Eight word lists to help you creating the perfect word game

Yesterday I blogged about the World Play Flash Game Contest, and the word list provided by Dictionary.com.

Suddenly a reader said this word list is not that useful because contains words like “german nazi”, “motherfucker”, and so on.

I’ve just killed a zombie in Resident Evil 5 swearing at his mother, but both me and RE5 are rated 18+ while a flash game should be suitable for everyone.

But the biggest problem is the list does not contain only words… it contains sentences like “german nazi” that could be very difficult to guess.

Samuel Toth helped us cleaning the list and releasing it at this link, but just in case you are looking for another word list I am showing you some useful links:

1 – http://www.scrapingweb.com/databases/words-database.html
A database of over 180,000 English dictionary words available in various formats for sale at $29.95

2 – ftp://ftp.ox.ac.uk/pub/wordlists/dictionaries (then open Unabr.dict.gz)
A list of 213,557 english words in a text file

3 – http://www.gotnet.biz/Blog/post/English-Words-Database-from-11-Sources.aspx
Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Database with english words also available in csv. 320,888 words

4 – http://en-gb.pyxidium.co.uk/dictionary/OOo.php (then open en-GB-wlist.zip)
127,238 english words in a text file

5 – http://www.puzzlers.org/pub/wordlists/enable1.txt
Scrabble dictionary with 172,823 entries

6 – http://www.outpost9.com/files/WordLists.html
Various word lists for theme-based games such as family names and Dos refrence words, for absolute geeks!!

7- http://www.esclub.gr/wordoxdictionary.html
Html word list grouped by word length

8 – http://www.morewords.com/wordsbylength/
Another html word list grouped by word length and initial

Hope this will help you in the creation of the perfect dictionary. If you know more or have a link to a localized dictionary, just post it in the comments.

Understanding roguelike dungeons

The roguelike is a sub-genre of role-playing video games, characterized by randomization for replayability, permanent death, and turn-based movement. Many early roguelikes featured ASCII graphics. Games are typically dungeon crawls, with many monsters, items, and environmental features. Computer roguelikes usually employ the majority of the keyboard to facilitate interaction with items and the environment. The name of the genre comes from the 1980 game Rogue. (source: Wikipedia)

The interesting part of a Roguelike game is the dungeon: unlike solid perfect mazes like the one explained at Perfect maze generation – tile based version, roguelike dungeons have rooms, corridors, loops… not the kind of stuff we can obtain with a perfect maze generation script.

So I selected some interesting resources to help you understanding the process of dungeon creation, and I am obviously creating a script to create my own dungeons.

Let’s see the links:

http://kuoi.com/~kamikaze/GameDesign/art07_rogue_dungeon.php
Algorithm for random dungeon generation.

http://www.gamesetwatch.com/column_at_play/
Lots of useful information about roguelike genre.

http://www.dev-spot.com/forums/index.php?topic=4.msg10
Forum thread about a roguelike dungeon creation contest with some interesting entries with source code, like this one or this one (with source code) that allows you to create a town full of enemies.

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Grid_Based_Dungeon_Generator
Grid-based dungeon generator: an easy method to generate maps that contain rooms guaranteed to fit within the dungeon space.

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Dungeon-Building_Algorithm
Dungeon-building algorithm.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/roguelikelib/
Portable open-source library written in C++ with a set of classes that can be used in all roguelike games. Classes are categorized to fullfill tasks of random map generation, pathfinding and counting field of view.

http://rubyquiz.com/quiz80.html
Some samples of code for a roguelike dungeon generation.

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Basic_BSP_Dungeon_generation
A simple method to generate a basic dungeon using a bsp tree, a space partitioning method. In mathematics, space partitioning is the process of dividing a space (usually a Euclidean space) into two or more disjoint subsets (see also partition of a set). In other words, space partitioning divides a space into non-overlapping regions. Any point in the space can then be identified to lie in exactly one of the regions.

http://www.rpghost.com/dungeon_gen.shtml
This editor does not work but you can see how many options you can set for your dungeon generation.

http://www.freebasic.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=13213
A little program that builds a dungeon based on a particle aggregation algorithm.

http://roguebasin.roguelikedevelopment.org/index.php?title=Cellular_Automata_Method_for_Generating_Random_Cave-Like_Levels
Cellular automata method for generating random cave-like levels.

http://roguelikedeveloper.blogspot.com/2007/11/unangband-dungeon-generation-part-one.html
Multipart tutorial about unangband dungeon generation.

http://dungeonmaker.sourceforge.net/manual/index.html
DungeonMaker manual – interesting read – and source code

That’s it… I already started coding my dungeon generation script, if you have one, let me know and I’ll publish it on the blog.

JiglibFlash 3D Physics engine for AS3

I want to introduce you to a 3D Physics engine for AS3.

Unlike engines like Box2D and the other ones listed in Flash physics engines galore, this engine adds the third dimension.

JiglibFlash is a open source Actionscript 3D Physics Engine. It’s ported by muzerly from the c++ open source physics engine jiglib and uses a part of jiglibX.

I still haven’t played with it, but it looks really interesting, give it a look.

(try to) Get funds for your project with My Micro Fund

« Do you require funding for a business idea? Share with me your story and business proposal and be considered for micro funding in the form of a grant or a goodwill loan – basically you pay back what you can. If I like your idea you will receive between USD $500 to $3,000. »

This is how Alex from My Micro Fund introduces his idea.

You can get funds for your next project following these steps:

1) Submit your proposal, with all relevant deltails such as how much do you need for how long, a simple business plan what is your plan to repay the fund if your venture is successful and what do you intend to do to replenish the fund if your venture is NOT successful

2) Get the money, anywhere in the world(*)

(*) That’s what Alex says, but I don’t really know if he’s really able to make you get the money if you live in a sanctioned Country.

3) Work on your project keeping Alex updated regularly as you execute your business plan so that he can share your experience with his readers

4) Repay the fund based on your goodwill… nothing is legally binding and everything is based on mutual trust and due diligence.

The project sounds really interesting, at the moment I am sending an email to Alex to have a loan for a project. It’s a project I can afford by myself but I really want to try the service and share this experience with you.

Buy and sell arts for Flash Games with FlashGameArt.com

How many times did you draw a “not so good-looking” character in your game just because you aren’t that good at drawing and you did not now where to find the graphic you needed?

And how many times did you draw something interesting for your game, just to discover you changed something in the gameplay and now you don’t need your drawing anymore, realizing you wasted your time?

Here it comes FlashGameArt, from the same guys behind FlashGameLicense and FlashGameDistribution

In this blog you can find more information about FlashGameDistribution and FlashGameLicense, but the aim of this post is telling you what Chis Hughes says about his last work:

« As it says on the homepage of FGA: “FGA is a haven for Flash artists and the people who need their services.

Create and maintain your portfolio, accept jobs, manage projects, and get tips and advice from professional Flash artists!”

The site is still in beta and so currently you can only sign up as an artist and show off your portfolios, but we plan to add a ton of new features that will help artists get more exposure, and ultimately team up with developers to create games.

The site strives to continue our mission to assist indie developers (including artists) in making better games and monetizing those games more effectively.

We think by adding this site to the arsenal we already provide (including FlashGameLicense, FlashGameDistribution, and FlashGameBlogs) we can further help developers focus on the main goal of spending all your time and energy on making great games. »

Some images in portfolios are really interesting, like this one:

… now you know what to do when you need an alien spaceship or the zombie queen.

I’ll make a full review (and will use it) as soon as developers account will be available

Optimize your blog on mobile handsets with MobilePress

In the last times we saw an interesting diffusion of mobile handsets in the market, just think about the iPhone alone sold 4 million units in 200 days.

That’s why a lot of big sites such as Google and Facebook feature a mobile version.

What about a your blog?

MobilePress is a WordPress plugin that will render your WordPress blog on mobile handsets, with the ability to use customized themes.

The plugin also allows specific themes for specific devices / mobile browsers, such as iPhone, Opera Mini, Windows CE Mobile and other generic handset browsers.

The plugin also allows WordPress theme developers to create custom mobile themes for WordPress blogs using the MobilePress plugin.

Therefore, theme designers can create specific iPhone themes or generic themes.

Think of MobilePress as an enabler for WordPress on mobile.

I tried and I have to say I am very happy with it.

Look how the blog looks like on an iPhone (in this case, emulated on Safari for Windows)

and here it is a real world photo

I would like also you to notice the “View Full Version” link at the bottom of the page, as in most important iPhone enabled sites.

A must have… check the official page for more information

GameJS and gameQuery: two javascript libraries for game developers

During late 90’s web games as we know them did not exist.

At that time Javascript was the only language used to make some simple browser games.

Years passed, and Flash became the leading tool to make Flash games. Anyway, I want to point you to two javascript libraries made for game developers.

While you can’t obviously compare the games you can make to modern Flash action games, I am sure you can code some decent puzzle games. Some months ago I made a Sokoban prototype using Javascript and the game worked pretty well, being Javascript only.

GameJS: A 2d game development framework in JavaScript by Tommy Maintz

It’s a Javascript port of the Microsoft XNA Framework using Canvas as the rendering device.

As the author says, « Obviously JavaScript and Canvas isn’t the best combination to write browser games with. Flash will be the best platform for this for a long time. But this was all about fun, experimenting with new HTML features and learning game development. In Tetris a high FPS isn’t really important, but with a filled game field, which already is 10 x 18 textures every frame, I still managed to get 25fps in FF and Chrome. This means that if you would use the framework to write games like Pacman and Super Mario, you would probably get 50+ fps on a decent computer, since they both probably have less then half the amount of textures at the same time on the screen. »

Read more information at the official page, where you can play Tetris.

I have to say, at the moment the game is giving me an error, but yesterday I managed to play from another computer.

gameQuery: a Javascript game engine with jQuery

gameQuery is a jQuery plug-in to help make javascript games easier to develop by adding some simple mechanism and commodity.

It’s still in a very early stage of development and may change a lot in the versions to come.

There is an interesting game (with a detailed tutorial) you can play: a Money Idol Exchange clone called Mechalchemist

I think it would be interesting to develop a Javascript game, maybe to be embedded as a Facebook application… yes… I am playing with FB… stay tuned…

When you are looking for a free software like Photoshop

There are thousands of posts around the web about free Photoshop alternatives.

Let me start from another point of view. There isn’t any free alternative to Photoshop. As far as I know, there isn’t any alternative at all to Photoshop.

But if you aren’t going to use all Photoshop features or you are somewhere around the world and for some reason your Photoshop crashes and need a quick, somewhat powerful and free way to mess around with photos, colors and shapes, you may find this list useful.

They’re listed in alphabetical order, so the first isn’t necessarily the best.

But I tried to point you to a couple of softwares for each OS, such as Windows, OS X and Linux, and some interesting online tools.

I didn’t try personally all the softwares, so the description of each one is taken from their sites. I just tried to download them for free and install them on various machines. Screenshots too are taken from their sites.

If you used some of them, leave a review comment. Read more

70+ Open Courseware Links for Game Designers and Developers

Normally I don’t like that much blog posts with a ton of links, but this time I got the permission from Kelly Sonora from Learn-gasm to publish Jessica Merrit’s article about 70+ Open Courseware Links for Game Designers and Developers.

Whether you work in game development or design, or you just aspire to, there are a number of resources available online that can help you get the education you need. Through the use of Open Courseware and related resources, you can learn about game theory, practical applications, and technical instructions for design and development of games. Check out this list to find courses that can teach you all of these things and more.

Game Development
In these courses, you’ll learn the ins and outs of game development.

1. OcwArts: OcwArts will teach you how to create various gaming programs from this course. [OcwArts]
2. Creating a Science of Games: Learn how games can be developed and improved for wider applications than entertainment. [Rice University]

Read more

The engine behind Splitter Flash game

If you played Splitter in these days, you probably enjoyed the gameplay thanks to the knife cutting and slicing various objects in the game

Obviously you can made your own splitter game with BOX2D, and the “only” problem seems to be the knife.

Well, in the BOX2D official forum there is a thread where a user created his own slicing engine (with a laser in the example) and released the source code.

This is what you will get with the script:

The boxes have been cut by the laser, sorry for the picture but I was controlling the laser with the mouse, pressing “C” to cut and “Print” to capture the image… I wasn’t quick enough…

The source code is C, but you (or me) can easily port it into AS3. Read more

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