Archive for the ‘ VBA4Play ’ Category

2048 – The Excel Version

You may have heard about the recent viral game 2048 by Gabriele Cirulli. It’s a perfect blend of addictive and frustrating. It’s a simple game where you match 2-like numbers placed next to each other to create a new tile of their sums. The goal is to get a tile of the value 2048.

2048 Screenshot

Well now there is a version playable entirely in Microsoft Excel! Co-developed by Peter Bartholomew and Petros Chatzipantazis, they bring all the fun of 2048 to a spreadsheet! You can download the excel version of 2048 for free here! The VBA is all open source so if you’re an advanced Excel wizard, have a look at the code to see how this all came together.

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2014
03/24
CATEGORY
Excel Games
VBA4Play
2 comments

VBA4Play: Making a Maze (Part 1: Your First Maze)

This post has been written by guest author Jordan Goldmeier of Advanced XL. 

Disclaimer: The following tutorial requires Conditional Formatting which is a feature of Excel 2010 and greater. If you are using an older version of Excel, please note that formatting will not work correctly for you.

This article is part of a series called “VBA4Play”, written in conjunction with Excel game developer, Cary Walkin, for his blog. Many thanks to Cary for inviting me to write a few tutorials for his series.

This post is a continuation of my first post for Cary Walkin’s VBA4Play series, Development Principles for Excel Games and Applications, and Cary’s first post, VBA4Play Part 1: Movement and Collision Detection. If you have not read either of these posts, I strongly suggest you read them before moving forward.

Today, we’ll be focusing on how you can turn regions of your spreadsheet into a map for a game. This will be similar to the illuminated pathway featured in the bottom-right of the spreadsheet maze shown below.

Maze

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2013
09/17
CATEGORY
VBA4Play
TAGS

32 comments

VBA4Play: Making a Maze (Prologue: Development Principles for Excel Games and Applications)

This post has been written by guest author Jordan Goldmeier of Advanced XL. 

This is part of a series called “VBA4Play,” written in conjunction with Excel game developer, Cary Walkin, for his blog. Many thanks to Cary for inviting me to write a few tutorials for his series.

My development approach is different from Cary’s. To be sure, there are many different development styles when in comes to Excel and, for that matter, in the software development world. However, my principles are ones I hold fast to. You may disagree with them, and I welcome you to challenge me in the comments should you feel inclined. But it’s far more important that you understand these principles and why I believe in them. Think of it as an Elements of Style for Excel development. (For the unfamiliar, The Elements of Style is English style guide with a list of rules and principles to English writing style.)

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2013
09/17
CATEGORY
VBA4Play
TAGS

2 comments

VBA4Play Part 2: Animation in Excel

This is the second part of the VBA4Play tutorial series. This tutorial is going to leverage off some of the code in VBA4Play Part 1: Movement and Collision Detection so be sure to view that prior to starting.

By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to make your own customized animations within Microsoft Excel. This tutorial is going to cover three different types of animation techniques: Uncontrolled, Wait, and Real-Time. Each type of animation has its own benefits and drawbacks so I’ll be going through the implementation of each of them step-by-step so that you will have the skills to use them in your own projects. Animation appears in every type of game so it’s important that we understand how to make effective animations so that we can make bigger and better games!

Okay, now let’s get started!

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2013
06/28
CATEGORY
Arena.Xlsm
VBA4Play
TAGS





4 comments

VBA4Play Part 1: Movement and Collision Detection

This is the first part of a new series called VBA4Play. The goal here is to use Arena.Xlsm as a learning tool to get more people to have fun with VBA. Ultimately, what I’d like to do is create new games together with you using the tools that I am going to be writing about in VBA4Play. To that end I want people to come up with their own ideas for games and put them in the comments or experiment with VBA and write some code for a future game. If your code becomes featured on VBA4Play, I may ask that you guest write the article in a step-by-step fashion so that everyone can follow along. I’m going to try to make this feature accessible to beginners so I apologize in advance to those of you who already have coding experience. Hopefully both beginners and advanced VBA users can learn from each other and build something amazing together. To that end, I am only going to guide the discussion, I would like this to be a community project so the power to see where this thing goes is in your hands.

Okay, now let’s get started!

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2013
04/03
CATEGORY
Arena.Xlsm
VBA4Play
TAGS




26 comments