RTAmoeba is working

I searched my Gmail account for "rtamoeba" and have found the tarbomb that I sent to my old friend Spag for testing. Luckily there was an archived gtalk conversation next to the mail that contained the attachment, which included some "installation instructions", otherwise I would have had trouble with compiling it from source:)

Anyway, it did compile and it did run, so I could play with it. Here's a screen shot.


I'm trying to convince some friends to play it with me. Should be fun. Meanwhile we will see what I can do with the code, maybe it worths saving. The code smells like University, but it might turn into something useful after some heavy refactoring.

Rebooting with RTAmoeba

So I found this blog again. It is sad, and it is beautiful. I don't remember why I failed two years ago, but this project should be revived.

I have learned much in these past few years. I knew that creating a video game has many challenges, but I was naive enough to think I can handle them all. I sort of miss that naivety.

Two years ago I was attending a Linux programming course at the University. One of the criteria was to create something that runs on Linux. It was a good opportunity to create some simple video game and see how it's done. I came up with a game that was the real-time version of Five In A Row (or Amoeba, as known in Hungary). The rules was the same as in Amoeba, but the players didn't take turns, they could place a stone every five seconds. If you couldn't come up with a good move in five seconds, your opponent had the chance to place more stones than you, a serious advantage in Amoeba. It was fast, thrilling, action-packed, it was Amoeba on steroids:)

I coded it in a few days in C++ using SDL. I looked into my code recently, and it was quite a sad experience. It was full of rookie mistakes. I can see why it took away my passion for creating a way more complex game.

What I'm going to do, is revive RT Amoeba. Maybe I will re-implement it in Python using Pygame. The goal is to clean up the code, fix the bugs, and release it in some form. I want to create a simple game that people can actually play. After that, I can start thinking about more grandiose things to create.

The quote in the sidebar is marvelous. If I can find the same passion and will again, I will be able to create something beautiful. I just need get this one right first.