were dystopia, monster and ugly. Thus, Loony is a game about a balloon trying to escape the monsters of a dystopian city. We finished a lot of what we set out to do, which surprised me, considering the short time limit. There are three levels (sewer, city and sky) with new monsters in each. The game includes sound effects, music and semi-decent programmer animations. All we missed was a fourth level in space to make the gameplay infinite (we have a dystopian ending instead :P).

Game Maker's Type System

I recently wrote a vector collisions extension for the Game Maker Community Game. GM has support for calling functions in DLL's, but it's only able to pass doubles and strings between the game and the library. Also, its type system includes only doubles and strings, so any other kind of data generally gets stored as the global index of some data structure. For example, my extension has to keep an array of polygons, dealing with them through their index, which gets cast back and forth between an int and a double every trip, checking that each index is valid every time it gets used. Blech. These problems would be solved with a better type system.

A Capability-Based Web

Google's new app store for Chrome is an interesting concept. Normally, a web app store wouldn't make much sense beyond charging for apps (which is of course interesting in its own right). However, that's not all the new store does. Web apps can be packaged in such a way that the user can install them, granting apps permission to features like the user's location or webcam only once, rather than every time they load the app. At first glance, this looks like web apps are merely trying to catch up to desktop apps, and in some ways that's true. However, this system looks distinctly familiar...