Jon's IDM Blog

Creative Coding Week 5

For this week in creative coding, I learned about APIs and how to use them.

Looking through the list of free API's I decided to go with the game list from Giant Bomb since I like video games alot. This one was a little tricky to use, first to gain access to it, I had to make an account and get an access key. To get it working I also had to setup a COR. This part was pretty tricky because after a while I found out I had to set it up as a proxy.

The Giant Bomb API uses a 5 digit code for each of it's games so I decided to set up a random game generator. Going through the options for available keywords, I found "images" was a nice to grab an image of the game. So after that I setup a function where when you click, you'll get a new game image along with it's name and ID. Sometimes you'll get a number that is not registered to a game resulting in nothing happening. I did try to fix this but haven't quite figured it out yet. So whenever you do get a new image, it goes next to a previous one or below creating a scroll bar, I'm not completely sure how this works out or how to scale the images but I think I'm pretty happy with the outcome. With so many video games out there, I'm suprised that I know some of the ones I've had pop up.

(scroll down below for my midterm proposal and reflections)

check out the code here!

Mid Term Proposal

For my mid term proposal, I think I want to try expanding on a shooter game. First, because I really like games, two, because shooting things are fun, and three, I kind of have the basic framework down to build something on top of. My main attempt is a 3D shooter with a space ship going through space with a 3rd person view, if it's a little too crazy then my backup plan has pretty much the same mechanics but is more of a 2d top down arcade shooter upgraded with cool new features like enimes moving in interesting formations.

/* setup web gl
draw player ship
place ship in -Z
control player ship with WASD on the XY coordinates
set canvas limits for ship

draw cross hairs
place cross hairs in the Z=0 location
have cross hairs follow mouse XY
have player ship rotate to point to the cross hairs

clicking will shoot projectiles from ship
to the cross hair location towards the positive Z location

draw enemies
they will fly towards the player in the negative Z direction

add collision function
if projectile hits enemies, do damage
if enemies touch player, do damage

use switch function when you grab a power up or armor
use switch function for enemy states if they can take more hits
use a switch function when you destroy enough enemies to get to the boss level

have everything restart if you die
add score counter for each enemy you defeat
add a winning screen when you win */

Art and the API

For the this reading this week, I thought it was pretty interesting how widely used and powerful API's are. I always knew data was really valueable for companies but I never really thought of exactly what that data was. It was always a pretty abstract idea to me, but it makes a lot of sense that it would be oragnized in a way for it to be easily accessed and used by code.

In a way API are kinda like classes in where you can take information out of them or how it's owners can put info in which makes it perfect to use with object oriented programming. I thought it was also really interesting how sharing an API is a risky move but at the same time could reap huge benifits like what Twitter.

home

while (!deck.isInOrder()) { print 'Iteration ' + i; deck.shuffle(); i++; } print 'It took ' + i + ' iterations to sort the deck.';