The Pleasures of Sharing Information

You heard right, poker training. It’s a little secret that the pros know, that the average player probably doesn’t. It involves getting oneself ready to play in the longer sessions. Think of it just like a marathon. You can’t jump right in and run a 10k, if all you’ve done is laid on the couch for the past six months and ate potato chips.

Likewise, poker is no different. Don’t expect to play in a six hour power session, and be playing at the top of your game the whole way though, if you’ve never done it before.

Poker is a game of the mind, as much as it is a game of probability. And when you’re mind isn’t there, your play suffers. So the following are some tips to help you stay on the top of your game, even during those grueling sessions that go in for what seems like eternity.

If you know you have a long sessions ahead of you be sure to rest up the night before. Just like anything else, you’ll play better if you’re fully rested. Try to get a full 8 hours.

Eat well the day of. Since food gives you energy, and you’ll be using a lot of brain power, you’ll want that extra energy. Some people swear by caffeine. And it has been proven to raise cognition ability.

Stay away from drugs and alcohol. Now of course the alcohol thing isn’t a necessity, if you’re just playing to have fun, as some people like having a drink or two during a game. But if you’re looking for a long session, be wary as alcohol will slow down your play, and make you tired much sooner.

Get up from the table from time to time, go stretch our, and clear your mind. You’ll likely get into a habit, and if you’re playing bad when this hits, then you’ll want to get up to break it. Kind of a way to get away from the monotony.

And work your way into it. When you start to feel tired, taking a break doesn’t help, then it’s time to call it a day…or night. If you continue to play and you’re not all the way in it, you’re prone to make some mistakes you wouldn’t make when you’re fresh.

And finally, condition yourself to get used to playing longer games. You don’t have to jump right into a 12 hour monster stretch of a game. Maybe start with 2 hours and work your way up. You’ll eventually be able to sit at those marathon games with the best of em.

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I’ve always loved video games, ever since I first played them on a friend’s computer in the afternoon after elementary school. There’s something almost magical about the fact that we can move images around and interact with virtual worlds, a living fantasy presented for us to interact with however we please. I’ve also always wanted to make games myself but, until recently, didn’t have the technical knowledge to do so. Now, I’m a second year software engineering student, so if I weren’t able to code a game without too many dramas there’d be something drastically wrong. But what about the common person: the person for whom the term ‘memory leak’ conjures up images of their grandfather, ‘pipeline’ is where the water flows, and ‘blitting’ is unheard of? Well, everyone can get in on the game creation process, and you don’t even need to learn ‘real’ programming to do so.

So where do games start? With an idea. Games, like all fiction, require an idea to be successful. Sure, in the same way you can just sit down and write a story without foresight, you can jump on in and slap a game together. However, unless you get ridiculously lucky, the best works are usually the ones that have been well thought out beforehand.

There are two methods of planning a project. You can start from a known technological standpoint and build your project on top of that or you can just go for the design, add as many features and ideas as you like, and then remove the ones that you can’t use when you’ve decided on the technology you’re going to implement the game with. In general, the second type is probably the best one to go with when designing games. When you’re first starting out however, the first option will save you many headaches.

So, for a first game you’re going to want a pretty simple idea. Don’t get me wrong, crazy-go-nuts game ideas are fantastic, and there should be more of them out there, but you’re not going to be able to create a real world simulator with fifty billion virtual people all interacting real time with your actions having a butterfly effect on the future of the virtual universe when it’s just your first game. Really. Many people try it; none that I know of have succeeded. Imitation is the best way to start out. Simple games such as ‘Space Invaders’, ‘Tetris’, ‘Pacman’ or even ‘Pong’ are great places to start. All are largely simple to create but have some inherent challenges. ‘Pacman’ for example, requires path finding for the ghosts. I recommend that you start even simpler than that for your very first attempt. ‘Space Invaders’ is a nice point to jump in. You can make a simple, complete game without much effort and it’s almost infinitely extensible.

If you’re stuck for an idea, pick a genre that you enjoy. Do you love adventure games such as ‘Monkey Island’, ‘Grim Fandango’, ‘Space Quest’, ‘King’s Quest’ etc.? Design one of those. Are you into fighting games like ‘Street Fighter’, ‘Tekken’, ‘Soul Calibur’, ‘Mortal Kombat’ and so on? Come up with an idea for that. Do you like first person shooters such as ‘Quake’, ‘Half Life’ or ‘Doom’? I don’t recommend it as a first project, but you can always give it a go. Feel free to be as generic as you like, this is a learning experience after all.

Now that you have your idea it’s time to flesh it out. Don’t worry about the technology or the fact that you may not know how to actually implement a game just yet, just grab yourself some paper and a pencil and go crazy with ideas. Describe the main characters, game play, goals, interactions, story, and key mappings, anything you can think of. Make sure you have enough detail so that someone can read through the notes and play through the game in their head with relative accuracy. Changing game design during the coding process is almost always a bad idea. Once it’s set, it should remain set until the tweaking phase (I’ll go into this more later) or you’re likely to enter ‘development hell’, where the project goes on and on; more and more work is done with less and less outcome.

At the end of this period of your game creation, you should have the following:

- A written outline of the game’s characters and possibly a sketch or two (be they space ships, yellow circles, cars or the prince of the dark kingdom of Falgour, you need to know who or what the player will be and who they will compete against)

- A written outline of the story (if there is one, this isn’t too vital for ‘Space Invaders’ or ‘Tetris’, but for ‘Uber Quest: An Adventure of Awesomeness’ it’s a really good idea)

- A description of game play, written or storyboarded. Storyboards are visual representations of ideas. Draw your characters in actions, with arrows showing the flow of action and short written descriptions detailing the events occurring in your image (because some of us aren’t fantastic artists and our images can be a little… open to interpretation…)

Now that you have a fleshed out idea, it’s time to work out how this will all get put together. If you’ve gotten to this point and are worried that you’re going to have to spend years learning complex programming languages in order to implement your idea, fear not! Others have already done the hard yards for you. There are many RAD (Rapid Application Development) Tools available for game creation, a number of which are available for free online. Some of them still require you to learn a ’scripting language’ (a simplified programming language made for a specific task) but in general this isn’t too complicated or involved. I’ve compiled a brief list of some of these I have found at the end of the article. The free ones are listed first, organized by game genre.

Well, that should be enough to get you started in the creation of your game. The most important thing to remember once you’ve gotten this far is that you need to complete your game. Many people start a project and then lose interest and it fails, or they keep moving on to one new project after another without finishing anything. Start small, build a working (if simple) game that is, above all else, complete. When you get to this stage you will always have a huge number of things that you wish to change, fix etc. but you’ll get a great feeling from knowing that it is, in its way, finished.

From this point, you can start the tweaking phase. Play your game a few times and ask others to do the same. Take note of what isn’t fun or could be better and change things here. At this stage, it is more important than ever to keep backups of previous versions so that if a change doesn’t work you can go back and try something different without losing any of your work. It is at this point that you can add all new features, improve graphics and sounds, whatever you please, safe in the knowledge that you’re working on a solid foundation.

When you’re happy with your game, why not share it with the world? There are many cheap or free places out there for you to host your files on and then you can jump on link lists and forums and let everyone know about your creation. Well, I hope that this has been a helpful introduction into the art of creating games. It’s a great deal of fun, and can open whole new avenues of creative expression for you to explore. Jump in and have fun!

Links:

General Game Creation:
(Tools that allow easy creation of many different game types)
Game Maker: http://www.gamemaker.nl
MegaZeux: http://megazeux.sourceforge.net/

Adventure Games:
(Games such as Monkey Island, King’s Quest, Space Quest etc.)
Adventure Game Studio: http://www.bigbluecup.com
AGAST: http://www.allitis.com/agast/
3D Adventure Studio: http://3das.noeska.com/
ADRIFT (for text adventures): http://www.adrift.org.uk/

Role Playing Games (RPGs):
(Games such as Final Fantasy, Breath of Fire, Diablo)
OHRPG: http://www.hamsterrepublic.com/ohrrpgce/
RPG Toolit: http://www.toolkitzone.com/

Fighting Games:
(Games such as Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, Tekken, Soul Calibur etc.)
KOF91: http://sourceforge.net/projects/kof91/
MUGEN (unfortunately the site is largely in French): http://www.streetmugen.com/mugen-us.html

Side-Scrolling Games:
(Games such as the 2D Mario Games, Sonic the Hedgehog, Double Dragon etc.)
The Scrolling Game Development Kit: http://gamedev.sourceforge.net/

There are many others available as well. One particularly useful site for finding game creation tools is: http://www.ambrosine.com/resource.html

Also of note, although not freeware, are the excellent game creation tools available by Clickteam at: http://www.clickteam.com/English/
Klik and Play and The Games Factory in particular are the programs to have a look at and download the free demos of.

If you really want to do things right and program the game yourself, there are some excellent programming resources available at the following locations:

Java Game Programming:
http://fivedots.coe.psu.ac.th/~ad/jg/
http://www.gamedev.net/reference/articles/article1262.asp
http://javaboutique.internet.com/tutorials/Java_Game_Programming/

Visual Basic Game Programming:
http://markbutler.8m.com/vb-tutorial.htm

C++ Game Programming:
http://www3.telus.net/alexander_russell/course_dx/introduction_dx.htm
http://www.rit.edu/~jpw9607/tutorial.htm

General Information:
http://www.gamedev.net/
http://www.gamasutra.com/

Daniel Punch
M6.Net
http://www.m6.net
Daniel Punch is a university student learning how to make a living through having fun.

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The playstation 3 is going to be a machine of machines. One that no other video game console can possibly match. It will have the Blue-ray drive, and have the ability to watch and burn DVD movies.

Even more, the Playstation 3 will be a mini computer, and have the ability to process information much much faster then the playstation 2 does, or even the XBox 360. All of this is great for Sony in theory, but when one sits back and analyzes the situation, it can become a bit more confusing.

When the Playstation 2 was released 7 years ago, the average number of games sold per unit sold was 5. Fastforward to the PSP; it released and has only sold about 2 games per PSP sold. This is mainly because of the multimedia aspect of the game. People are buying it to watch movies just as much as they are to play the games.

This doesn’t sound so bad, but it can cause problems for Sony. A lot of Sony’s income from video game consoles are the licensing fees they charge video game companies to create games on any of Sony’s console platforms. Thus, when less games are being sold, less money is being paid for the rights to make games since not as many games are being bought compared to the past.

Another possible problem with the Playstation 3 is the complexity of the interface. Since the Playstation 3 is so powerful, crtics are speculating that the console may confuse consumers and give the PS3 the reputation of being complicated.

Whatever the case may be, the Playstation 3 will prove to be the biggest release in video game history.

This article is by Matthew Evers, the owner of Playstation 3 People.

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One of the easiest ways to draw shoulder launched missiles at night is to fly UAVs very close and use the simulated sound of an Apache Attach Helicopter, Howling of a jet fighter or a few UAVs flying together the combined sound of a four engine transport. At night you could have a few UAVs with strobe lights or a tint of green glow simulating reflections off the canopy of an attack helicopter along with sound used by a whistler on the UAV, or even a whistler, which mimicked a high frequency sound which caused their equipment to whistler.

Devices such as these can be bought at Wal-mart for five dollars, the faster the UAV travels the more sound or high frequency sound is made. We also use these on cars in deer country, but certain ones screw with your radio reception you know? Every time a shoulder missile is launched they have one less. Chances are it will not even hit the target anyway, they will launch it into the sky and nothing will happen, may not even come close, they will probably launch it too far in front of the UAV assuming a rate of speed for an aircraft, which is not even there. A UAV could also go into an area near a border crossing using electric battery power or glide in after turning off the motor and crash 300 feet from the enemy troops. Have a small glow and cigarette smell and a small set of voices talking about getting laid in English and the newest corvette model the enemy would sneak up on the crashed model plane and give away their positions and could be seen by night vision goggles.

We can even see small arm fire from satellites now, if they sent of a mortar round, we are all over it, never know what hit them or see where it came from. You certainly would have less people fighting you if you had stories like that floating around that is if anyone lived to tell anyone else what happened that night?

“Lance Winslow” - Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/wttbbs/

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Playing your first game of poker against complete strangers can be pretty stressful. Since you know nothing about the other players, it is pretty much impossible to predict what is truly going on with their set of cards. That’s why in the beginning of the game you should be very cautious, and take some time observing your opponents. First get a feel for how they play the game, and then you will be able to play accordingly. Identify the weak vs. strong players and the strategies they employ.

The most effective play is to make money off the weaker players while not allowing the more skilled players make money off of you. Don’t expect to be invincible because the chance that the better poker players will lose to you is slim. It’s best to let them be, and avoid being their bait.

Being in the right state of mind is also very important to playing a good game. If you are tired it can be very hard to focus, and focusing on the game is key. If you are upset, just keep in mind that it is irrelevant to the game and don’t let it affect your playing. To be in control of the game you have to be in control of yourself first.

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