MineBlower is an alleged game I developed over several years for my Interactive and Game Audio class to support a major project in audio asset creation. The goal of the project was to learn about audio production by replacing my lousy audio assets with better ones. Unfortunately, my lousy audio assets actually worked, given the overall cheesiness of the graphics and the game itself, as you can experience by playing the game as it is distributed here.

MineBlower5 (fifth version) is a rather large Processing program (19 classes) that uses the Minim audio library, which is semi built into Processing. I’m distributing it here as a zip file of Processing code and assets, which means that if you want to play it, you’ll have to download it on your computer and install Processing to run it. That’s right – it won’t work on your phone or pad.

Install Processing – Follow these instructions to install Processing on your computer and set up the Minim library. You should do this before you download MineBlower or any other Processing programs you want to run.

Once Processing is installed with Minim, follow these instructions (for a Mac, but Windows and Linux are similar) to download and run MineBlower.

• Go to your “Documents” folder in a Finder window.
• There should be a folder called “Processing” there, which was created when you installed Processing.
• If there is not, make one.
• Download MineBlower.zip to someplace (like your Downloads folder)
• Move MineBlower.zip, into the Processing folder in your Documents.
• Double-Click on the zip file, which should create a folder called “MineBlower”
• Inside the MineBlower folder, double click on the file zip file “MineBlower5.zip” to create the MineBlower5 folder, which contains all the code and assets for the game
• Navigate inside the MineBlower5 folder
• Double-click on “MineBlower.pde”, which should load up all the code and assets for MineBlower5 into Processing.

• You should see a window with a bunch of tabs (19 to be exact, if you grow the code window wide enough), one for each class in the MineBlower program.
• In the upper-left corner of the Processing window there should be a play button (Circle with right-pointing arrow head) and a stop button (Circle with a square in it).
• Click the play button.
• After a few seconds, the game should pop up in a 1400 X 1000 pixel window showing the initial instructions.
• After reading the instructions, type ‘s’ to start the game, and have fun!

• To escape from the game, you can
  • Type ‘q’ for quit,
  • Click on the close box on the game window, or
  • Hit the stop button in the Processing code window.

If you want to actually do the project and replace all my lousy assets with your stuff, you’ll find documents inside the MineBlower folder to guide you, assuming you know your way around a sound editor or DAW. You also are welcome to peruse the code if you like and even make modifications, if you’re so inclined. Beware, though, that it’s pretty complex, which is not surprising given that this is version 5. A stroll through the design doc in the MineBlower folder should give you an indication…

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