PSNB Tech Blog

I've noticed that many of the comments I've been getting were trying to work out how to download the source code to my projects. Rather than forcing everyone to download an SVN client (or manually download each file), I've made the switch from GoogleCode to GitHub. This should make the code easier to obtain for anyone who doesn't have the appropriate software (just click the "Download Zip" button on the bottom right).

I've also went through and removed a bunch of useless posts and projects that have been sitting around for a while. I doubt anyone will miss them.

I've finally gotten around to writing a new classic game for everyone to look through, Asteroids! This was an interesting project to work on because of how fundamentally different it was than the games I'd worked on previously. Both Tetris and Snake are grid-based and have very little going on in terms of updates, and Asteroids diverged from that greatly.

The first thing I wrote when I made this blog was a 7-part tutorial series on writing a snake game in Java. Unfortunately, due to inexperience and the tutorial format, the code wasn't very well written and the result was rather sloppy. I decided to spend much of this morning rewriting a greatly improved version of the game from scratch.

It's not uncommon to see new game developers writing clones of classic games. The games are usually simple enough to write in a day or two, and generally don't need to be optimized for modern hardware. This makes them a great starting point for learning the basics of game development. While I have tinkered around with more complex games, I still enjoy making simple games or programs and sharing them on here with anyone who's watching.

Note: I have completely rewritten and improved this game. Most of my traffic comes from these posts, so I've not deleted them. Please use the new version which can be found here.

Finally, we're on the home stretch for the game. All that's left to implement is death and respawning. Let's not waste any time and jump straight in and get this beast finished, shall we?

Note: I have completely rewritten and improved this game. Most of my traffic comes from these posts, so I've not deleted them. Please use the new version which can be found here.

Games get boring rather quickly if there's no goal to it. For this reason, our game is about as entertaining as watching paint dry. To change this, we need to introduce the scoring system, and a steadily increasing difficulty. This section solves both of these problems in one quick swoop.

Note: I have completely rewritten and improved this game. Most of my traffic comes from these posts, so I've not deleted them. Please use the new version which can be found here.

What good is a game if there's no way for the player to interact with it? As I mentioned in the last part of the tutorial, this section will cover the controller input that is used in the Snake Game. This section will probably be relatively short, since we've already implemented most of the code in the Snake class. Anyway, let's begin!