Hey,

After a few days of itunesconnect being down, I was able to submit Galcon Labs to the App Store.  Check it out!  (See Phil’s first ever video!)

On a dev note, this game was REALLY fun to make.  I got to do things that completely change the gameplay of Galcon so that Galcon Labs is really four totally different feeling games.  My favorites are the Billiards mode (where the planets move around) which is just a lot of fun, and the Assassin mode where instead of trying to conquer everyone, you are assigned a single player that you have to destroy first.  The interesting thing about that, is if you destroy another player, or the player who is trying to annihilate you gets destroyed – YOU LOSE!  It really changes up how you have to play!

As usual, testing (TDD) was a big deal.  Having a network game makes it so that everything has to be tested to make sure it really works.  I’m going to be doing a talk at 360iDev on Wednesday, so if you want to hear me compare UDP networking to herds of rabid animals, be sure to attend.

Also, check out pygame 1.8.  It is really awesome 🙂  While working on Galcon Labs I felt I needed to put more effort into differentiating the game from previous Galcon games visually.  As it’s still triangle ships and planets, this took some effort.  And during the last hour, I decided I needed a whole shiny new look for the planets.  In the game I use a texture with 64 planet designs on it.  So creating all those by hand would have been too hard.  I used pygame to generate new landscapes and found the new pygame 1.8 features really helpful.  I was able to use the new blending modes to trim the landscapes into circles and rotate and scale them down so I got a nice antialiased look for all the planets.  In previous versions of pygame, this would not have been nearly as easy!  So, not just for games, but for generating and doing automated image manipulation, pygame is really starting to shine 🙂

Cheers!
-Phil

(I should have posted this earlier, sorry blog-reading folks!)

Rev up your design skills and make a Galcon T-Shirt!  Top entries win a FREE T-Shirt and the admiration of the world!!

http://www.galcon.com/misc/compo.php?cid=2

Here’s some graphics, logos, fonts, and other goodies from the new iPhone Galcon that you can use on your T-Shirt:

http://www.galcon.com/stuff/tshirt2.zip

Contest Starts: August 25th
Contest Ends: September 8th
Voting Ends: September 14th

Fine print: T-Shirts must be family friendly.  Unfriendly t-shirts will be DQ’d and will incur the wrath of Nanno.  Upload a hi-res (300dpi) image, if trouble ensues, use the Contact form and bug Phil.  T-shirt designs become property of Galcon.com.

Preview entries here: http://www.galcon.com/misc/compo.php?action=ipreview&cid=2

Have fun!
-Phil

So .. Yeah.  Check it out.  Realtime multi-player game .. in flash!

So on a more technical note .. The game involves quite a number of technologies!

• AS3 – of course – for the Flash client itself
• C++ – for the server
• PHP – for the web API and rankings system
• python – for the bots

If I did the project over, I’d probably do the server in python as well.  But all in all the project went pretty well.  After things were done, it only took me a morning to write up the python client.  There’s a very good chance I’ll release that code in a few weeks and let people try making bots for the game.

Anyway – have fun checking it out.  I’m a bit wiped out from wrapping all this up, so I’ll try and post some more interesting details later!

-Phil

So .. who thinks flash + Galcon = win?  I don’t know yet, but I’m giving it a try.  I’m not actually developing the flash version.  An awesome friend of mine has been doing the time on this one.  Though I’ll probably be doing the LAMP end of the deal.  At present the game is non-networked, but we’re been considering the possibilities.  A TCP/IP edition of the game could be made, but I wonder if that would end in tears.  TCP/IP isn’t ideal for gamedev IMO.  Flash doesn’t support UDP as-of-yet.

This isn’t the first time Galcon has reared it’s head from within the browser window.  (See my earlier blog posts …)

I haven’t decided exactly what I’m going to do with this once it’s completed.  Probably a few things.  Throwing it on facebook is an obvious one.  Throwing it on galcon.com is another one.  Maybe mixing it with something like The Maze of Madness is another one.  Or maybe something else!

One idea that I have that would be really cool would be if the tinypy vm were ported to ActionScript using Alchemy* .. and then somehow people would be able to script Galcon on the web and share it with their friends..

*I don’t know if you caught that .. but I think my weekend just got booked 🙂

I’ve just created a couple twitter accounts for myself!

philhassey is going to be my dev twitter account, where I might be posting real-time stuff about game-dev, python, and whatever else comes up.  Should be interesting if I get into it 🙂

galcon is my twitter account for news about Galcon, galcon.com, new games, etc.

P.S. Galcon for the iphone is an IGF Mobile finalist!  Check it out!

Hey,

The Galcon Prize contest is finally over!  Congrats to mewo for his great entry!  You can get the results package here.  This includes all entries and all datasets and all results.  It also includes some explanation on how I judged the entries, as well as the script I used to aggregate the results from the various dataset runs I did.

Now that the compo is over I’d love it if everyone who competed wrote up some postmortems about their entries, what strategies they used, and how they came up with the solutions they did.  Please post those in the forums.

Thanks again!  I’m going to try and get this added to the Galcon-iPhone rankings system ASAP 🙂

-Phil

If you haven’t put an entry together for the contest, you’ve got just a couple days left 🙂 I’ll be doing the final judging Monday morning when I awake.

-Phil

“The Galcon Prize is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to improve the Galcon rankings system! Galcon is a winner-takes-all multi-player game for 2-4 players. Entries are to be written in python. The prize is an 8GB iPod Touch. Entries must be uploaded by Oct 5.”

I’ve updated the dataset with way more data … so you’ll want to download that.

Here are the mid-contest results:

 1. rafsoaken        452.44  0:20 [-407,836]
 2. codepenguin      452.42  0:20 [431,1392]
 3. mewo2            452.36  0:19 [167,1601]
 4. azbuky           451.46  0:16 [54,903]
 5. fl0yd13          450.88  0:14 [103,7400]
 6. paulatreides     449.94  0:16 [0,24990]
 7. elo              449.93  0:18 [415,1352]
 8. adamzap          446.13  0:18 [0,7]
 9. simple           445.15  0:13 [-9922,6624]
10. mithrandir       440.20  0:28 [-33,1019]
11. percent          438.49  0:14 [0,100]
12. kester           424.54  0:13 [1,502]
13. rounds           387.33  0:12 [1,10710]
14. noop             317.46  0:11 [0,0]
15. bad              224.82  0:12 [-3803,0]

So .. It looks like the results are REALLY close .. The scoring is basically a percentage of how often the algorithm guesses correctly. So all the top entries are in the 45% correct zone. This is a nice improvement over my current algorithm which is at 43% correct.

Also, be sure to to keep uploading your entries throughout the week, I’ll try and post an update every day or so with the current standings so you can see how you are doing.  I may be testing your entries against NEW data that you will not have access to, in order to test how well your algorithm handles data it hasn’t previously trained against.  So watching for updates on the results will be quite valuable.

Also, rafsoaken sent me a histogram viewer function, which I’ve added to gprize.py. Run it with -histogram to see a visual of how your numbers are spreading. I’ll probably be using that to help me decide if an entry will really “work” for Galcon.

Hey, so I’ve never been feeling overly smart about how my rankings system works.  And quite a few of you have expressed interest in hacking on the stats data or trying to improve the ranks some way.  So here’s your chance!

Introducing The Galcon Prize!

“The Galcon Prize is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to improve the Galcon rankings system! Galcon is a winner-takes-all multi-player game for 2-4 players. Entries are to be written in python. The prize is an 8GB iPod Touch. Entries must be uploaded by Oct 5.”

Check it out, and have some fun!  🙂  If all works well, in a few weeks Galcon rankings will be considerably more-awesomer 🙂

-Phil

Hey, one of the Galcon-iPhone users is really doing his best to help me get the word out! He’s put up a digg article linking to an awesome youtube video he made demoing the gameplay on the iphone 🙂 Spread the word – and check out the sweet video!