Category Archives: Programming

Glowy Thing Pong

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The assignment? Create something in C++ with an ancient graphics library. It had to have input and a menu system and there was extra credit for motion.

I opted to create a souped up Pong game.

Glowy Thing Pong is a game where you control a paddle of various colors, launch a ball of various colors, and try to destroy little Glowy Things of various colors. The rules are simple; the ball you have only destroys Glowy Things when it matches their color. The ball only changes color when it hits your paddle, at which point it takes on whatever color the paddle is. The paddle changes colors by pressing the number keys 1, 2, and 3, or by clicking on Glowy Things.

There is an absurdly long timer that keeps score for you. When the ball is lost to fates unknown by hitting the bottom of the screen, you get a penalty. Right click any time to pause and load a menu. Left click to shoot the ball.

Any questions? That’s what comments are for.

Have fun!

GlowyThingPong

Recursive Copy Tool

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In the process of fixing my fiance’s laptop, I backed up all of her data and then reformatted her hard drive to reinstall the operating system. Any Windows user knows the joy of a freshly installed OS.

Somehow, when we looked at the backups, we noticed that none of her music was present. I had copied her entire User directory, but the tool I used, in its infinite wisdom, decided against copying music as if we had never really intended to copy it in the first place. It then proceeded to not tell us it didn’t copy it, making sure we felt no remorse with choosing the utility in the first place.

So, after attempting to recover her files, I wrote my own. “RecursiveCopy” is a very simple command line tool. That means you copy the file anywhere, go to your command prompt, navigate to it, and run it. It takes a source directory, a destination directory, and a file type. Other tools that do the same thing probably exist but I didn’t want to bother with them. This tool copies all the files from one directory to another of a particular extension. Simple to use, pretty fast, and useful when I’ve had to use it.

RecursiveCopy

Surrounded – THE GAME

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In Computer Science school (at least, at my university), the language of choice is Java. I don’t know why this is. Although I could list personal gripes I have with the language, I’ll refrain and simply say that I prefer alternatives to it by a great deal.

One of the first major projects we had was to develop a graphical version of a game called “Surround”, which is not a very complicated piece of software and also isn’t necessarily all that fun to play. But don’t let that stop you! Install Java and play to your heart’s content!

Surrounded – THE GAME

Legend of Kastuuline

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I’m going to be honest with you: I don’t know if this game works. I should probably test it more, but then I can think of a number of things that are more important than testing this game. In fact, there are plenty of things more important than even posting it online. So be grateful. No complaining from you. Hush.

I wouldn’t oppose bug reports, but you’ll have to word them cleverly. This is a sarcastic text-based RPG. It requires sarcastic testing.

Now for a little history. Back in my senior year of High School (this was 2004-2005 for me), I learned how to program in Java, if you use the term ‘program’ loosely. Some friends of mine also learned with me, and after our teacher gave us the lesson, we would finish the assignment as quickly as possible and begin programming our own stuff. We picked up faster than our teacher, as it was his first semester ever teaching a programming course, and we had almost the entire hour of class to do our own work for most of the semester.

The result was a massive, monolithic Java class called RPG, a very simple command-line game. I have since learned the art of Object Oriented programming and code reuse, and rewrote it in C# in about two hours.

Just start the executable up and play.

JavaRPGInCSharp

MegaMan vs Obama

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When you get a free educational copy of Flash, the first thing you will try to do is create a game. I can’t prove this scientifically or statistically, but I make the claim nonetheless. If you ignore all the complaints people give about Flash (and there are many, and they are debatable), you will find that it is a pretty entertaining way to develop graphical programs and animations.

In MegaMan vs Obama, the only ‘complete’ game I’ve done in Flash, you attempt to defeat a presidential monster as MegaMan with nothing more than your energy weapon. The final boss of Doom 2 should come to mind when you see the incarnation of Obama used for the game.

Note to the easily offended: I’m not endorsing violence or any such thing in this game any more than that Obama has laser eyes and spits out fireballs from his mouth. This is just a silly, simple, and short Flash game about shooting energy balls at fire-breathing, laser-eyed bureaucrat-heads.

Click here for your entertainment:

MegaMan