This is a simplified game mimicking the T-Rex dino game appearing on the “No Internet” google page. The motivation for making this comes from a YouTube video where a program learns to play the game at superhuman level using genetic algorithm. It was quite fascinating knowing the fact that nothing has to be taught in order to let this program acquire the ability to jump over obstacles, dodge birds … etc.. I made this game using C, with the console being the gameplay screen. However, due to the fact that characters instead of figures were drawn, the screen will always be in a flickering condition for renewing the screen at a rate such quickly.
Blackjack is a well-known gambling game and is the most widely played casino game in the world. Numerous researches about this game had been carried out, including machine learning of optimal actions for playing the game (see reinforcement learning for solving Blackjack).
I got particularly interested in machine learning during graduate school. Thus, I made this simple Blackjack game program in order to construct a game environment for reinforcement learning of game agents for future work.
The
game process is a single round of Blackjack, starting from player 0 being dealt
2 cards from the dealer. The player can either choose to “hit”, “stand” or
“split” according to his cards. After the “stand” action is chosen or if he
goes busted, The next player follows on.
I wrote this game using C language, which runs on a command prompt. While being simple, It can provide useful insights to game agents which can further learn on its own for achieving optimal behavior.
Magic cube, or the Rubik’s cube, is a popular 3D puzzle known by almost everyone in the world. There was a time when a lot of classmates in our class (including me) were crazy about this game. Everyone was trying to remember the awkward patterns and formulae for not only figuring out this puzzle but beating each others time records. Being very fond of designing games using Visual Basic and inspired by this puzzle, I constructed this simulated program for playing the magic cube.
A
player can enter in commands on the input field according to the description
(e.g. k = turn right face 90° clockwise, a = Reset cube …) in order to
control the cube. The program would only show the front, right and top side of
the cube, so the player should have to rotate the whole cube using certain
commands for observing every side. Although it is more difficult to solve a
scrambled cube for a normal human using this program, it is still possible if
one takes time :). Lots of geometric concepts were used when designing this
program. For instance, how should the data structure look like in order to
record every block of color on the 6 sides of the cube? How can the variables
be permutated if a certain command (e.g. turn top face 90°
counter
clockwise) is executed? How to even draw the cubes diagonal view?
I learned a lot myself from creating this program, gaining insights into various seemingly simple but somewhat counter intuitive geometric and algorithmic concepts.
This project is the first of the three “Guess the Number” projects that I’ve completed (before Guess the Number (iOS)and Guess the Number AI). I had played this game long before I wrote this program. During the period when I was self-learning Visual Basic, I decided to make a program of this game which the player guesses the number randomly generated by the program.
The two-player game is also named Bulls and Cows, which one player thinks of a four-digit number with every digit being unique and the other player trying to guess that number. During each turn, the player who guesses speaks a number while the other replies with how many A’s and B’s according to the relationship between the guessed number and answer. The number of A’s indicate how many digits in the guessed number are identical with those in the answer and are on the same location; the number of B’s indicate how many digits are identical but aren’t on the same location (e.g. 2A1B should be replied when a guessed number is 1234 and the answer is 1532). The player guesses until the answer is guessed and the round ends. Players may take turn playing the opposite role and try to guess as few times as possible.
This mini-project encouraged me to design more complex programs, and is an important milestone in my journey of programming.
Once upon a time, when cell phone screens were only black and white…
This game “racecar” had been the most interesting one on my first Motorola cell phone. Learning Visual Basic on my own, I had tried to mimic and construct games that I’d played before, hoping one day I could make up some fantastic ones of my own. Racecar is a simple successive one at the initial stages of my self-learning of programming.
The
player first picks a game level from 1 to 9, game
starts after the countdown of 3 and three adjacent
blue
squares representing a racecar travels down a track where obstacles will be
encountered frequently. The player can move left or right in order to dodge the
obstacles, and the longer he survives, the more points he will get.
This project is the first game for me to implement programmable drawn shapes as the objects, and led me into the discovery of the important fundamentals of program logic.
Bomberman has always been a popular online multiplayer game. Having the experience of creating several applications and games using Visual Basic (VB) (Racecar, Guess the Number (Windows), Simple Magic Cube, Tic-Tac-Toe AI, Sudoku AI, Othello AI, …), I decided to design a multiplayer game using VB. This is the final project for using VB as the programming language in my junior high school period.
Figure 1. Snapshot of game start on a 10×10 grid.
In
this game, the players decide the size of the game grid (an NxN
square grid), the number of walls and the
total
number of items. Then player 1 starts at the bottom right corner and player 2
starts at the top left corner of the grid (Fig. 1).
Player 1 and 2 walk around and drop bombs at preferred locations and the placed
bombs would explode after a few seconds. A player wins if the other player is
within the explosion range of an exploded bomb. A wall would disappear after
being hit by a bomb. Initially, the players can only wait for a bomb dropped by
themselves to explode before dropping another bomb, and the explosion range is
a cross section extending one lattice away from the dropped bomb’s location.
The number of available bombs and explosion range can be increased by obtaining
items that were initially hidden behind the walls. The images used in this game
are shown in Fig. 2.
Figure 2. Images used in bomberman. (Left to right: player 1, player 2, wall, bomb, bomb explode fire, bomb increase item, explode range increase item.)
Although being a highly simplified version of the original online game, this project demonstrated the ability of using VB for designing multiplayer games and deepened my programming abilities.
[Download Game] (The jpg files need to be in the same folder as BBMan.exe)
