Schlagwort: wireframe
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Code your own pinball game | Wireframe #53
Reading Time: 4 minutesGet flappers flapping and balls bouncing off bumpers. Mark Vanstone has the code in the new issue of Wireframe magazine, available now. There are so many pinball video games that it’s become a genre in its own right. For the few of you who haven’t encountered pinball for some reason, it originated…
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How pillars and triangles can focus your game design
Reading Time: 12 minutesIn game design, freedom can lead to paralysis. But in the latest issue of Wireframe magazine, Stuart Maine explains how game pillars and the iron triangle will help you focus on what’s important. The flexibility of the medium of video games lets us experience concepts like the non-Euclidean geometry behind Superliminal’s ‘whatever…
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Recreate Gradius’ rock-spewing volcanoes | Wireframe #52
Reading Time: 4 minutesCode an homage to Konami’s classic shoot-’em-up, Gradius. Mark Vanstone has the code in the new edition of Wireframe magazine, available now. Released by Konami in 1985, Gradius – also known as Nemesis outside Japan – brought a new breed of power-up system to arcades. One of the keys to its success…
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Meet Katt Strike: Musician, producer, and Twitch streamer
Reading Time: 3 minutesMusician, producer, and Twitch star Katt Strike chats to Wireframe magazine about video games, toxicity online and the appeal of streaming. What’s your favourite game? Oh, that’s a very hard question! I’d have to narrow it down between Fallout: New Vegas and The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask. Katt in action with…
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Recreate Exerion’s pseudo-3D landscape | Wireframe #51
Reading Time: 4 minutesSwoop over mountains in our homage to Jaleco’s shooter. Mark Vanstone has the code in the latest issue of Wireframe magazine, out now. Taking the shooting action of Galaxian from a few years earlier, Japanese developer Jaleco released Exerion in 1983. What helped Exerion stand out from other shoot-’em-ups of the period,…
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Keza’s love for the Japanese games industry
Reading Time: 4 minutesKeza MacDonald has been a video games journalist and critic for more than 15 years, and is currently video games editor at The Guardian. In the latest issue of Wireframe magazine, she tells us how her love affair with the Japanese gaming industry started. Follow Keza’s adventures on Twitter When I was…
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Recreate Galaxian’s iconic attack patterns | Wireframe #50
Reading Time: 4 minutesBlast dive-bombing aliens in our salute to Namco’s classic. Mark Vanstone has the code Aliens swoop down towards the player, bombing as they go. Back in 1979, this was a big step forward from Taito’s Space Invaders. Hot on the heels of the original Space Invaders, Galaxian emerged as a rival space…
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Play your retro console on a modern TV
Reading Time: 3 minutesWant to connect your retro console to your modern TV? The latest issue of Wireframe magazine has the only guide you need, courtesy of My Life in Gaming’s Mark Duddleson. “Get a Raspberry Pi. Done.” It’s probably the most frequently recurring comment we get across all videos on the My Life in…
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Remake Manic Miner’s collapsing platforms | Wireframe #49
Reading Time: 4 minutesTraverse a crumbly cavern in our homage to a Spectrum classic. Mark Vanstone has the code One of the most iconic games on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum featured a little man called Miner Willy, who spent his days walking and jumping from platform to platform collecting the items needed to unlock the…
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How not to code: a guide to concise programming
Reading Time: 3 minutesUpdating a 22-year-old game brought Andrew Gillett face to face with some very poor coding practices. Read more about it in this brilliant guest article from the latest issue of Wireframe magazine. In 1998, at the age of 17, I was learning how to write games in C. My first attempt, the…
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Swing into action with an homage to Pitfall! | Wireframe #48
Reading Time: 4 minutesGrab onto ropes and swing across chasms in our Python rendition of an Atari 2600 classic. Mark Vanstone has the code Whether it was because of the design brilliance of the game itself or because Raiders of the Lost Ark had just hit the box office, Pitfall Harry became a popular character…
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Code a Light Cycle arcade minigame | Wireframe #47
Reading Time: 4 minutesSpeed around an arena, avoiding walls and deadly trails in this Light Cycle minigame. Mark Vanstone has the code. Battle against AI enemies in the original arcade classic. At the beginning of the 1980s, Disney made plans for an entirely new kind of animated movie that used cutting-edge computer graphics. The resulting…
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Code your own Pipe Mania puzzler | Wireframe #46
Reading Time: 4 minutesCreate a network of pipes before the water starts to flow in our re-creation of a classic puzzler. Jordi Santonja shows you how. Pipe Mania’s design is so effective, it’s appeared in various guises elsewhere – even as a minigame in BioShock. Pipe Mania, also called Pipe Dream in the US, is…
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Recreate Tiger-Heli’s bomb mechanic | Wireframe #45
Reading Time: 4 minutesCode an explosive homage to Toaplan’s classic blaster. Mark Vanstone has the details Tiger-Heli was developed by Toaplan and published in Japan by Taito and by Romstar in North America. Released in 1985, Tiger-Heli was one of the earliest games from Japanese developer Toaplan: a top-down shoot-’em-up that pitted a lone helicopter…
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Make your own virtual reality 3D Shooter
Reading Time: 5 minutesIn the latest issue of Wireframe magazine, Mark Vanstone shows you how to turn a 3D shooter into a VR game for a variety of viewers, from Google Cardboard to gaming headsets. Our shooter, now in VR format. Blast aliens from the sky as they fly over the mountains. Browser development has…
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Code your own Artillery-style tank game | Wireframe #44
Reading Time: 4 minutesFire artillery shells to blow up the enemy with Mark Vanstone’s take on a classic two-player artillery game Artillery Duel was an early example of the genre, and appeared on such systems as the Bally Astrocade and Commodore 64 (pictured). To pick just one artillery game is difficult since it’s a genre…
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AI-Man: a handy guide to video game artificial intelligence
Reading Time: 9 minutesDiscover how non-player characters make decisions by tinkering with this Unity-based Pac-Man homage. Paul Roberts wrote this for the latest issue of Wireframe magazine. From the first video game to the present, artificial intelligence has been a vital part of the medium. While most early games had enemies that simply walked left…
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Code a Rally-X-style mini-map | Wireframe #43
Reading Time: 4 minutesRace around using a mini-map for navigation, just like the arcade classic, Rally-X. Mark Vanstone has the code In Namco’s original arcade game, the red cars chased the player relentlessly around each level. Note the handy mini-map on the right. The original Rally-X arcade game blasted onto the market in 1980, at…
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Recreate Q*bert’s cube-hopping action | Wireframe #42
Reading Time: 4 minutesCode the mechanics of an eighties arcade hit in Python and Pygame Zero. Mark Vanstone shows you how Players must change the colour of every cube to complete the level. Late in 1982, a funny little orange character with a big nose landed in arcades. The titular Q*bert’s task was to jump…
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Recreate Time Pilot’s free-scrolling action | Wireframe #41
Reading Time: 4 minutesFly through the clouds in our re-creation of Konami’s classic 1980s shooter. Mark Vanstone has the code Designed by Yoshiki Okamoto, Konami’s Time Pilot saw an arcade release in 1982. Arguably one of Konami’s most successful titles, Time Pilot burst into arcades in 1982. Yoshiki Okamoto worked on it secretly, and it…
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Code Jetpac’s rocket building action | Wireframe #40
Reading Time: 4 minutesPick up parts of a spaceship, fuel it up, and take off in Mark Vanstone’s Python and Pygame Zero rendition of a ZX Spectrum classic The original Jetpac, in all its 8-bit ZX Spectrum glory For ZX Spectrum owners, there was something special about waiting for a game to load, with the…
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Code Gauntlet’s four-player co-op mode | Wireframe #39
Reading Time: 4 minutesFour players dungeon crawling at once? Mark Vanstone shows you how to recreate Gauntlet’s co-op mode in Python and Pygame Zero. Players collected items while battling their way through dungeons. Shooting food was a definite faux pas. Atari’s Gauntlet was an eye-catching game, not least because it allowed four people to explore…
