Sour Swinger Predominantly follows my Army & Iraq Deployment. Also has some Geek, School, and other talk.

Back in April, I posted about a coding competition held at my school.  The winning team, OMGWTFBBQ, had won with a pretty awesome game.  Wilkie posted the game with source on his website.  Unfortunately its missing a DLL file and doesn’t work.  I’ve re-compressed the zip with the missing file.  Download here.

The game is a combination of Tetris and Breakout.  Once you clear a certain number of lines, the game will flip over and you play Breakout for a few seconds with whichever Tetris piece was next.  The game also supports network play in which you “battle” the other person.  When one player scores a Tetris, the other player may suffer additional lines or have their board rotated.  As the board rotates, the keys flip accordingly to further frustrate the opponent.  Here’s some screen shots.

Last weekend the Pitt Geeks Club held our annual 24 hour coding competition.  Participants were allowed to form teams of up to three people.  They could choose any language, platform, and type of game they wished.  Six teams signed up but only four of us completed something.

I held on posting this in the hope of tracking down all the teams code and games however, due to finals that was a total failure.  My choice of language was QBasic.  I had written and released a QB sprite editor for specific use in this competition.  Other language choices were C++ and D.  I’m not entirely sure what all the teams used.



The winner was Team OMGWTFBBQ with the theme of Penguins and Gangsta Rap.  They devised an awesome game which combined Tetris with Breakout.  Basically at certain points of the game, the whole Tetris board would flip over and your next Tetris piece turned into the paddle which the ball would bounce off of.  They also included network play where you could battle the other person.  Throw in a hip Penguin commentator and some catchy pirate rap and you got yourself one hell of a game.  I managed to get this source code and will post everything as soon as I get time to compile it.

My game was pretty much a flop.  I attempted a RPG and discovered that it takes too long to do such a game in QBasic.  In the end, I didn’t really have a game.  Its more of a display of graphics.  Granted the graphics I did far exceeded anything I managed to do in the past, however I never got to include any frame animation.  The “world view” map supports connecting multiple maps (like old school NES Zelda) and uses a 2nd overlay map for collision detection.  The battle screen is very similar to FF2’s battle view screen.  Supporting 2 player characters and 4 enemy sprites.  That’s about it.

I also realized that QBasic is a bitch when getting into this complex of programming.  The next annual programming competition, I’ll switch to another language.  I’ve included a zip of the source code and executable.

More Photos From Event
Download QB RPG

Well the Geek Club finally decided to start doing a Podcast once a month and I was able to participate. None of us ever did anything like it before and so was a quite the learning experience. I must say, Apple is awesome. We used the Garage band software and it made the whole process incredibly simple. Initially we didn’t know what to debate about, but finally decided to go with gaming. Next thing ya know, we have 20 minutes of us talking back and forth about it. So it’s a bit long however I feel we did a good job for our first time. The header is a direct download link for the first podcast. Check out Pitt Geeks homepage for the posting about it. You can also subscribe to the podcast here.

I had attended a 24 hour coding competition with the Geek Club at my school. My original intent was to just hang out with everyone there. I started getting a little board and my urge to program was kicking it. Well with everyone else programming, it was hard not to join them. I decided to revisit my QBasic days and see what I could whip up. This competition, to be a bit more specific, was to see who could program the best game in 24 hours. Everyone had teams of three or two. In the end I came up with a quick space invaders mock game with a Mooninite theme. Considering I started late and only had about 12 hours, the game didn’t turn out too bad. I have no way of posting the file myself, so instead the header will link you to the file on the Clubs webpage. Source code included.

Update: Sprite Editor Released.