Do you want to play a game?

You need to make it first! Remember the movie, was one of my favorite movies of all time! It was also one of my thoughts and things I was always was facinated with is games. How to go about doing it, where and how to start? I remember in the early days of computers, Basic programming was the simplest way to go in the beginning. But now games are getting more realistic and involves a ton of graphics. One of the best ways to get started is using a program that does a great job of setting one up along the way would be a great help. A company called Unreal is a great way to start learning about game development. Since i'm just starting out, I too is just beginning. What Unity offers is a free personal account to start and it is free as long as you make less that $125k a year! Since i'm just a beginner, i'm more interested on how they do it rather than making and selling games. This is what I thought would be a great site of information on what I ran into going along in the process! Also it can be a place where I can place my thoughts on what I have done. Tell me... what do you think!? Drop me a line on what have you found! Thanks for visiting!

barryselkmarketing and bsmconnect game development news and reviews

barryselkmarketing and bsmconnect game development news and reviews

I have just created a new section on my weebly site that covers game development news and software reviews. These are products that I use and highly recommend! Included is information on great books that I use for game development and software packages that I have used. If you are interested in beginning to advance game development information and where to start, take a look here:

barryselkmarketing gaming development

I hope this can help!

Do You Know How To Program?

Mobile iPhone Gaming Article 5

What is programming? If you never wrote a program you might be surprised that your train of thought is like writing a program.

Lets say that you have a recipe for making a salad. What are the ingredients for a salad. Well you need lettuce, tomatoes, onions, cucumbers, and salad dressing. Now you decide how much you need to make, lets say 4 people, Now how much ingredients, lets say 1 onion, 1 head of lettuce, 1 cucumber, and 1 tomato. Now to prepare the salad, you need to chop up the ingredients, throw them in a bowl, and add the dressing. So here are the steps so far:

Making a salad

How many people
Ingredients, how much
Prepare the salad
Serve the salad

Now break down the 4 steps

Step A: Quantity: We decided 4 people
Step B: Ingredients: 1 each onion, lettuce, cucumber, tomatoes, dressing
Step C: Processing: Chop all ingredients,toss with dressing, place in bowls
Step D Serve : Serve to family

Now what you have done in the above process is laid out the instructions for making a salad. What programmers call the above process is developing an algorithm. This is how you start the process of making a program.

The next area showing A-D is considered the main processes or routines that are needed to prepare the salad. Its a way to break a problem down to smaller steps. In programmer terms these are called routines.

The area showed as Steps A-D, are more detailed routines for each step. In the programming world these are called subroutines. These subroutines do the actual work for the routines.

Another thing you need to know about is variables. Variables are memory storage locations for data used in a program. You can have a variable for tomatoes which has the quantity amount of tomatoes. In this case tomatoes would be equal to one. Same for the other ingredients.

Another type of data needed is called a flag. A flag is used as a indicator to notify if something is done or not. A common type of flag be a yes or no, but in programming it is usually as simple as a yes or no or true or false.

Another area is a decision statement. In the above example you can say is the salad ready yet? If not do you have the ingredients, if so make the salad, if not go shopping.

One last area is for operator interaction. How many people are there for dinner? This calls for a response or input such as 4 people, or a (y)es, (n)o, (t)rue or (f)alse answer.

Oh and I forgot a way to show the information to the world can be a simple print statement like "Hello World!".

All these cover the basic small program. Next lesson I will start discussing Basic programming! See you then!

Barry

Programming with ObjC or Basic?

Mobile iPhone Gaming Article 4

As you read the previous article, you have to do a lot of studying in many areas in order to write and make apps, plus then you need to learn the specifics of what it takes to do game programming. Now don't get me wrong, Apple has a great compute, a great op-system and a very good development package. Now if you already have an Apple computer, then I suggest this is the way to go. Plus having a great knowledge of C language is a very good way to jump into Objective C.

But if you were brought up with a Windows system and know the basics of Basic, then you have one advantage. For one thing, any type of C language is sort of cryptic and until you get that learned, it takes getting use to.

Basic on the other hand is more easier to read and understand. The code is sort of like reading a book. The commands are easier to remember and writing code is a lot simpler . Plus the code tells you what it is trying to do at a glance. The one drawback is it is a slower programming language than C because of the way it makes a program. C is more compact than Basic and has faster execution times. This is important in game software because you want faster execution speeds. One thing about Basic it is easier to understand, which means it's great for a beginner. So since I'm a beginner in game programming, and I don't have the funds for an Apple computer, and I've played with Basic programming for a long time, I've felt I needed to find some sort of game programing development software that uses Basic to write code.

So now you know what language I plan to use for a fast track into the game programming world. This is especially good for a beginner starting out and it works with Windows. Now in order to get the game to run on an iPhone there is another program that you need to get that runs it from your computer to the iPhone. We'll discuss this at a later time. So for now I welcome you to my tutorial on Basic programming for use in game development and hope you continue your visits. Also leave a comment and see you in the next article!

By the way for anybody that doesn't know the Basic programming language, there is a small Basic programming app that runs on the iPhone that is very low cost that is great to experiment with. The beginning of my tutorial you will be able to use this app to practice with Basic! Later you will need to get another program when I discuss game programming.

Barry

Which Direction To Go?

Mobile iPhone Gaming Article 3

Hello and welcome back to my series of articles concerning a beginners approach to programming for the iPhone. In this article I will discuss Apple's way to write app software. App software is what you would call the app programming process. Since I don't have an Apple computer YET (hear me Apple!), just give you a rundown of what I've read is their process. Also since their software only runs on their Lion op system on their computer I may have errors about the process. Since currently I'm running a Vista machine, I have found another way to do this. So without further ado here goes my discussion.

First you must have some sort of Apple computer, most likely one of the newest models. Then you need to go to the Apple Developer site. Apple requires you to sign up as a developer if you are going to design and write apps for their system. There is a yearly fee depending on the level you are developing for. Then if you do not have their development software installed, you need to follow the instructions to get this installed.

After all of this you should have Xcode installed along with the software libraries, developer IDE environment. The you need to learn about the IOS SDK. Now the programing is done with objective C, so if you don't know that it's another thing you need to do. If you know C or C++ programming then it won't be as hard to learn the concepts. Of course you need to learn how to use and debug with the IDE, since this is what you use to develop programs and how to do game programming.

The rest of the articles after this one will be on learning how to program using a specialized Basic game programming that is available.

See you then!

Barry

My Journey To Here

iPhone Gaming Article 2

In my previous article I was discussing my beginnings with the personal computer and the Sinclair ZX-81. Last article we discuses the hardware side of the ZX-81. Now we will discuss the software side of the computer and how it relates to the iPhone and game programming. In the ZX-81 or ZX there is one processor that does the graphics, IO, memory management and IO. The programming in the computer that does all this work in memory is called the monitor. Now the amount of total memory that is available in the computer is 1k bytes (1,024) of memory. But with the memory expansion module you now have 16k or 16 thousand bytes total to work with. So the amount of memory required limits the size of the monitor and the program. Also the processor has to do a sort of tasking to get input from the keyboard and save and output it as a program.

One way to limit the programming language is to use a sort of compact instruction set that is part of the monitor that you write programs with. We'll get. back to this in a minute. Now another feature at that time, there was another programming language monitor based on the Forth programming language. This was another nice monitor for the ZX-81 which allowed for multitasking. Multitasking allowed you the feature to run multiple programs at the same time, just like UNIX. Now getting back to the programming language, it was a special form of Basic. Instead of typeing the word "Print", you would type using the key mode K and type a P for print. So anyway that was one of my exposures to Basic programming languages. With this I could write games, programs for astronomy, do calculations and make crude blocky graphics. By blocky graphics I mean like the old Atari game machine graphics! So this was how I programed for a while until I could afford some sort of computer. But I learned Basic pretty well at that time. Your probably wondering why I'm telling you all this, and it is because this exposure to multitasking and Basic allowed me to understand programming in general.

Now my further entry into computers came with when I learned about Linux. Now Linux is a free multitasking op system that is available for almost anything. My studies in Linux got me interested into Unix, because it was a Unix clone. Now it just so happens that the Apple computers are based on UNIX or Lion OS, with a phone version called IOS. Well it just so happens that the iPhone4s op system is also IOS5. What makes the iPhone so different is that it has a version of IOS which is a full blown multitasking op system! Apple just made it smaller to fit the phone in only 7 months! Listen to Steve Jobs 2007 keynote video for what in the iPhone, great stuff.

So now I've came full circle to tell you why I like the iPhone, plus my learning experiences. Next article I will discuss what is available for iPhone gaming and programming! Hope to hear you soon and leave a comment if you enjoy these ramblings.

Barry

Why Use the iPhone As A Gamer Platform?

Why Use the iPhone As A Gamer Platform? 

Mobile iPhone Gamer Article 1

 Thru out the years I've always been interested in computer gaming. I guess you can say that I've learned about gaming before I learned about computers. I guess you can call doing a crossword puzzle in a newspaper a type of game. The games that are in children's school books are a type of game. So you can say almost everybody has been exposed to some type of game.

 One of my first experiences of game programming came in the late '70s. A company that resided in England came out with one of the first personal computers for a person. This company was called Timex Sinclair and its cost was $99! They came out with a computer that you can build as a kit or was fully built.

It was about the size of a small book, had a keyboard that was flat with buttons and used any TV set for a monitor. It had on board color graphics, and stored programs on a cassette tape along with 1k (1024) bytes of memory. So you could have a 30 minute tape that could hold a lot of your programs! It also had an external memory module with 16k or aprox 16 thousand bytes of memory, and a thermal printer! Thats 16 thousand byes of computer memory, not like the 1 trillion bytes or 1 terra byes of  memory we have now!

It also had an 8-bit Z80 processor which at that time was a lot of computing power for an intergrated circuit IC. What's ironic is this processor is still used in micro controller applications for everyday common devices you use everyday.

In my next post I will continue with how it is programmed and how it history helped with the iPhone in later years.

 If you used this computer, I would like to hear about your experiences! Also do a WIKI for the ZX-81! Interesting stuff!

 Barry