Syzygy for Win32, pre-pre-alpha release

I’m releasing a prototype version of a puzzle game, Syzygy, that I eventually intend to port to iOS and possibly Android. The prototype is written to the Win32 API and should run on basically any Windows system without installing anything. Syzygy can be downloaded here. Just unzip these three files into a directory and run the executable. I have the Syzygy prototype parametrized such that…

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Raster-to-Vector plus not bitching about significant whitespace

So this weekend I learned Python and implemented a basic raster to vector converter in it. It converts whatever file formats the Python PIL module supports to SVG. Here’s the little guys from Joust embedded as SVG (This probably doesn’t work on Internet Explorer, but if you’re using IE you have bigger problems, brother) and here’s the fruits from Pac-Man: (My favorite is the Galaxian…

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Playing simultaneous sounds in Win32

There is a nice unscary Win32 API call for playing sounds that is unpretentiously called “PlaySound”. It is extremely easy to use. Unfortunately, PlaySound(…) has one problem that makes it unsuitable for even casual game development: although it will play audio asynchronously, it will not play two sounds simultaneously. Depending on what you are doing this may not be a big deal, e.g. warning beeps…

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