The gameplay involves capturing the central location on the map. Players can shoot each other with snowballs, drink hot cocoa to improve their body temperature and build walls made out of snow to get some cover from incomming shots.

One interesting aspect of the game is that players can pick up the ammo (snow), anywhere in the level. So get ready for some intense kids fighting for playground domination.

P.S. – Game executable can be downloaded from the game’s website.

Our group – Team Noir – made the game “Monkey of Puppets”: A little chimp is trying to exit the evil world of oppressive gorillas. Dodge enemies to escape, but there’s a deception somewhere in there. Use puppet mastery skills to leave decoys of yourself to distract the sentries. Find the key and get to the door to escape the level. And then do it all over again. Is there any end to it?

Monkey of Puppets – Game

The game is made in XNA and can be run after installing the XNA Redistributable Framework 3.1 from Microsoft. So, try it!

I’ve had a slightly successful first day at my new job. Given to code review a game project for the iphone, I expected to dally a couple of days with getting myself upto speed. But being thrust immediately into bug fixing is what actually happened. Not that I’m complaining.

I had to fix 3 bugs, and guess what, they were ALL solved by commenting out extra lines of code. There were lines that were just not needed. I confess being a culprit of the same crime many times, being safe rather than sorry when the compiler throws a couple of value not initialized errors. But its a journey on the path of programming zen that comes with experience.

One of the bugs was that the iphone screen was flickering. Its a problem that is widely documented by many, just Google it. And many solutions work. I feel it might be helpful to some if I described what made the difference in this particular case. It was the case of some liberal usage of “swapbuffers”. As we all know, OpenGL can be configured with a timer which in turn processes each frame. When the framebuffers are ready with the data processed in that particular “loop”, the buffers are swapped, send to show up on the screen while we go back to the loop and process the next buffers. But calling the swapbuffers command repeatedly many times within each frame leaves the clearly visible flicker. Try keeping it down to only once each frame render.

Another small clue to solving that flickering problem you might be having…

For the record I must state here that I’m a Liverpudlian through and through. But Rooney’s recent form in the England international game was heartening to see. I’ve always held a fearsome admiration for the lad. He has the character that differentiates English players and belongs to the category of rare players who can change a game completely (of course Gerrard is the finest example in that category).

The performance is especially encouraging keeping in mind his red card and subsequent burst of anger in ManU’s last game at Fulham. With this kind of form, he can really help ManU keep the focus in the last stretch of games of the season.

Here’s to hoping Liverpool maintain their ruthlessness and keep banging them in… You’ll Never Walk Alone.

The third year running of Microsoft’s Dream Build Play competition is coming soon for all of us. The official website is listing April 6th 2009 as the contest start date.

If you don’t know about Dream Build Play, the competition is a chance for indie developers to submit entries of their games for a worldwide contest, with chance of winning total prizes worth $75,000. Oh, the only catch though is that all games must be programmed in Microsoft XNA Game Studio, which actually isn’t a catch at all. Its a great platform for developing games and anyone can get started using the framework for free combining with Visual C# 2008 Express.

Taking part in this contest is definitely a must for all aspiring game developers. There’s nothing like actually working on a project, and at the least gets a game on your portfolio. Put on your thinking caps folks…

Wanted to tell people that Photographs taken by me can be seen on flickr…

I want to talk a little about Digital Photography in this entry. The activity provides many people with distinct pleasures and hence, from a game design perspective alone, is something worth dissecting with a view to find a special feature of the human psyche. This is hardly a detail analysis from me, but only a rant, logging the questions that are coming to my mind. One of the most important problems is to figure out WHY humans want to capture photographs. There are many motives – capture a perspective, capture a moment, remembering, art form, pride of “being there”. And might I add these reasons encompass most of the populace of modern civilization. Is there a common reason here?

Another activity that might not have been directly related to photography has seen a revolution since the digital avatar has come to the scene – photo sharing. People always showed tendencies of sharing photos with friends and family since the Polaroid days, but digital has added so many adjectives to the process – ease of use, name tags, geographic tags, social networking etc.

Successful designers have already been able to find answers to many of these questions, and many more I’m not even close to. But of course the process never stops… so think on…

• Pythagoras’ Mathematicians came up with the identity of Perfect and Amicable numbers.
• Euclid, in the Book IX of the Elements, proved that there are infinitely many prime numbers.
• Eratosthenes devised a very fast algorithm for calculating primes called the Sieve of Eratosthenes.

Then there was a very long gap in the history of prime numbers during the Dark Ages. But the work was again taken up by world famous mathematicians of the likes of Mersenne (Mersenne Primes), Euler (extended Fermat’s Little Theorem and found 60 pairs of amicable numbers), Cataldi (proved M¹⁹ in 1588), Fermat (Fermat’s Little Theorem). Legendre and Gauss both did extensive calculations on the number of primes in a certain limit, i.e. ƒ(n) is the number of primes in the interval [1,n].

Gauss (who was a prodigious calculator) told a friend that whenever he had a spare 15 minutes he would spend it in counting the primes in a ‘chiliad‘ (a range of 1000 numbers). By the end of his life it is estimated that he had counted all the primes up to about 3 million.

Both Legendre and Gauss came to the conclusion that for large n the density of primes near n is about 1/log(n), known to be the Prime Number Theorem.

Many scientists came up with modifications to the formula to come closer to the actual value of ƒ(n). Legendre gave an estimate for π(n) the number of primes n of:

π(n) = n / ( log(n) – 1.08366 )

while Gauss’s estimate is in terms of the logarithmic integral:

π(n) = ∫( 1 / log(t) ) dt

where the range of integration is from 2 to n.

A Graphical comparison between the actual value of π(n) and estimated value ( n / log(n) ) is shown below:

Although solutions can be found by construction for N=1 and all N>3, many researchers have tried to find solutions by different methods with different success to demonstrate the properties of the methods (divide and conquer, search methods, neural networks). The following table summarizes what the authors have achieved.

I made a program that calculates the solution to this problem by brute force algorithm (I know, the least intelligent procedure). All the four solutions to the 6 X 6 Queens Problem are given below (1 represents the presence of a Queen at the position, while 0 represents the absence of a queen):