On first glance, making a first person game without an engine or a graphics API seems like an almost impossible task. In this post I’ll show you how to do that using an algorithm called ray casting.
My goal here is to show how something that looks complicated can be broken down into simple pieces, and if I’ve done my job right, it should feel like you’ve discovered how the game works.
This is so cool! Shout out to Zach Latta (Founder of Hack Club) for giving me a call today to tell me about Sprig — this awesome new Hack Club project is built by teenagers for teenagers.
Sprig is a game console where every user is a creator. It can only be obtained by building a tile-based game in the web-based game editor and shipping it in the community gallery. It’s made by Hack Club.
… Fall of 2022, we are giving a Sprig (valued at over $100 in components alone) to every teenage hacker that successfully shares a game they create in our community gallery.
This week we’re doing some Linux mythbusting and talking retro gaming with Jay LaCroix from Learn Linux TV. This is a preview of what’s to come from our trip to All Things Open next week. By the way, make sure you come and check us out at booth 60. We’ll be recording podcasts, shaking hands, giving out t-shirts and stickers…and speaking of gaming, you can go head-to-head with us on Mario Kart or Rocket League on the Nintendo Switch. We’re giving that Switch away to a lucky winner at the conference, but you have to play to win. If you’re there, make sure you come see us because we want to see you.
An actual card game to teach actual kids how to actually combine unix commands with pipes.
task: print the most common line from a file, we need to first cat the file (in our case the file is card 03.txt), then sort it, uniq count it, then do numeric sort, then tail -1:
answer:
cat 03.txt | sort | uniq -c | sort -n | tail -1
Print it yourself or… actually it’s sold out for now so you’ll have to print it yourself.
Nick Nisi hasn’t played it yet, but he’s already declared TDungon to be the “Game of the Year”…
I don’t know how practical this font is, but I do know how cool this font is…
The story of Kells is an inspiring one, to say the least!
I started this game back in 2020 as a fun little side-project to pass the time during the pandemic with lots of help from my son. Back then we didn’t even expect it to be playable, never mind it turning into a real game with 100+ levels and being released on Steam/PC. But even after that milestone, I never dreamed my son and I would be able to play it together around the TV on our favourite console!
TIL that Pong was built using hardware circuitry. Fascinating! Here’s the original schematics from Atari 👇
There’s a lot going on in that picture. Let’s take a closer look at exactly what computers and gear they were using to do the 3D animation for this game.
Why? Because, Final Fantasy 7 is a true classic. When the game was first released in early 1997, for the Sony PlayStation, it took the RPG gaming world by storm. To this day, many consider it the greatest entry in the franchise.
I remember getting this game for Christmas and playing it nearly non-stop until school started again after the new year. Greatest entry in the franchise? Easily!
A fun post from the Grafana blog for your Friday enjoyment:
It started as all good projects do … with Rick Astley.
After seeing the project about how to Rickroll your friends with Grafana — in which a seemingly innocent hyperlink surprises users with the music video for Astley’s classic “Never Gonna Give You Up” rendered with Prometheus and Grafana — a question arose: Can Grafana run Doom?
Thankfully, this post breaks Betteridge’s law of headlines. The answer to the question is a resounding yes!
The incomparable Jessica Kerr is back with another grab-bag of amazing topics. We talk about her journey to Honeycomb, devs getting satisfaction from the code they write, why step one for her is “get that new project into production” and step two is observe it, her angst for the context switching around pull requests, some awesome book recommendations, how game theory and design can translate to how we skill up and level up our teams, and so much more.
Read the comments for all the bug reports and iteration. 🔥
In addition to being a Developer Advocate at Hugging Face, Thomas Simonini is building next-gen AI in games that can talk and have smart interactions with the player using Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Natural Language Processing (NLP). He also created a Deep Reinforcement Learning course that takes a DRL beginner to from zero to hero. Natalie and Chris explore what’s involved, and what the implications are, with a focus on the development path of the new AI data scientist.
I love how much hacking has been inspired by Wordle.
The Wordle source code contains 2,315 days of answers (all common 5-letter English words) and 10,657 other valid, less-common 5-letter English words.
We combine these to form a set of 12,972 possible words/answers.
We then simulate playing 1,000 Wordle games for each of these possible words, guessing based on the frequency of the word in the English language and the feedback received.
Then we take three measures to evaluate the observed distribution of ⬛🟨🟩 squares on Twitter according to our valid words.
The resulting code is included in the article.
Rebuilding Wordle is a fun way to show off what your frontend framework is capable of (and how). Evan You has been doing just that for Vue. It’s not a 100% reproduction of the original, but it does have one cool feature the official game does NOT:
You can make your own Wordle and send it to friends by base64-encoding a word and include it as the URL query
Here’s a custom one using an acronym that many devs think about often…
If you landed here hoping this project isn’t serious… fear not. It’s just for fun, but it really works!
Have you ever thought to yourself: Why don’t we have an immersive 3D sandbox user interface to manage workloads on my favorite container orchestrator? No? Well here it is anyway.
Pigs are pods. Cows are ReplicaSets. Chickens are services. You get the drift.
Jim Hall used grep and some fancy regular expressions to get a leg up on Wordle, the word game that keeps you guessing… but only once per day. Some people may think of Jim’s technique as cheating. I wouldn’t necessarily disagree.
But it’s a lot better than View Source-ing to get at the answer, which you can also do in a pinch. 😉
(Also there’s zero point to Wordle other than having fun, so it’s really only cheating if your answer-finding-method is less fun than you’d have otherwise. Even then, you’re only cheating yourself.)
Previously, we compiled a Go program into a WebAssembly and then converted it into C++ files to make it run on Nintendo Switch. Now, I have succeeded in compiling a Go program into a native binary for Nintendo Switch, and also running a game there. I replaced system calls with C function calls using the
-overlayoption.
This is phoboslab’s entry in this year’s JS 13k Games competition. Stunning what you can accomplish with so little. View the source right here and play the game (desktop only) right here.
Battlesnake’s Brad Van Vugt:
This past spring on Coding Badly, Joe and I, for whatever reason, challenged ourselves to build a camera-controlled Battlesnake. The result was “Facesnake” – a Battlesnake controlled in real-time using your face and webcam. This post outlines how we built it using Replit and tracking.js :-)
You can also jump straight to the source code or watch Facesnake in action here.
Super Mario World Widescreen is your beloved Mario World SNES game but in the 16:9 resolution. This is possible by expanding the horizontal resolution by 96 pixels, increasing resolution from 256x224 to 352x224. Since the original SNES does not have this resolution, the emulator focused into high definition mods bsnes-hd must be used.
I love how open source hackers give classic games like this new life by applying their skill and ingenuity to a property they love. I wonder if having it in widescreen changes the gameplay mechanics at all…
In the past decade a variety of games have emerged where players need to create an AI to play the game rather than play the game directly. In this episode we speak with the creator of one of those games - Battlesnake. Brad Van Vugt joins us to talk about building a game engine using Go, making programming games easier for beginners to get started with, the long term vision for games like Battlesnake, and more.
rpg-cli is a bare-bones JRPG-inspired terminal game written in Rust. It can work as an alternative to
cdwhere you randomly encounter enemies as you change directories.
You’ll want to practice a bit first, then once you get good at it go ahead and override the builtin cd by adding this function to your bash profile.
cd () {
rpg-cli "$@"
builtin cd "$(rpg-cli --pwd)"
}
The accompanying video (22:36) explains why and walks you through the development process as well.
