Top 10 Reasons to Teach Kids Programming

Here are my top ten reasons.  My wife says I should have added discipline to this list as well as the ability to complete, see something through.  What are yours?    1.  You like to spend time with your kids. 2.  Your kids like to spend time with you. 3.  Kids need trade skills to make them employable.    4.  Math becomes useful, less abstract. 5.  It takes 10+ years to master something.  Start early. 6.  Creating things is very cool. 7.  You will learn things, about yourself,...

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Flash versus Java:

Market: After making two games with Java, I realized that the mass web delivery mechanism for Java is almost  zilch.  This was a classic case of the cart before the horse for me, but I learned a lot programming with Java.  There are few game portals out there that host Java only.  If you have a very popular game, you can get it up on many of the sites, but you are fighting an uphill battle.  Many great games do make it, but usually through less refined channels. Yes, I have some regrets about not starting with ActionScript....

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Dot n Munch: Postmortem

Dot n Munch My wife, Miho, was pretty busy with kid's school work, taxes and what not, so I thought that I would make a game that was super easy to tied me over before I got help with the art work. If the wife is happy, I'm happy. I decided to make what I thought would be a simple game. It was a timed, "fit the piece in a hole" type of game, giving me hopes of advancing my skills and increasing my reusable code. In particular, I wanted to develop a level manager, something that would display unique splash screens, then load the next level,...

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Best Java Games

Best Java Games I'm a little bit cynical about developing in Java. It is such a nice language, but I find myself having hard time finding games that are developed in it. With flash, I can find 2,500 games in an instant. With Java it took me several hours to find 300 or so. Not sure which comes first here, the chicken or the egg. Here is a listing of the best and most successful Java games I've found. Subby and the Fishes RuneScape Bang Howdy Milpa Alien Flux Puzzle Pirates Tribal Trouble goSupermodel Lux Coke and Code Games Erik v...

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Subby and the Fishes: Postmortem

So how did the development "Subby and the Fishes" go. My goal was to write a simple applet game that could be sold to advertising based sites. Lets review 10 things that went right and 10 things that went wrong on the development. The Good: Starting with a small project. Choosing Java2D over 3D. Rewriting to make code more elegant Having other people play it. The Bad: Estimate to completion was completely off. No refined sprite class. No refined sprite manager class. Display class was not abstracted The Good in detail: 1. Starting...

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Drawing Sprite Speed Test

In an attempt to make my code a bit more elegant, robust, and fast, I've started review my newly created Sprite class in detail. I included percentage resizing and alpha blending. I chose an easy way to alpha blend but had two choices on how to resize my images. I started to become curious: What is the best way to draw my sprites in Java 2D? I turned off my sleep timer in the game loop and then drew a 59x448 pixel index image on to my canvas. Note I tried the same image as RGB and had scary slow downs. Making sure your art work is all indexed...

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Finish Damin it!

While looking at books at Amazon, I found an forum discussion that posed the question, "Can a self taught programmer get a job?" The answer was a resounding yes but with a few caveats. Note I'm not really interested in a job; I'm interested in making games which requires being a good programmer. So the discussion was pertinent to my goal and steps that I should take. The first thing that was rejected was the idea of certifications, most saying they are waste. (My guess is that this is only partially true because you just never know if one word...

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