Category: Programming

Bananasplit

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What is Bananasplit?

Bananasplit was my first “big” programming project that I actually finished. After countless small programs I created in Delphi including some sort-of games I had a goal to actually make something that has not existed before.

This program is a splitter specialized on speedrunning MKDD (Mario Kart: Double Dash!!) specifically in the ACT (All cup tour) category. After being part of that community for a while I realized the need of such a tool and started programming a prototype in Delphi with the Pascal language.

I oriented myself on the design of Livesplit and also used the open source code of it as a sort-of guidline while coding.
GoombaNL really helped me improve the design of the whole thing.

 

Why create this if stopwatches/livesplit already exist?

The reason for this program is solely to have splits for your run. This means that you can compare your segments with your record and see how well you are doing instead of relying on your feeling.

A lot of people think you can just use livesplit, but the problem is that the track order for the tracks 2 to 15 are random. Livesplit can (at least to this point) only have a fixed order of splits.
And since the tracks vary in length it does not work to use splits like “Track1, Track2, …”.
I personally like having splits, but some people don’t care about that that much.

 

You can download the program either on speedrun.com or directly here.

If you want to see the source code just shoot me an e-mail here yannik.braendle@gmail.com and I’ll gladly provide you with the project files.

Dodgeblock

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In Order to learn more about using the Unity3d engine, as well as programming C# scripts, I wanted to re-iterate the idea of my first game programmed in Pascal in Delphi. (To check out the post about that project click here) This game takes the basic ideas of my old game I just mentioned and adds expands on it further. The main difference is that through the 3D engine used all the objects can now move freely on the two axis of the game field, and additionally implement physic simulation into the mechanics. Through that the blocks can push each other around or have new types of movement (like the purple momentum based blocks).

You can download the game & files here:

First steps with a “LEGO Rock Raiders” inspired game

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One Game I really enjoyed in my childhood was “LEGO Rock Raiders” and at some point I wanted to try myself on a game similar to it and see how far I could take it with my current knowledge.

A short explanation of the original game: it’s a strategy/building game in top down vision in which you indirectly control all your builders. While you can micromanage pretty much all actions it is one of those “queue your actions and let the builders decide who takes up which action” games.

Anyway, this project was my first go at pathfinding and made realize the complex math behind the different possibilites. After researching a few of them I decided to implement the A* and fully understand it before I moved on to start on the rest. After a lot of hours put into this I finally got a working prototype. You can see this here:

As you can see the little blobs can’t walk on water and try to avoid the gravel, since that makes them walk slower. I also made them split up when controlled together. But my biggest problem was that I couldn’t fully grasp the use of a dictionary for this implementation. And since this was supposed to be primarily a learning process I focused on the different topics lying below it.

I ended up doing other stuff and letting this project sit. Maybe I will revisit this at a later point when I have a better grasp of the more advanced basics needed for such use cases.

Dodgesquare

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My first actual game I created. This was the product of a project we were free to choose in my programming class in school. After I got the idea, I expanded on it until I were satisfied. This is not optimized by any means, but I made use of all the methods I knew at the time.

As a small summary: Dodgesquare is a small Arcade-style game in which you have to dodge the grey enemy squares as long as you can. over the first minute a new enemy spawns every ten seconds.
The game field is just a “canvas” which is drawn own pixel by pixel every frame. All the collision detection is actually done by checking pixel colors in the direction the object is moving.

 

You can download the Game here: Dodgesquare and the Project files here: Dodgesquare_Project

“Reaktionstester” – A “game” quickly thrown together as a birthday present to a friend.

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“Reaktionsstester” (= reactiontester) was a small present to a friend and was just a shell for the gifted paypal code. Completing (=beating the hardcoded goals) the reaction minigames reveals a part of the code. I never really polished it, but I still think it was quite neat, so here it is.

You can download the project files here: Reaktion_project