VIDEO GAMES PLAY AND GET MONEY

Jérôme Lange Journal Entry 2: “I have spent quite some time questioning everyone in the manor, assuming that literally anyone could be the murderer. It became clear pretty quickly that this questioning alone was not going to lead to a resolution, so I have also started sneaking into each of their rooms and going through their stuff, looking for anything that might assist in my investigation. It has been very eye opening, and I’ve found quite a few documents that suggest not all is well between some of the family members. Pat seems to owe a lot of money to Guy and has been forging his accounts, whereas Guy is apparently having an affair with Eva. I’m not yet sure if any of this has anything to do with what has happened, but knowledge is power. Most interestingly, I have found a second cryptic parchment in one of the rooms, and I’m not convinced that figuring out their meaning will be the key to my success. Reading over the first parchment again, I now realise that it must be speaking of the well outside the manor, but I have not yet figured out how to get down there. I plan to ask everyone about the well and see if one of them will let slip something of value.”

Well I’ve certainly done some hard yards on Mortville Manor over the weekend. I’m up to six hours in total on the game, but over three quarters of that has been taken up by going through every item in every room and recording it in my spreadsheet, and asking every possible question to every suspect and recording that also. It’s taken a long time to collect all of this, mostly due to the way each suspect drip feeds information before telling me I’m “too curious”, but also due to my game ending prematurely due to death or dismissal. I still don’t completely understand why Max is sending me packing occasionally. It doesn’t seem to be at any set point in time, so I don’t think it’s because I’m failing to achieve something within a timeframe. It seems more likely to do with me snooping around in places I’m not supposed to, but it happens at such random times that it’s very difficult to associate with any of my actions. Perhaps it’s because I’m leaving cupboards and suitcases open when investigating which gives away the fact that I’ve been snooping, or maybe it occurs after a manor inhabitant catches me in their room (occasionally when I walk into a bedroom, the owner is already in there). Whatever is causing it, it’s pretty damn annoying, and causes me to start over (I can’t use a recent save game as I don’t know whether I’ve already done whatever it is that causes the dismissal). If it is indeed random, then The Adventure Gamer will not be happy!

Let’s start from the beginning shall we? In 1982, Bruce Carver formed a video game development company called Access Software with his brother Roger and friend Chris Jones. They immediately set about creating titles for 8-bit computers, including Neutral Zone, Beach-Head I & II, Raid Over Moscow and the golf title Leader Board. The first DOS game out of Access was a tenpin bowling game called 10th Frame, which was quickly followed by another golf game called World Class Leader Board. By this stage, the majority of Access games had been fairly simplistic affairs, designed and programmed almost entirely by Roger and Bruce, but 1987’s space combat simulator Echelon attempted something more complicated.


Designed by Bruce, Roger and Brent Erickson, with a story by David Brown and Chris Jones, Echelon combined wire-framed graphics based space combat simulation with a puzzle based mystery to solve. It also showed off Access groundbreaking PC audio technology called RealSound, a technique that used the PC speaker to “generate high-quality digitized sounds such as speech, music and sound effects without the use of additional hardware.” Unfortunately, Echelon sucked, but it inspired the team to have another shot at a similar game in the future. The team therefore set out to develop another flight game, only this time they would incorporate a film noir detective story that had been formulated while filming a homemade movie in their spare time.


During the development of the game, more and more adventure game elements were added to the mix, and the eventual result was an odd hybrid called Mean Streets. Set in San Francisco in the year 2033, Mean Streets follows a private investigator named Tex Murphy as he tries to solve a case, being the death of Dr. Carl Linsky, the father of a beautiful woman named Sylvia. The game was directed by Bruce Carver and the story was written by Chris Jones (who would go on to star as Tex Murphy himself in future games) and Brian Ferguson (who has no other credits as far as I can tell). I’ve read an interview with Chris Jones where he stated that his biggest influences for the Tex Murphy series were Sam Spade novels, the movie Casablanca, Blade Runner and The Twilight Zone TV series, which explains the mix of film noir and sci-fi.


Programming and design were handled by Roger Carver, Access regulars Kevin Homer and Brent Erickson (who would go on to design and write adventure game Noctropolis), and first timer David Curtin. Doug Vandegrift, John Berven, Zeke McCabe and Jon Clark combined the give the game its distinct visuals while Steve Witzel handled the sound. Mean Streets was the first popular PC game to fully support 256 colour VGA graphics, and it was also the first to support EGA, CGA and Hercules graphics modes with real-time quantization and dithering. I don’t know much about this sort of technology, but I believe this means they converted the graphics on the fly for each different mode rather than pre-converting all possible outcomes (which would have taken up twice the disk space). This was considered a big achievement at the time and along with the RealSound technology, shows that Access were really trying to push the technology boundaries.


That’s enough background information though; it’s time for me to play my first Tex Murphy game. That’s right! I’ve never played any of the games in the series, and I don’t really have any decent explanation as to why. I guess the early ones came out when I was playing whatever games were given to me by my friends for my Amiga (yes, pretty much all pirated, which I’m not proud of) and by the time the later games came out, I was switching between LucasArts adventures and every first person shooter game I could find. Anyway, I’ve got my GOG purchased Tex Murphy collection, so will be playing the game in DOSBox I guess. I’ve played the last few games in SCUMMVM because it makes it so much easier to take quality screenshots on the fly, but my brief attempts to start Mean Streets in SCUMMVM failed. I haven’t even Googled it yet, but if anyone knows if that’s possible, please let me know (Laukku recently informed me that it is possible to take decent shortcut screenshots with DOSBox, so Ill look into that too). The GOG collection comes with a Detective Information Chart, a map, and a manual, so I should be all set!

Before I get into anything fancy with my Tic-Tac-Toe Bastard game, I'm going to sit down and work through some basic game logic. I want to code the foundations in pure Lua with text output to the console, to get a bare-bones version of the game working for faster and easier debugging.  We should be able to reuse a lot of this material as we layer graphics, sound and GUI elements into the build later on, but there's quite a bit of groundwork we can do first and it's good to keep things simple while we create the core.

We'll represent the tic-tac-toe grid using a simple 9-cell table structure.  While our visual representation is a 3 x 3 grid, we really don't need to make the table that complicated; we'll just lay out the 9 cells in a single row, numbered as follows, and display the grid to the user in the expected manner:

1 | 2 | 3
---------
4 | 5 | 6
---------
7 | 8 | 9

(Note that Lua, unlike many computer languages, natively starts numbering at 1 -- this makes intuitive sense, but it takes some getting used to for programmers used to counting from 0!)

Each of these cells will start in an empty state, and will be marked by either the player or the CPU as the game progresses.  For readability, we'll declare three useful constants at the top of the routine -- the numeric values really don't matter, as long as they are unique:

EMPTY_ID = 0;
MY_ID = 1;
CPU_ID = 2;


Now we'll declare and initialize the tic-tac-toe grid accordingly:


gGrid = { EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID, EMPTY_ID };

With this structure and the constants we've set up, all we need to do to record a player's move is set an element of the gGrid array to either MY_ID or the CPU_ID.


One of the logic challenges we need to deal with is recognizing when somebody has won the game.  We could do this heuristically, searching through the grid for patterns indicating a win, but there are a finite number of combinations to consider.  Our code will run faster and more simply if we just define all of the winning combinations in a table of tables, like so:


POSSIBLE_WINS = { {1, 2, 3}, {4, 5, 6}, {7, 8, 9},
                  {1, 4, 7}, {2, 5, 8}, {3, 6, 9},
                  {1, 5, 9}, {7, 5, 3} };


(We could also use this approach to impose rule variations on the player -- an "only verticals win!" round, for example, although that seems unlikely to be much fun in a game of Tic-Tac-Toe, so we probably won't do that.)

For reasons that may (or may not) become clear later, I'm going to treat the human player and the CPU as "players" by setting up another table:

   PLAYERS = { MY_ID, CPU_ID };


This approach makes the main game loop simpler -- we just need to loop through the players, giving each one a turn until somebody wins.  (This will also simplify our lives later on if we decide to add a player-vs.-player option, or a CPU-vs.-CPU exhibition mode, or even an online mode or a more-than-two-players mode.)


We will still need to distinguish between the human player and the CPU at another level -- when the main game loop looks for input from the current player, we'll want to solicit interactive input from a human player and call upon an algorithm for the CPU's move.  But the main game loop can just solicit a move from the current "player", however that is defined, check for victory, and end the game if that player has won.


My initial scripting goal for this installment is to establish the Tic-Tac-Toe grid, mark it up, and verify that we can detect a victory condition and identify the winner.  So I'm not going to implement any real user or CPU action -- I'll just let the code select a random number from 1 to 9.  In fact, I'm not even going to check for duplicates, so our players can just mark right over each other.  I just want to set things up so that the game can run until somebody wins a single match.

My main game loop logic needs some work at this stage -- it always forces the first player listed in the PLAYERS table to go first, and it's not even really using the PLAYERS table correctly; it only works because our indices {1, 2} happen to match the PLAYER_ID and CPU_ID values.  If we wanted to mix up the play order we would have to fix that, so that then we could just restructure the PLAYERS table to reorder the participants.  My code also breaks out of the for-player loop using a "break" command, which is less than elegant.  And there are some conditions it doesn't catch, like playing to a draw, which is entirely possible.  But we'll have time to refine this in a future installment.

The checkVictory function accepts a grid and a player ID, and uses the POSSIBLE_WINS table to see if that ID has occupied a winning set of squares on the grid.  This routine will probably not change much as we develop the game.  (Note that I could reference the actual game grid directly as a global variable, but passing it in as a table keeps the local code clean, and the ability to handle multiple grid instances might prove very useful for our AI implementation later on.)

For now, I've defined a getMove function that takes an ID from the main loop, and then decides how to obtain move input.  Right now, the supporting getPlayerInput and getCPUInput functions do exactly the same thing, picking a random number from 1 to 9, but we'll change that later.


I've also written a throwaway utility function -- doPrintGrid renders the game grid to the Lua console, in a readable text format.  This routine is handy for now but will probably be discarded later in the development process.


All we can really do with this initial version is run the code and see whether it stops when victory is randomly achieved -- which it does!  The code so far is below the fold.


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Few months ago, I published the Quoridor Board Game, with the promise that, if the user rating exceeds the threshold of 30, I would further improve the game. Today, you guys really make it... (btw, is that a coincidence?). And I would spend more time and efforts into polishing this board game.

The truth is, before it reached 30, a number of enhancement has been made, from time to time, especially on the user interaction parts. Yet, I am aware that it still has room for improvement. Here, I would like to briefly summarize what it lacks of, and what should be possibly improved.

1. Computer AI (Artificial Intelligence) difficulty

Honestly, the current Quoridor computer is still too weak to be taken as a training. A number of players have complained for this. This is my first priority. And i see my competitor could make it as well. So, no excuse. Just a matter of time.

2. Users friendliness

In order to squeeze a 9 x 9 matrix board into mobile devices (plus walls and others), it is undoubtedly a challenging task. This is especially significant when the player is required to drag and place the walls. The existing version has been designed such that when the wall is moved around, the surrounding tiles are highlighted to make the movement clearer. Apart from that, some users request that it would be greater to add a confirm button, to be able to revert in case there is a typo made accidentally. Guys (and girls), i copy that!

3. Undo feature

This is another challenging feature which greatly tests the programming skills of the game creator. I am not sure if this is needed. But nothing to lose if it is getting integrated.

4. Challenge other players Online

Definitely, this is a very demanding feature. Playing with computer all the time would be too boring... However, i set no date for this feature to come true, yet. After all, without the sufficient amount of players, this feature could hardly impress anyone. Moreover, enabling the Online Challenge Mode would cost. (Maybe i should wait until the number of rating exceeds 100? :p)


Updated on 30th Nov 2013:
- A Hard Mode is added to the latest release.
- An Undo feature is added. This might help address the issue of wrong wall placement, while helping the players to have a better analysis of the computer AIs game play.
- You can choose which player to start first through the green Setting button.

Yeah, after several weeks of hard work, I manage to come up with a unique Android game published in the Google Play Store - Quoridor Board Game.

Quoridor Board Game Icon

Quoridor is a turned-based strategy game. It can be played by 2 players or 4 players (However, I only enabled 2-player-mode at the moment). Lets briefly brush up the rules of this game:



a) The Quoridor board consists of 9 x 9 tiles (squares)
b) In the 2-player-mode, each player (represented by a pawn) is placed at the end (and center) of each side facing each other.
c) To win this game, you have to move your pawn to the either tile at the opposite site.
d) In each turn, you are allowed to move your pawn or to place a wall (in order to block your opponent or to block a potential block)
e) The pawn is only allowed to move 1 step, except when you are face to face with your opponent.
f) The wall is not allowed to cause a dead end to both players.

Feel free to enjoy the game and give comments~

Notes:

• An AI-mode is added into the game. At the moment, the computer AI (oops, is mobile device AI) is a bit dummy. I will further improve the game if there are more than 30 ratings. :)
• To move a pawn or a wall, you have to TOUCH and DRAG at the same time.
• To abandon moving a pawn, you can place the pawn back to the original location.
• To abandon moving a wall, you can drag it to the drop zone on the right side.

Download Link
Start a crazy and most funny jumping journey on Nokia Asha 305, 306, 308, 309, 311 java supported full touchscreen phones. Lets have the amazing experience of Jumping.

Name: Giga Jump
Size: 472 KB
Game Type: Arcade/ Strategy
File Format: Jar
Supported on : Java supported mobile with 400x240 touchscreen phones

Tested On: Asha 305, 306, 308, 309, 311

Installation Guide:

• Click on the download link.
• Download the games on your PC.
• Then install the file using Nokia Suite on your Nokia Asha Mobile hone.
• Or Transfer the file simply on your Mobile phones SD card. And Simply open the file to play.
• Or Transfer the file to your PC via Bluetooth.
• You will get the game at file manager> my apps  folder if you transfer it using Bluetooth.
• The DOWNLOAD links Are on the Top of the POST.

All the game we provide is specifically tested on mentioned device.

 

Worms 2010
Download the Worms 2010 game for free on Nokia Asha series touch phones. Its really a  amazing to play. I know many of game lovers that they play only a single game on mobile and that one is Worms 2010. Lets have a comic war , lets have a Battle. Worm is back. The game will support on Nokia Asha 305, 501, 310, 306, 308, 309, 311 java supported full touchscreen phones.


Name: Worms 2010
Size: 642 KBB
Game Type: Action/ Battle
File Format: Jar
Supported on : Java supported mobile with 400x240 touchscreen and 240x400
Supported Devices: Nokia Asha 501, 305, 306, 308, 309, 310, 311

How to Download and Install:

1. Download the game from the top link of the post.
2. Save it on Computer.
3. Transfer the file to Nokia Asha full touchscreen Smartphone using Bluetooth or data cable.
4. Then go to transferred folder and click to began play the game.
5. Also you can install the game through PC suite or Nokia Suite too.

Download Link
This one the most favorite game of mine. I like Puzzle game too much. Addicted with game. Will get the playing hints that how to play the game in game mood. Automatically switchable game music. Local and global high scores available to see.

Name: Fling
Size: 436 KB
Game Type:Puzzle
File Format: Jar
Supported on : Java supported mobile


Installation Guide:

• Click on the download link.
• Download the games on your PC.
• Then install the file using Nokia Suite on your Nokia Asha Mobile hone.
• Or Transfer the file simply on your Mobile phones SD card. And Simply open the file to play.
• Or Transfer the file to your PC via Bluetooth.
• You will get the game at file manager> my apps  folder if you transfer it using Bluetooth.
• The DOWNLOAD links Are on the Top of the POST.

All the game we provide is specifically tested on mentioned device.