Blog Posts

BAFTA YGD - results

14/7/2018

I went to London to the BAFTA Young Games Designer finals and had an amazing time. There was a fabulous ceremony and a really good talk by a developer. It was so exciting! I didn't win, but will have another go next year. The winner in my category, Maggie by Harry Thurston, is really good. You can download it from ygd.bafta.org/competition/competition-news/2018/maggie.

BAFTA Young Game Designers Awards 2018

15/6/2018

I'm really pleased and proud to have qualified for the final 10 with Penguin Peril in the Game Making Award: 10-14 years old.
This is the BAFTA press release: http://www.bafta.org/media-centre/press-releases/ygd-finalists-announced-2018
And this is the BAFTA webpage page about Penguin Peril: http://ygd.bafta.org/competition/competition-news/2018/penguin-peril

I had to make a 2-3 minute video about the game, which is linked below
bafta_james_lindsay.mov

Blender umbrella

28/5/2018

I have now finished modelling my first blender model, an umbrella. Blender is a free, well documented 3D editor www.blender.org/. I am using my umbrella in my 3D water the crops (I have made 2D versions in Scratch and Python arcade games).

Breadth First Search

12/5/2018

I have just finished breadth first. This search method looks from every square for a blank square and is quite slow.
I found www.redblobgames.com/pathfinding/a-star/introduction.html very helpful.

Google Cardboard VR

12/5/2018

I have just started looking at VR on IOS developers.google.com/vr/develop/unity/get-started-ios
I have currently got it so you can look and move around a complex scene.
I am planning to make a lazer shooter game.

Surrounded in App Store

30/4/2018

I've finished Surrounded in Unity. It's a strategy game. You have a counter and 4 blocks and the aim is to surround your opponent, so that they can't move their counter or place a block. I used Minimax (with an eval function) with increasing depth for the difficulty levels. The music changes as you get closer to being surrounded.

Bullying: Get It Heard!

15/4/2018

I've written this app to help victims of bullying. It's on the App Store. I learnt a lot about data persistence.

Penguin Peril!

29/3/2018

I've just finished Penguin Peril, my first 3D Unity game. You can see it on the Unity/C# page.

Noughts & Crosses on App Store

21/2/2018

I've finished my second game in Unity, Noughts & Crosses. It's now on the Apple App store. (There are lots of Noughts & Crosses games; mine is called "Noughts & Crosses (by James L)".)

Fly Orange! on the App Store

21/2/2018

First game in Unity done!

3/2/2018

I have made my first game in Unity, a 2D jumper game called Fly Orange (see the C# / Unity page for a link to download).

Surrounded in Pygame

21/1/2018

Surrounded was originally made on pen and paper; then I converted it to Scratch; and now I have converted it into Python but with a computer player that uses minimax.

Connect Four with minimax

20/12/2017

I have now re-written Connect Four with minimax. Find it on Python strategy games. The minimax code is below:

Water the Crops

8/12/2017

Water the crops (first written in Scratch) is now finished.
In the game you have to get as many raindrops on the land as possible. You can change the raindrop's path by hitting it with your umbrella. There is scratch (the cat) in this because it was there when I first coded it in Scratch.

Traffic Jam

27/11/2017

I have now completed Traffic Jam (find it in Python strategy games)

Menu done

12/11/2017

I have finally managed to link all my programs with a menu (trinket.io/python3/df7b99779e?runOption=console) to work. To make this work I needed to make another program.

Table football scoreboard works

5/11/2017

Lily pad game

4/11/2017

I have now competed my lily pad game (see it here: Python arcade games). The hardest bit was getting the frog to move at the same speed as the lily pad it was on. It confused me because you can't get a return from the update function (explained in flappy-bird-done.html), so I used a global variable to report the speed of the lily pad.

Table football scoreboard

23/10/2017

I have now tested my table football so it can sense a goal for both teams and have done the display in Pygame. The next step is to install it on the table.
I found it hard to run it using .bashrc (allows you to run a program when you boot up) because you need to make a way of exiting other than the usual quit button. I rescued it using remote access through puTTY on a PC. In the code on the Electronics page, you can see I added buttons into the Pygame window to exit and reset.

Space Invaders done!

22/10/2017

I have finished Space Invaders, which uses lots of classes and is my first Pygame program using sound. The code is on the Arcade Games page.

pygame.sprite.spritecollideany

13/10/2017

I've finally found out how to do collision detection for my new game Flappy Bird.

How to do it (the full code is on the arcade games page)

CODE FOR MAKING A GROUP OF CLASS MEMBERS AND UPDATING THE GROUP

class Pipe (pygame.sprite.Sprite):
def __init__(self, image,[...]):
pygame.sprite.Sprite.__init__(self)
self.image = image
self.rect = self.image.get_rect()
self.x = 5
self.y = 5
[...]
def update(self):
screen.blit(self.image, (self.x,self.y)
self.rect = Rect(self.x, self.y, 50,50)
def main():
pipe_image = image.load('pipe.png')
pipeGroup = pygame.sprite.group()
for x in range(3):
pipeGroup.add(Flappy_class(flappy_image, [...]))
while True:
pipeGroup.update()
 pygame.display.update()

KEY

line 1. we create the class, inheriting from pygame.
line 2. we "__init__" like usual.
Note: "__init__" has 2 underscores
line 3. we call the pygame "__init__"
line 4. we load the image
Note: I don't load it in the class because if we had 40 pipes it would be too slow
line 5. we make a rect according to the image
lines 6&7. we create the x and y
line 10. I make a method called update
Note: its name is important because it it one of the only methods that you can call for all the sprites in a group.
line 11. we display the image
line 12. we create the rect(x pos, y pos, width, height)
Note: using self.rect = Rect (...) for the updated image is important for collision detection
line 15. we load the pipe image.
line 16: we create a sprite group
line 18. we add members to the sprite group
line 20. we call the update method for all the sprites in the group

We would do a similar thing for flappy bird (including updating using self.rect = Rect (...) and store it in the bird object and then call these lines

if pygame.sprite.spritecollideany(bird, pipeGroup):
print ('collision')

Fifty Eulers done!

11/10/2017

I've finally done 50 Project Euler questions.

Flappy Bird

9/10/2017

My new pygame program is flappy bird. At first I zipped along until I had done the moving of flappy and the pipes. My first problem was that I couldn't get the collision detection to work. It was easy in scratch, if touching flappybird, but in pygame it looked like I had to try again but then I looked up how to do it and found some promising results.

AIY Projects

1/10/2017

AIY Projects is a voice projects powered by google(at aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/voice#project-overview). I got the kit free with the MagPi magazine. I've got it to detect words and say something in response (I say"My name is James" and it says"Hello, I hear you have a blog").

I have considered a few projects e.g. a program were the computer sings (la, laaaa) and you have to sing the right pitch back (it is very hard to detect the pitch though).