Tetris Game

Yesterday, when I realized I didn't have the Tetris game on hand, I decided to look for it among my old school things. I finally found it, and now I'm sharing it with everyone.

Again, this was a class project that my team and I worked on. It isn't super polished, and it will probably have a few bugs. Hopefully, someone will get some use out of it.

TetrisGameBin.zip

TetrisGame.zip

EDIT: So earlier today I actually ran these files to make sure that they were working properly and I found that I had linked an early, incomplete version of the game. I've since fixed it to link to the final copy. My bad.

Defender File

In April of 2012 I was taking a Game Development course, which was a whole lot of fun. I was in a team that worked on a Tetris game (which, for some reason, I can't find the source files for) and a Defender-style game.

The Defender game was a side-scrolling 2.5D space shooter, where you try to blow up the UFOs before they abduct the scientists on the bottom of the screen. I worked in a three man team, and I worked a lot on the AI, the music and sound effects, the models and textures, and miscellaneous other parts (particles, physics, side-scrolling, etc.).

I'm including both the project files and the binaries. This is by no means a fully polished game. This was made for a class, and we really were only able to spend less than a month on it. I haven't touched it since then, so it will be a bit raw. Having said that, it's yours to peruse and enjoy!

Defender Binaries

Defender Project Files

E_CTI_DEVICE_IN_USE Error

I was struggling to figure out why every time I sent a QUERY_AGENT_STATE_REQ to the CTI Server, the CTI logs would show that I got an error which said E_CTI_DEVICE_IN_USE. I knew that the device wasn't in use, so I wondered why in the heck I was getting such a weird error.

It turns out that when I sent my OPEN_REQ to initialize the session, the service mask was missing the Service_Client_Control bit. After I switched it from a 0 to a 4, then it worked out fine. I doubt anyone else will ever have this particular error, but I thought I would note it here in case I ran into it again.

Live Stream Google I/O

I went searching for a live stream of Google I/O this year and I found that Google was offering a gadget to host the live stream on blogs and such. Maybe they do this every year, but I figured I'd try it out. This is one of those things that's definitely more for me than for anyone else.

Tile Engine Source

About a month ago, I decided I wanted to create a simple FarmSim game akin to Harvest Moon. This would require a bunch of sprites, and I figured having a Tile Engine would be the best way to go about implementing it. I know that Microsoft's XNA will be losing support, but I was pretty familiar with it already, so I decided to kick off my making a tile engine using XNA 4.0. But first, as is my wont, I decided to first try and find a good Tile Engine to base my project off of so I could build it up from there.

Now, I consider myself pretty skilled at finding things online. So imagine my surprise when I couldn't find a single decent implementation of a Tile Engine in XNA. There were plenty of tutorials and lots of people pointed to Nick Gravelyn's excellent video tutorial on building your own tile engine. I can understand that they perhaps wanted to have young programmers learn how to do this themselves, and that's fine. But I think it would have been more efficient for me to have the source code, since I already understood the concepts.

So what really got the ball rolling in starting this blog was the idea that I would provide the end result of those tutorials here, as soon as I finished implementing them. And that's exactly what this post is for.

The end result of going through those tutorials includes:

• Tile Engine
• Map Editor
• Base classes for Characters, Items, and Scripts
• Content Importers and Processors for the Map Editor

That said, if anyone has any questions about any of the stuff that's in here, I highly recommend that you go and watch the video tutorials before asking any questions.

TileEngineSource.zip - Download

Hello World!

I'm willing to bet that there are thousands (tens of thousands?) of personal programming blogs that have "Hello World!" as the first post. But it is fitting, so I'll just leave it there.

I'm starting this blog mostly as a sort of personal reference - a place where I can put down my thoughts and, most importantly, solutions to problems that I encounter in my adventures in development. I've been meaning to do this for a while, but haven't had anything significant to post. This is mostly intended for me, but if there are others out there who find my solutions helpful, then I'm glad to help out my fellow devs.

Now for some testing of code blocks.

// Comment
public class Testing {
   public Testing() {
   }
 
   public void Method() {
     /* Another Comment
     on multiple lines */
     int x = 9;
   }
}