spinvaders 0.0.2
08 Jun 2004A few small steps forward in the life of spinvaders:
- Monsters killed with the “super gun” now fall burning from the sky! Prepare to be terrified.
- New sound effects, in stereo! Crank it up!
- Changed player death behavior: If monsters reach bottom, restart level. If player is hit by a bullet, just lose a life and continue the level in progress.
- Gameplay and speeds tweaked to maximize your Fahrvergnügen.
- While the game is paused or switching screen modes, audio output is paused.
- Mac version now has a reasonable (but somewhat incomplete) menu thanks to PyObjC and a proper nib file.
- Windows version now has an icon.
- Internal code reorganisation to make my life easier.
- Added CHANGES.txt and README.txt to distribution.
- spinvaders for Macintosh (OS X 10.3 or later)
- spinvaders for Windows (95/98/ME/W2K/XP)
Go nuts.
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Support our troops?
26 Apr 2004Hmmm. For a long time, I’ve consistently held the opinion that even though the U.S invasion of Iraq is wrong-headed, that the troops who are stuck in the mess over there are worthy of support, since none of them created this war and are presumably trying to make the best of a tough situation.
But then again, there are things like this
Don’t Loot
video that are just scary as all get-out. For those who haven’t/can’t/won’t view that clip, here’s an executive summary of this brief clip from frontline:
- Somewhere in Iraq, looting is occurring. Reporters arrive on the scene.
- U.S. soldiers are there, and have arrested some men for looting. The men have apparently taken a couple armloads of lumber and stacked it on top of their car.
- One soldier explains for the camera that “We tried to stop them from looting, they don’t understand, so we’ll take their car and we’ll crush it.”
- A couple of soldiers shoot at the car with pistols a bit.
- The soldiers crush the car by driving a tank over it.
I think that the mental exercise of reversing roles can be a useful thing to do here. What if my country was on the verge of civil war after an invading army had removed a brutal dictator but simultaneously destroyed much of my country’s infrastructure? Perhaps lumber would be hard to come by. Perhaps I might take advantage of available resources, particularly if it seemed like they were going unused. I sure don’t that that punishing me for this “crime” by crushing my only means of transportation would be a noble endeavor on the invading army’s part.
Read on →spinvaders 0.0.1
20 Apr 2004In my copious amounts of spare time (ha), I’ve recently been teaching myself both python and game programming using a fine cross-platform library called pygame. I have some results!
spinvaders is a direct descendant of the old “Space Invaders” type of game. This first public test release, version 0.0.1, is fully playable and may even be fun! The controls for the game are described at the startup screen, everything should be pretty obvious. One undocumented feature of this test version is that pressing “J” will let you jump to any level.- spinvaders for Macintosh (OS X 10.3 or later)
- spinvaders for Windows (95/98/ME/W2K/XP)
Please try it out and let me know what you think by adding a comment below.
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