Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Freebird coward and games we (dis)like

Hmm… it’s 9:20, I don’t really want to blog more now. Actually, instead of writing long articles about tiny things, I’ll write tiny articles about tiny things:

Freebird Coward

Games We Hate into Games We Love

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Freebird Coward

The other day Duy said “Nobody fights fiercer than someone who hasn’t saved”, in reference to when we fought Legretta. Hehe, it’s funny cuz it’s true. If we haven’t saved in a while, we can’t be as risky – so we’ll use life potions a bit earlier than usual and take less chances.

The same is true for Freebird – Freebird is 9 minutes long, with the first 4.5 minutes being really easy and the rest being pretty hard. So, after playing for 4.5 minutes, it feels like you haven’t “saved” for 4.5 minutes – so if you die, you have to start back at the save point, which is the beginning of the song. So we learned the other day to do freebird co-op expert/expert, we should play a bit… cowardly. So we tend to use star power a bit earlier than usual, for example, instead of waiting for us to be flashing red, maybe we use it at low yellow or first sign of red.

I think that’s how we were able to beat freebird… play cowardly.. haha.

Games We Hate into Games We Love

Hate is a pretty strong word, so I’m just using it for emphasis. Lately, there have been at least two puzzle games that turned into RPGs, which makes the game a whole lot more fun. These two are Bookworm Adventures and Puzzle Quest. It’s easier to emphasize puzzle quest, so I’ll talk about that.

The “parent” game of Puzzle Quest, I think, is Bejeweled, or many other similar games like that. In this game, you have a grid (8x8 or 10x10 or whatever) of blocks, different coloured diamonds or whatever. All you do is click on a block, and then click on an adjacent block, and the two blocks will switch places. If you connect 3 or more blocks in a row or column, they disappear, you get points, and more blocks fall down from above, possibly causing chain reactions or whatever. If you do not connect 3 or more blocks, you lose points. Uhh, I don’t think the game ever ends, unless there are no more moves, and then they give you a new board.

So that’s all you’re doing – you’re switching blocks around, to eliminate blocks, and to get points. What’s the point to a chain reaction? More points. What’s the point to eliminate more than 3 blocks at once? More points. Anyway, I think this type of game is quite boring and unsatisfactory.

But then comes Puzzle Quest – an RPG where you fight bad guys using puzzles. The gameplay is essentially the same, but the goal is different. This time, you take turns with the bad guy on clearing the board, and different blocks on the board mean different things. For example, if you clear 3 skulls at a time, the enemy takes damage; more skulls, more damage. If you get a chain reaction, you can take extra turns. If you clear 3 yellows, you add to your yellow mana bar; 3 reds, red mana bar, and etc. 3 purples raises your experience, 3 gold coins give you more gold, etc, etc…

Just like regular RPGs, you can start with different classes, which gives you access to different spells; and when you gain enough experience points, you gain levels and you can put your skill points in bettering different magics or other attributes.

So as you build your mana up, you can use up your turn to cast different spells, some that heal, some that damage, some that clear some of the board, etc… so… umm… it’s fun. In Bejeweled, you do the puzzle to get points. In this, you do it so that you can defeat the bad guy, to survive, to cast special magic effects.

So, deep in my heart, I know I’m playing the same game, but it’s much more fun now, even though I know I shouldn’t like it so much. The same is true for Bookworm Adventures - you spell bigger words to deal more damage, and you acquire special items to make different words have different effects. Like, there's an item that, if you spell words dealing with "Metal", you get to deal more damage, or if you can use X, Y, and Z's you also deal more damage. It's so much funner like that.

Puzzle end and Puzzle begin

I will probably post 2 more topics before tomorrow morning. Anyway, for now, here are three possible solutions to the wiki puzzle, and then another puzzle:

Command and Conquer || Mammoth MK2 Tank || tank || tank disambiguation || Tank (the matrix) || Jada Pinkett Smith.

... || Adolf Hitler || Drama Movie || List of drama films || Reign Over Me || ...

... || USA || Maryland || Baltimore || List of famous people from Baltimore || ...

(last one was by Isaque)

Anyway, here's a new Magic related puzzle that I thought of:

Let's say you are playing Type 2, and you have a starting hand with only 1 land, and it is a swamp. By the end of the turn, you will have 1 green creature in play. How is that possible, and what possible creatures can come out?

Anyway, previously there were 4 answers, then I thought of a 5th, and then thought of a bug that could screw up the puzzle. So here are a few restrictions:

- you may only play 1 creature spell
- you may not play non-creature artifacts

Sounds weird, eh? But whatever. Actually, here's a clue or further restrictions if you want help on the 5 answers:

- you may only play 1 spell, and that must be the creature
- if you want, you can pretend your starting hand has no lands at all

And that's it! So, we have 5 answers. Enjoy!

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

talking with Jia

Sunday night Duy calls Jia, and the conversation went something like this:

Duy: Hey Jia, are you busy?
Jia: No.... take me away. ... please Duy... please... I.. I need this.

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Sunday, May 13, 2007

funny e-mails

oh, man. It's funny - our hotmail accounts are all our junk accounts, but our hotmail accounts are the ones with "good" "work-ish" names, like bknh @, or dknguyenhuu @ . Meanwhile, we prefer gmail or yahoo, but my gmail is baomon, and duy's yahoo is dragonairwapt . oh man...

we should probably get some real e-mail account that we like, like bao.nguyenhuu @ gmail ... oh well.

Anyway, I just thought of this topic while talking with Duy. I was planning to write another entry, but I never got around to it. probably... never. but maybe one day.

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Thursday, May 03, 2007

Flash Puzzling

Okay, I’m currently trying to recreate an already existing game in Flash, and I’m having some trouble. I’m trying to use a bunch of nested objects since the objects have an obvious parent/children relation, like branches in a tree. Unfortunately, because of this, it’s sorta hard to get the exact location of different objects in the tree, in relation to the root.

For example, let’s say you have object #5, which is nested inside object #4, which is nested in #3, and so on. If you ask Flash for the x co-ordinate of object #5, it will compare its x co-ordinate with object #4, and say something like “I’m 50 pixels right of object #4”, but if you want to know how it compares to object #1 or the root, it’s a bit more complicated. You need to know how object #4 relates to #3, and so on. So eventually you can find out that #5 is 50 px from #4, and #4 is 100px from #3, and #3 to #2 is 200px, and #2 to #1 is 80px, so using some sort of almost recursive function, you find out #5 is 430 pixels from object #1.

So that’s great and all, but then when you start rotating objects… well, unless I don’t know some special function, it all gets really messy. If you rotate object #5, it will still think that it’s 50px from #4, rather than 50pixels X cos(30) or something like that. So, it’s probably not too hard to figure out how far #5 is from #4… but when you have all these objects nested, I think it’s a bit harder.

Anyway, so now I have this problem, and I don’t feel like doing all the complicated math… it’s making my head hurt, haha. Well, I could work on it, but if you want to help too, that’d be awesome… or if you just want to play around with some math, here’s your chance.

Okay, here are 4 puzzles – the first 2 are practice puzzles, but the real meat is in puzzle 3 and 4. I’ve only done puzzle 2 so far, heh. In puzzles 1-3, you find the co-ordinates of point “a”. So check out these puzzles:

Puzzle 1:



Puzzle 2:



I’ve only done puzzle 2. I think it’s correct… I won’t give you the exact answer yet, but if your x value is close to 7.33 and your y value is close to 5.70 (or negative these values, blah blah blah), then we have the same answer.

Puzzle 3 I think, is the actual way my program is going to work. So a few things shifted, so maybe puzzle 3 is easy after puzzle 2, but I’m not sure, I haven’t tried it yet.



Puzzle 4 has no picture, but it is simply this; add more blocks, and create a (semi?) recursive function to calculate the co-ordinates of any possible “a” points. I’ll give you what I have for the x-value semi recursive.

So each of these blocks is identical, and like the example, let’s call them Object #X. All of them are the same, except object #0, or the very first one. All of the objects above 0 have the function

Function getx()
{ return _x + _parent.getx();
}

So from #5, when you call this function, it returns “50” and its parents getx() function, which for #4, will return 100 plus whatever else is at the bottom, and it keeps doing so until object0, which has a getx function which looks like

Function getx()
{ return _x;
}

So that the semi-recursive function stops there. I say semi recursive because it doesn’t use the same function over and over, although… well, it does, but on different objects. I guess it’s easier to understand than a fully recursive function. So, that’s puzzle 4. You can assume that the blocks know a lot, like _x, _y, _rotation, _width, _height, etc. As an additional bonus to puzzle 4, if you could use variables instead of the constants I provided (2, 6, 30 degrees, etc), that’d be good.

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Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Secret Pet Peeve: People knowing what I'm doing

Here's another thing that I don't like, that I don't think I've written about before. I don't like it when people know what I'm doing. What I just said was quite vague, so I'll clarify with two examples.

I don't like it when people see me blogging. I'd love for them to see the end result, but I really don't like it when people are watching me type, before the end product is done. It's kinda like, they're watching more than they should be, or they're learning more about me than the blog post is supposed to teach them. And sometimes they might read an incomplete work with errors, and they might judge it in that state, rather than the completed, error-free finished post.

Another weird thing I don't like is, having people infer some kind of... ack, I'll just tell the example. I like to take haircuts on either Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. People would see me Friday daytime, and then I would get a haircut, and on Monday they might forget that my hair was longer, or they just comment that I have a nice haircut, and they'll know that I got a haircut this weekend.

However, I don't like taking a haircut in the middle of the week - so say if I go to work on Tuesday, and then I get a haircut and then I come back to work on Wednesday, people would infer that "bao got a haircut yesterday/tuesday", and for some reason I don't like that. I don't like people knowing that what I did last night - it feels like an invasion of privacy, although in reality it's really not.

So them knowing that I got a haircut during the weekend was fine, but them knowing that I got a haircut "last night" is not fine, because it feels like it should be private info. I dunno, I'm weird like that.

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