Won An “Award” November 19th, 2010
Patrick Stein

Early this year, I wrote a small start of a game for a 7-Day Lisp Programming Contest. I just got some hilarious please, give us information about you we can sell to third parties spam saying that my product has been granted the Famous Software Award.

There is an (apparently apocryphal) story that the World Series of Baseball was not meant to imply something global, but rather was to reflect that it was sponsored by the newspaper The New York World. In the present case, however, there is no implication that my software is famous. The company sponsoring the award has the word famous in its name.

Anyhow, I found it quite amusing that my half-a-game experiment with a one-button interface was being recognized for:

The Famous Software Award has been initiated by [Spammer’s URL Here] to recognize Famous Software, which come up with innovative and efficient ways to reflect the best relationship with users assuring their satisfacation.

The broken English there makes it tough to discern if they’re claiming that my famous software assures user satisfaction or if the Spammer company does. Either way, Go, me! 🙂

Roto-Mortar: A 7-Day Lisp Game March 26th, 2010
Patrick Stein

Roto Mortar was written for the 2010 LISP Game Design Challenge. The challenge was to design and implement a game in seven days using some LISP dialect.

The KPs have been beating on your base all week. Your defenses are just about to collapse. In fact, your mortar cannons are both on the fritz. Billy Bob, the ACME Repair Guy, has just gotten one of your mortar cannons back online. Unfortunately, he had to wire things a little wonky. Your cannon is spinning all on its own. You’ve only got one button to control both the elevation of the cannon and when to fire it. And, you better fire it, because the KPs are still coming at you.

Inspiration

A few years ago, I read the book Game Design Workshop: Designing, Prototyping, and Playtesting Games. One of the exercises in the first chapter is to design a game with a “one-button interface”. At the time, I didn’t come up with anything particularly thrilling.

When I started brainstorming what to do for this Game Challenge, I remembered that exercise. I came up with this concept just under (as in 3.5 hours under) seven days ago. The game is nowhere near as polished as I’d like… but it was a 7-day thing. And, it was fun to take a break from Objective C to get back to some Lisp programming.

Obtaining It

You can find out more about the game, including where to get the source and a Mac OS X binary, on the game’s web page.

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