Phillip Trelford's Array

Last weekend I teamed up with other gamers for the Creative Assembly game jam at Rezzed. We had 9 hours to create a game, and were given the theme of the 80s at 9am on the Saturday morning. After some brainstorming we came up with the idea of a platform game that became an endless runner with rhythm and puzzles called We Jammin’:

The main character is a skateboarder, collecting 80s artefacts to build up the volume on each track, while hitting mental blocks depletes the volume. All 4 tracks must reach the required volume level to complete a level:

Here's a short video of the game running in Unity:

Here’s the game presentations made to a packed audience on the Sunday afternoon (skip to 26:20 for We Jammin):

We had a lot of fun making the game and it was a great experience, particularly for my 11yo son Thomas who created sound effects and the base line for the game.

If you’d like to have a go at making a game in a day, check out London GameCraft, a free one day game jam at Skills Matter on Saturday the 10th August:

Last night Neil Danson gave a great presentation on F# on iPad and iPhone in Xamarin Studio at the F#unctional Londoners meetup hosted by Skills Matter. Xamarin announced that they were working towards first-class F# support at their recent Evolve conference, and that support is currently in Beta. Xamarin Studio is an IDE that runs on Mac, Linux and Windows and lets you target iOS and Android.

Easy to follow instructions: Use F# for iOS development

Neil showed how to build a movie database application using the IMDB API that runs on iPad and iPhone in just over 100 lines. It makes use of F# Object Expressions and Async Workflows. The source if available on Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/thedo666/imdb

One of the really impressive parts is the readability, the following statement taken from the code composes the application:

start ==> search ==> show_results ==> open_web_page ==> finish

The next demo was a game with the imaginative title “Pissed off owls”, that lets you launch incensed rotund avians at obstacles with physics. Again the source code is just over 100 lines and available on Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/thedo666/pissed-off-owls

It is written with MonoGame and uses the Farseer physics engine. Here’s the code to set up the scene:

let player = Actor("Owl",Position(30.f,8.f), Circle, Player, Dynamic)
let level =  [ Actor("Background", Position(160.f,120.f), Box, Ignore, None)
                Actor("Catapult", Position(70.f,32.f), Box, Ignore, None)
                Actor("Mouse", Position(185.f,15.f), Circle, Enemy, Dynamic)
                Actor("Mouse", Position(285.f, 15.f), Circle, Enemy, Dynamic)
                Actor("Tower", Position(225.f, 64.f), Box, Prop, Dynamic) ]

The video to the talk should be available later today: http://skillsmatter.com/podcast/scala/f-on-ipad-and-iphone-with-xamarin-studio

Another demo showed briefly at the end was PacMan, written in F# and running on iPad. The source code is available on Bitbucket: https://bitbucket.org/thedo666/pacman

It’s a port of some code I wrote for a Coding Kata last year, it also runs on Windows in Silverlight, WPF, Windows 8 and Windows Phone. Play it here: http://trelford.com/blog/post/PacTile.aspx

Want to learn more about MonoTouch F#, I’d recommend Dave Thomas’s short series:

Dublin GameCraft