Nanaca Crash is a bizarre and highly-addictive Japanese flash game. You play a young girl riding a bicycle, and the object is to ram into some random dude hard enough to make him fly several kilometres.

How to play

• At the start of the game, you have to set the Angle and Power of the hit. Press the mouse button to set the angle, and release to set the power.
• The poor boy you hit can also crash into several bystanders, who can either slow him down or knock him further.
• Sometimes these bystanders have special attacks - you need to click the screen as soon as 'special' comes up.
• You also have several opportunities to hit him again while in mid air. Click the screen while the 'Aerial' button is highlighted.

The Challenge

Try to beat the following distances, and post your best scores as a comment on this thread.

Bronze: 2500m
Silver: 5000m
Gold: 7500m
Platinum: 10,000m

You can play it here

For the record, my current highest score is this:

Secondary Challenge

Try to get the lowest score possible. My current low score is 0.80m

Since discovering BlitzBasic 3D in 2005 I have had a lot of fun with it. It's a pleasure to write with, I learned a lot about programming concepts from it and all of my games on this site were either written in Blitz3D or BlitzMax.

But, after thinking about it recently, I have decided to move on for three reasons:

1. Blitz3D has a DirectX only 3D engine, so it is not portable to other platforms.
2. Only C++ programming experience seems to matter in the game industry.
3. The Blitz3D graphics engine, though slick and reliable, has not changed much since it was released in 2001, and still does not support Shaders.

So, my current train of thought is that I should learn to make games in C++, using Visual C++ as my IDE/Compiler, OGRE as my graphics engine, ODE for collisions/physics and OpenAL for sound. All of which are free for download and use.

After going through a bunch of tutorials, I think my first project will be to port "Blow Stuff Up" to C++. It's a very simple game, probably the dumbest FPS ever, but it gives me a lot of opportunities to learn how to implement certain effects. For instance:

- Cube maps (Building reflections)
- Reflection/Refraction (Water)
- Real time lighting and shadows (From Buildings)
- Collisions and Physics (Buildings falling over on each other)
- Particle effects (Explosions, dust and debris)
- 3D Sound (Jets roaring past, Doppler effect)
- Fog (Underwater, dust clouds from the ruined city)
- Lens flare
- Grass and foliage
- Terrain

So, how long it'll take me to get that far in C++/OGRE etc is anybody's guess. But I'll post some screenshots as soon as I get something cool going.

The first issue of online magazine "BlitzMax coder" has been released. The highlights:

1. Interview with BlitzBasic mastermind Mark Sibly
2. Interview with Pete Carter, who is behind the "BlitzMax community framework", which is essentially a collection of useful community built libraries. Similar in principle to my Earok Engine, though it's for BlitzMax rather then Blitz3D, and it's a community rather then a solo effort (And, presumably, a lot better coded!)
3. Tutorial on how to code Beizer curves. I might find this useful in future as I wouldn't mind experimenting with Vector shapes
4. Interview with the guy behind the Bullet Candy games
5. Interview with a the guy making a faithful remake of the vector based Return of the Jedi arcade game.

A worthwhile read even for non-Blitz users, the magazine can be read here

The other day I had a poke around the "Playmaker NZ" forums at http://www.playmaker.org.nz, it's a new community portal for New Zealand game developers (a successor to the more or less dead forums at the NZGDA).

I noticed that the FAQ of the Design forum stated that it was the place where "Make my MMORPG" requests are to be posted, so for bit of a laugh I decided to write one. It was based in part on some forum posts I read from time to time (such as http://www.devmaster.net/forums/archive/index.php/t-3257.html).

The post I made is at http://www.playmaker.org.nz/mod/vanillaforum/vanilla/comments.php?DiscussionID=31

However, Playmaker's administrator took my tongue-in-cheek humour to be a deliberate troll (my intention was to amuse, not to annoy) and he knew my site had been taken down earlier this month so he drew the conclusion that the hacker got hold of my email, logged in with the credentials I had been sent and made that post. Now I can't log in any more!

I'm finding the whole thing hilarious. I haven't been accused of trolling since I was making dumb comments on the Perfect Dark forums at the age of 16!