Microsurgeon

Playing through a bunch of old Intellivision games this summer and stumbled on Microsurgeon from 1982, where you navigate through the body and vaporize bacteria and tumors.

“Sinistral & Dextral” Screenshots

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Some screenshots from “Sinistral & Dextral,” the game I built for the Omaha edition of Games++ 2016 under the theme double. In the game, the player navigates a large, procedurally-generated landscape that mirrors itself at various scales (land-forms, rivers, etc mirror across the entire map; trees, rocks, and smaller objects mirror locally). Various “noise patches” populate the map, as do wandering creatures that cause the player to respawn randomly on the map.

The layout of the map, as well as all the colors, are randomized at startup.

(The title of the game refers to the scientific term for “handedness,” a kind of mirrored doubling.)

Virus Level 5

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An idyllic afternoon with friends, congratulating each other on reaching virus level five. (Via the addictive Dr. Mario.)

2d Array Generation Stats

While wrapping up an Arduino-based game project, I wanted to see how large a level (stored as a 2d array) could be stored on the Arduino while not making the user wait too long. Running some test code (available as a Gist here), two interesting discoveries:

  1. It seems that a 2d array of integers larger than 28×28 integers will crash (no error message, just stop responding)
  2. Varying the array size below that has basically no impact on creation time. A 10×10 and 28×28 array with 1000 random steps through the array both take 145ms from boot. Increasing the number of steps to 2000 increases the load time to 289ms.