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Hey, I'm going to enter the Java4K contest this year. This is going to be my first participation. If you don't already know the contest I suggest you to consult and play a a lot of very cool games at java4k.com. It's truly amazing what can be done in a game with only 4kb (4096 bytes) of size! Believe me, I browsed all the games for this year and past years and I was simply stunned by the quality, playability and fun factor of a lot of them. But, yes there's a but, don't expect full fledged games there of course. Some have multiple levels (many here means different content and not just increased difficulty in levels) and you can play those ones for up to 1 or more hours. Again, you know that these games can't be compared to normal PC games and not even casual online games, even those crappy-marketing purpose games. The comparison doesn't stand here because of the limit of size of 4k games.

Talking about size, since 4k is a very small size (that wasn't the case in the vic-20 era), the typical developer makes every possible attempts to save space. This makes room for more content, better graphics, etc. To save space, many compression techniques can be used such as pack200, lzma and gzip. An obfuscator can also be used to further compress the code. But before applying these techniques, the developer must take great care about how he codes his game to try saving space. Such code design or style I should say implies for instance having only one class, which is named with only 1 character. Other guidelines are:

• avoid creating methods
• avoid instance variables
• instance variables should be named with 1 character
• and more

I'm going to start coding my first 4k game very very soon (since the contest ends in about a month or so). The game concept is based on the snake game. In a summary, you - the snake, have to eat the highest number of eggs before time is over and by competing with other snakes. Your snake never stops moving. He must avoid walls, blocks and his rival snake otherwise his life decreases.

My last point I wanted to cover about 4k games is how fantastic it is as an exercise of prototyping game concepts/ideas. Because of the size limitation, you're forced to focus on gameplay to achieve a complete game. Having less emphasize on graphics and sound keeps you concentrated on the most important thing in a game, the gameplay. Sure you have to spend time on byte saving but I guess it's a question of getting used to.

So stay tuned about my 4k game I'm starting developing. Before leaving you, here is a small list of impressive and great 4k games this year:

Assassins 4k

http://www.java4k.com/index.php?action=games&method=view&gid=284

Don't Reach The Square

http://www.java4k.com/index.php?action=games&method=view&gid=271

Falcon4k

http://www.java4k.com/index.php?action=games&method=view&gid=268

GTA4K

http://www.java4k.com/index.php?action=games&method=view&gid=280

Hi all,

the last weeks or last month have been really busy for me. My day job prevented me to progress on my game. Before this I had developed a new tool called the swap tool. It allowed to swap 2 blocks and was supposed to be used with hammer to remove used blocks. Well, this tool may seems fun but the design of levels for it is more difficult than planned. And the fact of switching tools with space bar doesn't fit very well the hand position in my opinion.

So I put the swap tool on hold and decided to go with a new one called the free knife. This tool is like the simple knife except that you're not penalized using it, but if you put blocks in the trash can then you lose 3 seconds (this is to discourage cheating with the trash can). I already have planned for 10 levels in which most of them will use the the free knife. So with this tool, you'll build much more detailed structures like a human face with multiple colors for example. This will open the gameplay for more detailed levels with more colors without making levels too difficult since you'll be able to move blocks without penalty. You can see this tool as a way to draw things in a funny and challenging way.

So stay tuned with the progress.

So I decided to start blogging regularly on various games and technical subjects. Why did I decide to do that? What are the benefits? Recently I asked this question on javagaming.org: "Should I start blogging about game dev?" One game developer, Orangy Tang, gave me a link on an article by Stevey Drunken about blogging and why. This nailed it and from this point I was totally convinced to start blogging. Here is the link by the way: http://steve.yegge.googlepages.com/you-should-write-blogs

The are a few points that captured my attention about the benefits of blogging. Note that there're other points that are not discussed in the article.

When you have ideas, writing them down force you to validate them. For me I often solve issues or come up with new issues by explaining to someone else my ideas or problem I'm trying to solve. Writing is very useful because it's a validation tool for yourself. I would say that as long as it stays only in your head, you didn't really validate it.

Sure you could only write your ideas in documents and keep them for yourself. But the public aspect of blogging allows you to have comments about what you're saying, and others can learn from you. I don't expect a lot of readers but a least someone can learn from my knowledge. That's just another motivation.

Another benefit of blogging is that when you have readers you have a way to keep them motivated to come back to your site. For me this is important because I need testers so I need feedback about the games I develop. I might be wrong pretending that the subjects I'll discuss will interest them but I can adjust.

Blogging often come with a search engine. My website has one, which is very primitive but at least I have one. That's another advantage of blogging. Let say you keep your ideas in word documents, how do you search then? Buzzz! Additionally you can create categories to sort your blogs.

I'm sure I forgot great points exposed by Stevey but I don't have time to re-read it. Anyway for me the points above are more than enough.

I hope this is useful for you. Tell me what you think.