Tag Archives: C#

Individual Research Project - Genetic Algorithms

Individual Research Project – Genetic Algorithms

The major project of my final year was for my dissertation. I chose to research the effectiveness of dynamic learning algorithms in providing an adaptive, real-time finite state machine in a game environment. After doing a literature review to get up to speed on Bayesian networks, artificial neural networks and genetic algorithms, I chose to focus my research on the latter. I felt genetic algorithms could offer a working solution, and I was interested in programming one and seeing for myself exactly how it would work.

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Week 10 – Go Right

Week 10 marks an exciting first for my Game a Weeks; happy collaboration. Please indulge in Go Right – download and play here.

The controls are explained in-game. If you absolutely have to mute the audio, press the M key.

Credits

I’m going to start this post off by giving a huge shout out and thank you to the four other people who contributed to the game.

Tom Lamey is the enigmatic hero responsible for the lovely character design and great spritesheets that bring the protagonist to life. He also advised me on the general look of the game

For the music I counted on the talents of the insatiable Jack Drewry. He brought together a couple of rag tag musicians to aid him, collectively they’re known as Squid Tooth, but separately they go by their birth names of Jack, Laurie and Rowan.

I hope you agree that these four all helped raise the bar on my games with their contributions. I’ll talk more about how it all came together below.

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Week 9 – Colourful Threes

And now for something completely different. Download and play here.

Arrow keys to try a slide, space bar to confirm it. Imagine it’s on a phone screen; pressing right swipes right, and so on.

Some bad news: this game is going to be incredibly colour-blind unfriendly. I wanted to have letters on the cards to give you a fighting chance but I ran out of time. I’m so sorry.

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Agile Development - Collada Importer for XNA

Agile Development – Collada Importer for XNA

One of our modules in third year was focussed on exploring agile development techniques, culminating in a group project that we managed in an agile fashion, using scrum. We had to treat our tutors like clients, asking them about what they wanted from the solution, creating user stories from these requirements and turning them into backlog items. The project itself was to create a Collada model importer for XNA, able to import the model’s skeleton, mesh, skinning and animation data, packaged with an app to view these models and outputting complete logs of the importing process.

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Week 5 – Physical Breakout

This is the fifth week of my Game a Week challenge. I didn’t have a clear goal this week but things really came together once I started experimenting on Friday, and you can download and play the result here.

The paddle follows the cursor, use a and d (or left and right cursor keys) to tilt the paddle slightly. Use the ball to destroy the blocks! I’ve clearly taken inspiration from the Breakout (or Arkanoid) series, but added a physics-y twist.

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Week 4 – Graduation

A small update for a small game. I was busy pretty much all week so threw this together in two hours on Sunday; guess the reason why after giving it a download and play.

Yep, I graduated this week so I was super busy with that and entertaining my family who came to visit. So I used that as the theme and tried to think of the most lightweight idea possible so I could still make a game without having to stress about keeping up with it all week. And this is the result!

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Week 3 – Blink

So I’m actually incredibly happy with this one. It hits all the right buttons for me: it’s a novel gameplay mechanic, I implemented something technically challenging, and I think I’ve achieved a really nice atmosphere in general. I implore you to give this one a play. Download here.

Headphones are recommended. W, A, S and D to move, mouse to aim, M to mute the sound if you really want to, but I advise against it.

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