Project Euler

A part of being a programmer involves designing and solving mathematical and/or logical problems. Project Euler can be a fun way of refining those skills. The website describes itself as...

"...a series of challenging mathematical/computer programming problems that will require more than just mathematical insights to solve. Although mathematics will help you arrive at elegant and efficient methods, the use of a computer and programming skills will be required to solve most problems."

The problems themselves are tricky, but a high school student with the mathematical and programming skills should be able to solve many of the earlier problems. Lets take problem 1 for example..

"If we list all the natural numbers below 10 that are multiples of 3 or 5, we get 3, 5, 6 and 9. The sum of these multiples is 23.

Find the sum of all the multiples of 3 or 5 below 1000."

In many cases we can use simply a brute force attack to solve problems like above. However in later problems code needs to be designed to be efficient or else it might take days to compute. The answer in c++ of the above problem would be...

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
  int result = 0;
  for (int i = 3; i < 1000; i++)
    if (i % 3 == 0 || i % 5 == 0)
      result += i;
  cout << "The result is: " << result;
  cin.get();
  return 0;
}

Postmortem: Geometry

Geometry was made in July 2011 for the Game Maker Community Jam #3. It was made in 72 hours. It's worth noting that this game was my first game, which was released publicly.

The whole point of Geometry was to recreate a domination game in it's simplest form. The game play involved large shapes (known as nodes), which created smaller shapes (units) that could be used to capture more nodes. Victory was achieved when you controlled all the nodes and no enemy units remained.

That was what I wanted to achieve, did I do it? Yes. The game did score well and received many favourable reviews. One which I enjoyed reading came from ThatSnail, it read; "The graphics are **** but the strategy involved is so deep it's ridiculous. Whether you intended to or not, you managed to incorporate a lot of tactics like flanking, decoys, attacking on multiple fronts, intercepting enemy lines, guerilla warfare, etc..." It sums the game up well: Good game play, but poor graphics.

Geometry tied 11th place out of 59 games and can be downloaded here.

Hello and welcome!

I'm Paul, but I'm mostly known by my screen name "RedOctober." I'm a gamer who also likes to create games. This blog is to analyse and showcase my projects, as well as my opinions on a range of topics.