First game

 
The first game that Luke and Peter made together many years ago was simple remake of Boulder Dash. In this game player diggs the tunnels to find diamonds. He runs away from danger like monsters and falling stones or diamonds. There was no next lives and levels order. Death or timeout ended the game. Collection of all diamonds in time caused jump to randomly picked new level.

As you can see, it wasn't big production. ;) But there was a lot of fun to make this. Menu - always the first part of game! Config loading, bitmap loading, levels loading - easy. Player moving - first bit of life in game. Falling stones and diamonds - look out what are you doing. Moving monsters - some bug makes them teleport, so they were unpredictable. Explosion when something fall on the monster - like special effects. Score bar, 'game over' label, credits inscription and game was finished.

Yes, good old arcade times.

Juggling simulators research

Simulators are tottaly different kind of juggling programs. They are trying to imitate juggling process as much as possible to make throws physics and user capabilities close to real.

Anyone who knows juggling a bit, also know there are thousands ways to juggle three balls. One ball throw can be made in many different ways.

Simulators allow for an accurate preview of juggling tricks, a review of them from different perspectives, and analysis of their writing. They can be helpful tool or inspiration for juggling treaning, especially the sports juggling. It should also be noted that some of tricks generated in simulators are impossible to make by even the best jugglers due to high degree of difficulty.

Examples of that programs are Juggling Lab, Joe Pass and Jongl.

Larger list of simulators can be found on The Internet Juggling Database, or the chilean site about juggling Malabarismo. Also collection of juggling programs and animation from the '90s is located on juggling.org.

Juggling games research

It's hard to find bigger game with juggling theme. To be honest, we didn't find any. Most of them are simple flash games, available on sites with free games. The only one, which can be installed is Virtual Juggler 3D.

Juggling computer games can be split in two categories.

First one contains games made as pong remakes, where you operate paddle and try to bounce an incoming ball. In juggling games, paddle is replaced with player holding different kind of items (balls, clubs, chainsaws etc.), and bouncing is replaced by catching and throwing. The throwing quasi physics are used but whole gameplay looks almost the same as in classic pong game. The examples are Virtual Juggler 3D and flash games like Juggler, Fire Juggler, Juggle Challenge Game, Juggle or Juggle Mania.

Second one contains games based on proper timing when you must press buttons to catch or throw balls at specified moment. Probably the most known is Juggling which is also available on Facebook. Left and right buttons are used to catch balls with left or right hand. On the other hand, the most advanced example we have found is Juggling Simulator Game which allows player to make 2 different types of throws (vertical and diagonal).

There are also games based on other rules. In Juggling Hero player has to throw ball (or balls) over the wall. In Jojo's Juggling Jumble he has to add balls while juggling.

Juggling Puppies is a great example of game with interesting (but hard to learn) control. Juggler's hand is controlled with mouse. Items are held or released by pressing or releasing mouse button.

All juggling games available on the internet are based on very simple rules and gameplay rarely looks like real juggling. Mostly it's chaotic items throwing, sometimes ordered passing from hand to hand. Only in Juggling Simulator Game player can get familiar with couple of simple patterns known to jugglers. Practically there's no game which allows you to simulate even small part of diverse world of juggling tricks.