For the past month or so, I have been working in Scratch, trying to create a game. I started with a simple football game of pong. It was finished with a week so I decided to move on to something harder. I decided to work on Flood It, a game with the objective to make the entire board one color, by starting at the top left corner and changing the color of adjacent blocks. I began with simply creating the backdrops, one for the intro (which includes instructions and a start command) and the starting backdrop (just a black screen). The only commands I wrote for the backdrops, was to clear the screen when the flag was pressed

Lately, I’ve been working on making the classic game Mastermind on Scratch. It has been going well and it has been a learning experience being new to Scratch. One of the first challenges I faced when making the game was how to display the guesses the user made each time and how to give hints on the guesses they have made. I have also had to change the layout of the game at least twice to make it easier for the sprites to move and look at least semi-organized. The game is almost completely functional with one exception as the game does not process duplicate numbers well. It’s a minor bug which is probably due to some math inconsistencies that I am fixing. I have also  been meaning to simply make it look better simply for the sake of vanity.  I’m hoping to improve it possibly making it more user friendly but with some harder levels in order to make it more challenging.

I have also been looking into game theory to make it a part of my other project for the summer. Since the beginning of my light-research on the subject I have found it to be more interesting then I previously thought. Also, it has shed some light on certain aspects of economics that I had previously not understood. Most of my research has been through videos on game theory. I have not found any books that are easier to digest than text-books. I will keep looking.

I am working on a videogame made on Scratch, it is a Version of the Asteroids game , but it consists on different graphics (of Spaceship, asteroids, laser, Earth) rules, and scoring. The game objective is to score the greater number of Points after the game is over. A life is gone every time an Asteroid touches the ship. If the laser touches the Earth, the game will end inmediately, without considering the number of lives left. Asteroids exist in three sizes; big, medium and small, each have a different value of points ( Large = 2pts, Medium = 3pts,  Small=5pts ) which are added to Points, duplicated and time is subtracted from that value to get the score. A high Score Memory is included and can be erased with “reset High Score”button wich appears when game is over with number of points, time and Final Score. The difficulty of the game increases gradually depending on the Score that you have, if score increases, the velocity of steroids will increase each Level reached.  It is an endless game, the only way to stop is losing the 3 lives provided or destroying the Earth .

I’ve been developing my own 2048 game on Scratch, the project has given me many problems but am slowly coming to a working game. Some problems have included getting blocks (sprites) to combined, getting the blocks to stay with in a grid, and costumes change when blocks touch. However, I have been figuring out how to fix these problems one step at a time. After getting the major problems finished I believe I can fix any minor changes afterward, such as getting the blocks to stay in the lines with out touching the outside the boundary and bouncing back in.

Other than my game  I have  also been consulting  Mirka on a second project in which we decided to build a robot that does art. We have been looking into building an arm, what will draw a scanned picture. We got the idea after seeing something called Sketchbot. We hope to start on the project Friday.

Hello, we are the 2011 Nexus interns for Dr. Ceberio from Da Vinci. This summer is special in that it has two projects to it. First is an app for Droid phones that compares two DNA sequences and displays those that match together and the second is an AI in python using Minimax that plays connect four on a 3D board.

First, let’s talk about the app since we did that first. We used the Google’s app inventor to create the app first doing tutorials then moving on to the task at hand. The application has two text boxes that you put your string of DNA into, then it tells you if they are the same or not and lines up the two strings showing lines between the ones that match up and blanks where they don’t match up. The lines used to not match up properly due to the characters being different sizes but we solved that by putting several spaces between the characters when they are displayed.

Our second project was the 3D Connect Four AI that is designed to play the game and win against another AI made by the community college students. The game itself was made by Christian Del Hoyo and we added the intelligence agent. Our initial approach was to use Minimax, which is an AI that would follow a tree of decisions, branching out into different actions depending on what the player did. Unfortunately, a Minimax program was beyond our abilities so we settled for a large list of if statements that changed based on what the opponent played and random variable that selected the list of ifs that should be used.