Programming Games

[benny!]

Hi all.

I was stumbling about some some programming games lately and wonder who of
you are actually playing some of them or are interesting in it.

The idea of programming games is to motivate / help ppl to learn to program a
certain programming language or just to have fun. You do not control your player
object via mouse / cursor keys like in a normal game. You have to code a programm
( something like a KI ) that controls the movement / action of your player.

To find out more about - here are some links to some games I found :

RobotBattle

JRobots

RoboCom

Crobots

RoboWar

RoboCode

AntMe (german site)

Would be interesting to know - if you ever played such a game ( if so - which ? ) and what
you generally think about those kind of games ?

[rain_storm]

I stumbled across BattleRobot before I think I was googling for obstacle avoidance systems for a robot and was surprised to see a community exchanging code snippets this puzzled, I was expecting to see schematics. then I found that they were talkin about a video game this was the first time I heard of a game that allowed you to program an AI robot. I never played it though I prefer building the circuits and see the bot function in the real world it has a greater satisfaction even if it is more expensive. But the idea is very clever I think

[rdc]

Yeah, I wrote a game like this eons ago, although I wouldn't really classify these as games per se. To me a game is an interactive simulation, where the player has to take part in the game. These "games" are more programming exercises than anything.

More of my thoughts on what a game is.

[benny!]

@rdc:

Nice link / artice you wrote.

[rdc]

Thanks. It is a rough-draft of the first chapter of a game design book I am working on.

[benny!]

Wow. You are working on a game design book. That sounds interesting. Keep
us informed about its process, please !