Kyle Girard

The Finale

admin — Fri, 15 May 2020 19:15:59 +0000

The end has come and gone, and I’ve finished my program. The files are being uploaded to the website and with that my college career is finishing. I really enjoyed working on this project, it was exciting to learn a new language and try some new things. This course was defiantly a good capstone to end my college career, and even though its ending I’ll keep the memories and the knowledge I’ve gained for years to come.

I want to thank everyone who helped get me this far, from my professors who have tirelessly worked with me over the past four years to help me improve and prepare for my professional life, to my friends and family who have always had my back through the harder times. I’ll never be able to fully express my gratitude to those who have helped me get to where I am today, but from the bottom of my heart I truly thank each and every one of you.

Signing out for the last time,

Kyle Girard

The Wild Ride on a Cut Loose Train

admin — Thu, 23 Apr 2020 08:19:20 +0000

So its been awhile, I could go into excuses and the like but when it comes down to it, its just a lot harder to get things done when not at school in an efficient manner. But anyway onto what I’ve been working on.

In class last week, Professor Pankratz said he wanted to see some in progress shots of the pathing, as well as some files and explanations, so without further ado, I’ll be explaining whats going on.

Above is essentially the work in progress shot of the map. As I was working on it, I decided at least for the testing purposes, I’d color in the grids for the roads as well as the walls. I have yet to decide if I want to leave the roads colored in for clarity’s sake, any input with that decision would be appreciated.

Below is the “code” that generates the walls, where I meticulously edit the 1’s for walls, the R’s for Roads, the C’s for what will be coins (they’ll replace the R’s, I just have R’s for testing purposes) and P for player. I go through, matching each and every cell to its appropriate value to make it look “good.”

The next below is the actual code for the generation of the walls and basic stuff. The load function gather’s and parse’s all of the data, while the draw_grid function is what does the heavy lifting, and since I put it in a function, I can comment it out when I’m done testing if I want.

Below is the final edited version, with everything overlayed, Pacman is still a little confused and doesn’t function properly on this new map quite yet, but he appears to be walking and I just need to handle some of the new collision detection and he should be all good to go for this version of the map.

And finally, below is the “code” yet again of the current map version. As you can tell I removed the R’s and replaced them with C’s for coins. The only thing left to do here other than fixing the aforementioned collision detection, is adding a box for the ghost’s to spawn, but I think that’s easily handled.

Countdown Until Destruction

admin — Thu, 26 Mar 2020 00:08:15 +0000

It’s sure been a while. After getting influenza b and being taken out of commission for about a week, then learning that I’m getting kicked off campus and having to suddenly plan how am I going to do my school work from home when I don’t have WiFi, and how I’m going to get a job/an apartment so I could try and live in the area, its been a long couple weeks. I’ve been under an extraordinary amount of stress from everything seeming like its falling apart, but I finally have a plan for most of my things so I’m stabilizing. Because I’m stabilizing I can actually get back to working on things and so we’ll see how I manage to pull everything back together. Thanks for staying with me everyone.

“Progress, of the best kind, is comparatively slow” – Samuel Smiles

admin — Tue, 03 Mar 2020 05:44:04 +0000

So this last week was a pretty slow week. I was pretty swamped with a job interview as well as some personal issues I was working through so I made far less progress than I hoped. But on the bright side, I did find at least the beginnings to a potential solution for path-making. I did some digging and ended up finding some basic functions that I want to play with before I make any big decisions.

For this week, my general plan is to experiment with this new potential solution I found, and see if it’ll lead me where I need to go. I am also going to mess with my website here and hopefully add some more things, like a potential timeline.

Week Four: The First Major Hurdle

admin — Tue, 25 Feb 2020 05:27:59 +0000

This week my goal is to overcome one of the first major hurdles I’m running into. When you make a normal Pacman game, the map is square with simple paths. Therefore it is possible to use grids to map out possible paths for the sprites to move on, below on the left is an example of how this would work. On the right is one of the possible maps I could use, as you can see I would not be able to use this method for my maps.

Therefore my first major hurdle will be figuring out how to make a sprite follow lines on the screen. I have been doing some research and have found next to nothing on the subject in python, but its still early so I can still find more.

The best I found was some research into algorithms that pathfind for more advanced games, here, and here. But both of those articles talked about some very heavy hitting pathing algorithms, both of which are far too much for what I need here. But in the event of me not being able to find anything else I can always try to implement one of these.

Week Three: Menus and the Basics

admin — Tue, 18 Feb 2020 00:35:15 +0000

For this week I finally began putting code down for my program. So far I have the basic start screen created, and am working on creating the next couple game states. From there I plan on implementing the basic game selection screen then putting its map in. The AI will be a future problem as well. When I figure out how I will also add my demo Balsamiq version of my program to the website.

Progress Continues

admin — Tue, 11 Feb 2020 15:02:15 +0000

This week’s main task was to start learning how to fully use the environment. I plan on using the Python tool pygame, which is completely unfamiliar to me so I will have to teach myself how to use the whole system. I also need to make a mock-up of my basic program, and for that I plan on using Balsamiq, and so far it will make a decent first build and will help my visualize my project better.

And So It Begins

admin — Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:23:50 +0000

First post of the capstone, I have made my basic to do list, and picked out my working language. I’m doing it in Python because it is a very important language to learn and has a bunch of helpful tools for making games. So far I found a game library called pygame, then I also found a github repository for using maps from google maps. Next on my to do list is to do a basic architecture outline for how my game will work.