But it is a wonderful time. Your inbox floods with email messages from Facebook and you feel all warm and fuzzy inside because someone out there truly cares for your delicate soul. Yet you overlook the fact that most of them were merely reminded of your birthday from a right-aligned sidebar on Facebook.

Something that I’ve found fascinating are the birthday emails you receive from schools, banks, forums or other websites of which you have memberships to. You think to yourself, “aw, how nice of Corporation X for remembering!” Your impressions of the company grows fonder.

But when a server sends the email, it really has no concept of what a birthday is, at least not in the sense that we have. To us, it is a significant time of the year. To the robots, it is merely an entry in their database. The server runs an algorithm and the machine forwards a birthday message to you. The server has no emotional conception of what a birthday is, yet it can run a function that sends birthday messages to make you smile, thereby controlling your emotions.

And that is how you program happy birthdays.

I’ve always wanted to develop games, but my naivety made me feel that creating a game required special knowledge and programming skills that are far beyond the realm of a mortal beings. I picked up programming during my early college years but it wasn’t until a year ago that I’ve actually considered creating a game. I am by far not a professional game developer, but I can tell you how I personally started making games and how you can begin to make your own games.

Learn to Code

First thing is first: you absolutely must know how to code if you plan to develop a game. It is nearly impossible to create a fully functional game without writing a single line of code. Sure, there are GUI-based game developing software such as GameMaker, but even that requires some lines of code to get it working. There are others such as RPGMaker that can be used to create an entire RPG game, but requires scripts to handle events. But my gripe with most GUI-based game development software is that it is virtually impossible for it to be flexible enough to create any game you want; you will be confined only to their development framework and you will definitely be limited. Wouldn’t it suck to have to alter your vision just because this software doesn’t have that feature?

Bottom line is, if you want to have full control and flexibility in creating your game, you are going to have to learn how to code. But let me tell you, it’s not that hard, it just requires time to dedication to develop the skill.

The Mighty Python

If you are a beginner at coding, I believe Python is the right language for you. It is very intuitive, great for beginners yet powerful enough for even the most gangster programmer (Google uses Python). It is the Zen of all languages. It eliminates all the boilerplate bullshit that plagues languages such as C/C++. Plus, there are several wonderful documentations online (Beginner’s Guide to Python) to get you well-acquainted with the language.

Pygame

However, Python is only a language, you need an API that can actually do game shit such as drawing your sprite images, handling user inputs, sounds, etc. If you are developing in Python, I believe Pygame would be the right API for you (I personally feel that it should have been called PySDL, but that’s for another day). Pygame has great documentation that can get you started on creating your first small game. PyMike also great tutorials on his site, and I also suggest you to download and read his code.

Programming Tips

The best tip anyone can give you when you first begin developing games is: start small. This is very important. You see people all over game-dev forums telling beginners to just start by creating a simple tic-tac-toe or tetris game. Yes, I know that we all have that dream of creating that mind-blowing game with an epic story and endless number of gameplay features. But the truth of the matter is, you will be so tied down in to all the minute details involved with learning the game development environment that you will quickly become discouraged. So please, start small. Then after you have a good feel for the process of making a game, then you can scale upwards.

The second tip is for any game programmer is to master object-oriented programming. This idea of everything being an object is never more pertinent than it is in game development. This is because everything in a game is an object: the characters, the objects, the scene, the interface, the NPCs, etc can all be abstracted as objects.

Also, the idea of polymorphism is also very important to master. I will not go in depth into this because there just so many articles online that talk about OOP/polymorphism as well as their importance.

Anyhow, the journey of learning how to make a game requires a lot of dedication and persistence, but the thing to remember is, don’t give up. Just like how Rome wasn’t built in a day, your game also won’t be built in a day, unless you smoke crack (yes, you). So just stick with it and feel free to email me if you have any questions.

And beyond that, we have some people who have their cars equipped with those extremely bright Xenon headlights. You see, nobody really needs lights that bright, but some are still willing to pay for it anyway. I wonder what goes through their mind when they are driving their Xenon-equipped car. Because when I see a car behind me with their headlights blinding my field of vision via my rearview, I don’t even envy and think, “wow, I wish I had the same exact lights that are currently burning a fucking hole thru my retina”. People are so silly sometimes.

The third thing I want to say about headlights is the phrase “deer in headlights“, which is used to describe the mental state of surprise caused by anxiety, fear, suprise, etc.  Ever year, many deer in are killed through this deer in headlights scene. They begin by innocently frolicking through the magical woods until they accidentally end up on the road. They become hypnotized by the pair of glowing eyes, growing ever so greatly as the vehicle comes closer and closer..until BAM, from beautiful life to instant roadkill. Kind of funny, in a way.

For the past twenty years, there has been correlation between American politics and the type of horror movies which are released in theaters. More specifically, the popularity of zombie and vampire films tend to oscillate in accordance to the political attitudes of America; zombie movies appear more often when a Republican president is is in office, while vampire movies are more prominent during Democratic reign.

According to this article, right after Bush’s election in 2000, there “came at the start of a massive upsurge in zombie flicks: 183 in seven years, for an average of 26 a year”. During the 1980s, which was the “Reagan era”, zombie movies were rolling out a few per month. And during the Clinton years, vampire movies such as “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”,“Interview with the Vampire,” “Dracula: Dead and Loving It” and “Blade” were all immensely popular.

One can speculate why this trend is so. Democrats are often fearful of upper-class America and believe the rich are the ones who are bleeding the nation dry. Since vampires are mostly noted for their aristocratic status, there is no question why Democrats tend to project their fears of the wealthy upon vampires. Furthermore, Republicans fear the revolt of the masses, which can be demonized and made into brainless zombies.

Reference: With Obama election comes the return of the vampire