Half-Life 2 Video
New YouTube Video: Five Nights at Freddy’s – Night 2
Remember to like and subscribe!
No More LittleBigPlanet Vita Trolls! :(
As I’ve explored the LittleBigPlanet Vita Community, I have noticed the huge presence of “trolls”. A troll is a person who makes a level that says it has one thing, but in reality does not and wastes your time. These levels are very annoying, and some people make levels to “encourage” people not to do this. Well, that’s nice and all, but it won’t stop people from doing this. So I have come up with a solution. In my level, “Stop Trollers!“, I give out a sticker that says “FAKE!!” which you can place in levels created by trolls. Then, you can take a picture with the sticker and make it public on the level description, marking it as a troll level and making nobody want to play it. Together we can make LittleBigPlanet Vita a better place.
To show your support for ending LBP Vita trolling, go on facebook, twitter, instagram, etc. and make a post with “#nomorelbptrolls“! I will make LBP 1 and 2 levels like that soon.
Posted from my Raspberry Pi!
Flappy Bird Deleted!
Around the start of the new year, a game called “Flappy Bird” became very popular to iOS and Android users. People loved it so much that they played it more and more, until it became a problem. Nguyen Ha Dong, despite making around $50,000 a day from the app, took down the app from all stores to keep from “ruining people’s lives”.
In other news, an almost exact replica of Flappy Bird called City Bird has become #2 in the iOS App Store.
Create your own game in Construct 2!
I recently began learning how to make games in a very simple program called Construct 2, made by Scirra games! It is a program that doesn’t require any coding experience or game-making experience! I had an assignment for school to give instructions on how to do something I know how to do. I thought that many of my readers would like to see the instructions as well. Here they are:
Making Video Games: The First Steps
By HelloTyler
So, you want to make a video game for the computer? Well, today I’m going to teach you how to make games in Construct 2, the easy, simple game-making program. Unfortunately, I can’t teach you to make a full game, because that would probably take a lot of instructions to teach. Instead, I’m going to teach you the first steps on how to make a simple side-scroller, complete with your very own controllable character, a background, platforms for the player to walk on, and more.
Step by Step
First, download and install the free version of Construct 2 off of scirra.com. Now open the program. Once you’ve opened the program, you should see an opening screen. In the top left corner, click “File” and select “New”. On the left, you should see “Size”. Change it to 4000 x 2048. Also, change the “Position” to 0, 0.
Now, let’s make a background. Double click the white space in the middle of the screen. That white space is what the screen will look like when the game starts. A small window will pop up with multiple types of objects to make. Click “Tiled Background”. Now click “Insert”. Another window will pop up. You can make your own background in this window, but a safer option is to make it in a photo editing program. (Photoshop, Paint, etc.) Make sure to make the background 4000 x 2048. Now, go back into Construct 2, and Click the little folder in the top left corner of the window that opened after you selected the “Tiled Background”. Upload the background that you made. Now hold the “Control” button and scroll the mouse wheel down to zoom out. The white chart on the left should have changed. Change its “Size” to 4000 x 2048 and its “Position” to 0, 0.
To the right, you should see a “Projects” tab. At the bottom should be a button that says “Layers”. Click it. In it should be layer zero. If you want, rename it by clicking the pencil icon, and type in “Background”. Now, create another background by clicking the green plus. If you want, rename this layer “Main”. Select the “Background” layer and click the lock. This makes it so you won’t accidentally select it while trying to select something else. Click the “Main” layer again.
Now we create the platforms for the player to walk on. Double click what used to be the white space again. Click “Sprite” and “Insert”. Go into your photo editing program and create a block. You can make a very fancy looking platform, a brown block, or something else; just make sure it’s a square. Now, upload it to Construct 2. Next, make the size on the chart to the left 24, 24. Of course, with just one block, the player has absolutely nowhere to go. So, Hold the “Control” button and click and drag the block. You’ve just made another block! At the top, under “View”, click “Snap to grid”. This will make it easier to connect blocks.
Let’s make the player. Double click the space, click “Sprite”, and “Insert”. Make the character in your photo editing program, and upload it. Do you see the empty space around the character? That should be taken out, because it takes up memory, and makes the game that much slower. In the top part of the window, there should be a rectangle with arrows on the four sides. Hold the “Shift” button and click it. Now, let’s set the image origin. In this case, the origin makes sure that the player won’t get stuck in the platforms. Click the Button underneath the piece of paper, and set the point at the player’s feet. (If it doesn’t have feet, put it where the feet would be.) If you want to, rename the object to “Player”.
On the chart to the left, there should be some thing that says “Add/edit” under “Behaviors”. Click it, and select the green plus. Next, select “Platform”, and click “Add”.
On the window that was opened on the last step, make the “Jump Speed” 1100 and the “Gravity” 2500. Now click the green plus again and add “Scroll to”. This way the screen will follow the player.
Select the block object that the player is supposed to walk on. Add the behavior called “Solid”. Now the player won’t fall through the block. Double click the space again. Select “Keyboard”. This just enables the keyboard to be able to be used. Now, go to the tab which is titled “Event Sheet”. This basically tells what is supposed to happen when the game starts, when the player falls off the screen, when an enemy is hit, or anything else. Add an action by double clicking. Double click the keyboard, and click “Next”. Click “On key pressed”. Now click “click to choose” and press the left arrow key. Now click “Add action”. Double click “Player” and choose the action called “Set player mirrored”. Lastly, add an identical event, except use the right arrow key, and set “Not mirrored”.
While I can’t give you the whole set of instructions, you should probably be able to figure out the rest by now. It is basically the same routine, adding events, objects, and other things. After reading four long pages about how to make a game in Construct 2, you may be surprised to find out that this is the simplest game making program that I’ve heard of! You may be happy to know that you can make games for multiple mobile devices in Construct 2. All you have to do is change the controls to touch controls, and buy the full version. Then, upload your game file (which should end in “.html5”) to phonegap.com.
Sly Cooper Gang Green Lantern Variants
Here are some pictures that I’ve made for fun. They are the Cooper gang, only as Green Lanterns. I’m going to also make a Dimitri Green Lantern, I just need to find a good quality picture. Here is a link that you can get to each of their pages. I might need to change some of the backstory, depending on how Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time ends.
Leap Motion Control
My dad found a very cool video on Mashable that he showed me. It is a preview of a product called Leap Motion. The idea is that 8 cubic feet in front of your computer will be an interactive space to use with your hands. Your hands can control your computer, just like your mouse. It’s only $70 and it is supposed to be 200 times more sensitive than Microsoft Kinect. You will be able to plug it into a USB port. It is supposed to come out in December 2012 or January 2013, so you have to pre-order. Here is a cool video:
How to run Gamecube and Wii games on the mac
Recently, I wanted to play Sonic Adventure 2: Battle on my Mac computer. Sonic Adventure 2: Battle is an old Nintendo Gamecube game that was released in 2002. If you have a Wii, you can play old Gamecube games as long as you have a Gamecube controller and memory card. I had to do some research to find out if there was a way to play the game on my Mac too.
I had heard of a site called Emuparadise somewhere, so that is where I looked to find the game. You can download the Sonic Adventure 2: Battle and A LOT of other games from that site. The games you can download are called ROMs and the programs you need to play them are called Emulators. Here is a link to the Emuparadise site, which has links to the ROMs and a lot of good information about emulators:
Once you go to Emuparadise, click on “ROMs, ISOs & Games” from the site navigation. From that page, choose the console type you want to find games for. I chose “Nintendo Gamecube ISOs”. After you choose your console, you are taken to a page where you can either pick from the top games or search for a specific game listed in alphabetical order. I clicked “S” to search for the Sonic The Hedgehog games and then I clicked on the link for the Sonic Adventure 2: Battle game. The game page gives you a description of the game and some screenshots. Scroll down on that page and click the “Direct Download Link”. This might be a little confusing because clicking that link doesn’t download the game, but it takes you to another page where you can actually find the link to the game file. The actual game file will be under the “Direct Download” section of that page. Be very patient while the ROM is downloading. Some games can actually take hours to download from that site.
The file you will download will be a compressed file like a .rar or .7z file. Some emulators will uncompress the game when you want to play it, but the emulator I am going to write about makes you uncompress the file first. I use The Unarchiver or UnRarX to uncompress files.
Once you download the file and uncompress it, you will have a .iso file. This is the file that the emulator needs to be able to play the game. All of this sounds complicated, but it really isn’t. You can delete the compressed file once you have uncompressed it and have your .iso file.
Now that you have the .iso file, you need to download the emulator, which is called Dolphin. As far as I can tell, this is the best Gamecube or Wii emulator for the Mac. Dolphin is also available for Windows computers too. You can download it here:
https://dolphin-emu.org/download/
Once you have installed Dolphin, run the program. The first time I ran it, it did not automatically find my Sonic Adventure 2: Battle .iso file. I had to click “Open” and find the .iso file. Since then though, every time I open Dolphin, my game is listed in the home screen. Here is a tip – to make your game full screen, press Command-F (Ctrl-F for PC). Otherwise your game plays in a small window. Another tip – some of the game files are very big, so you might want to only download the ones you want most. The Sonic Adventure 2: Battle file is over 1GB.
If you want more information about Sonic Adventure 2: Battle, you can read more on the Sonic Wiki. Here is a link to the Sonic Adventure 2 / Sonic Adventure 2: Battle page:
http://sonic.wikia.com/wiki/Sonic_Adventure_2. Spoiler alert! That page tells the story of the game if you want to play it before you read about it!