Archive for March, 2008
Videogames And Observations On How We Learn?
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Uncategorized on March 25, 2008
There are many studies cited in the media about possible links between video games and violence, probably because the results of these studies can be used to push certain agendas – It can be beneficial to a particular group to find a co-relation (Statistics cannot prove anything, that’s the first law of statistics in case you didn’t know) between violent tendencies and video-game habbits – or vise versa, c’mon lets be fair 
But what I want to know is what has been done using video games as an attempt to understand how humans learn? We are amazing parrallel processing machines, capable of pattern recognition far beyond that of any computers created thus far.
Lets take an example from my latest game Attack of the Meeplings – A large component of the game (and of many other games in the shooter genre) comes from learning the patterns that the game presents to you. The game is entirely deterministic, i.e the same every time you play, and it’s this determinisim that allows someone to learn the game and improve their abilities.
Taking Earok as an example – Sorry to pick on you Earok I find it pretty amazing that someone can go from 3000 to 12,000 to 38,000 pts in only three goes. There must be somekind of fancy processing going on in the brain to be able to improve that much in such a short time span.
Attack of the Meeplings Beta
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Meeplings, myProjects on March 23, 2008
Attack of the Meeplings is a Neo-Retro shooter that loops indefinately, getting faster and faster and harder and harder until you just can’t keep up anymore.
Check it out here
Only some minor things to do before declaring version 1.0 such as coming up with a more secure way of handling the global high scores and some performance optimisation.
Special thanks to Kristie Addison for the music
Caverns of Underkeep Updates
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in UnderKeep, myProjects on March 8, 2008
Another week another batch of updates for Caverns of Underkeep
This time there are only a few minor corrections/improvements, the game is probably very close to a 1.0 release – I would still like a nicer gui in the town though…
- Bug Fixed – Multiplicity of items now taken into account when calculating your score.
- If you don’t use any magic you get a +2000 bonus to your score (the barbarian automatically gets this of course.)
- Drinking mana potion sfx distortion problem resolved.
- Bug Fixed – Carry capacity had an ‘off by one’ error (you could only carry one less than what it actually said)
- Bug Fixed – Game incorrectly told you that if you increased your endurance you could carry more.
- There are now 200 arrows in the shop and each bundle of arrows that you find randomly generates 4-8 arrows (previously 2-6)
- Hall of Legends now displays the top 16 scores (to stop an overflow display error)
I should probably create an extended hall of legends to be displayed on the webpage.
Retro Sound Effects Generator
Posted by Joshua Smyth (Admin) in Must Have Freeware on March 4, 2008
I’ve been using this nice little program to generate the sound effects for Attack of the Meeplings
It’s very easy to use. Simply select a style, such as explosion, shoot, power-up etc.. and hit randomise a couple of times until you get the sound you like (or hit mutate if you only want a minor change.) You can also play around with all the parameters of the oscillator if you really want to understand the program in a little more depth.
The program is also open-source.