May 04, 2006
So for the past couple of days I've been adding audio triggers to the game. In the context of my engine this is a really easy thing to do. Just ask the audio manager to play a particular audio resource and voila you get your sound.
Even though it's not technically challenging work adding these t…
Even though it's not technically challenging work adding these t…
May 02, 2006
Well it looks like my networking over the years is finally paying off. My email request for artists looking for work came back with a bunch of great leads. It looks like I may have solved my artist woes. Finally my ugly dev art can die a pitiful death!
While I finalize the art plans I've finally …
While I finalize the art plans I've finally …
May 01, 2006
My goal for this week is to kick start my search for an artist. With that in mind this morning I sent out emails to a bunch of my contacts who might know available artists. I'm going to give it a couple days to see what kind of leads this generates. I'd really like to find someone through a refe…
April 30, 2006
Now that my project is "feature complete" I figured it was a good time to take a weekend and just go back and clean things up a bit. I'm not talking about re-architecting, just making sure all the header files are neat, comments are where they should be, etc.
The biggest task I wanted to tackle w…
The biggest task I wanted to tackle w…
April 28, 2006
In a totally non-game related research project for work today I checked out SQLite. I've done a bunch of DB stuff in the past including some game work so I was checking it out since I heard it was a great lightweight solution that could replace things like ugly MDB files.
All in all I am impresse…
All in all I am impresse…
April 25, 2006
As of this morning I can happily say that my current project is "feature" complete. There is still a bunch of polish work that needs to be done like adding the right sounds to the right triggers, getting all the dev art replaced with real art, tuning, general cleanup, but all of the core functiona…
April 24, 2006
This weekend was the first real weekend with sun and warm weather here in Seattle so I couldn't get myself motivated to stay indoors at all. Sunshine and a little time away from your projects can be a good thing in the long run. Burn out is still a killer and a couple days will keep you from goin…
April 21, 2006
One of the least exciting dev tasks is finding all of the small functionality that you are missing and add it. This is the stage my current project has hit. I'm going through and figuring out what polish I need on the core functionality and adding it. This morning was adding the ability to mute …
April 20, 2006
I've been developing using Visual Studio .NET 2003 Standard since the 2003 version came out. The way I figured it everything I needed in a development platform was in the Standard version so I just went with that. Ends up the C++ compiler in the standard version doesn't do any optimizations so yo…
April 18, 2006
I wanted to give some thanks for the kind words to my last entry. I didn't want to sound like a whiny bitch and wasn't looking for affirmation on my work but I wanted to make sure that this journal really represents the full spectrum of emotions that pop up while creating a game. With that said G…
April 18, 2006
I consider game design/coding/creation to be a form of art. That doesn't mean games need to be artistic but generally the process of creation is artistic in nature. As such we really shouldn't be surprised that game developers sometimes have the same problems that artists do. The major problem b…
April 16, 2006
This week in my day job was all about project reviews. This is where you get to stand up in front of all the big wigs and describe what your team accomplished in the past year, what you're planning on doing in the next year or two and then plead for more resources. In a way it's all about defendi…
April 13, 2006
To help out with my debugging my engine I added the ability to be able to run in single threaded mode as well as multi threaded. This allows me to easily look at a bug and figure out if it's being caused by multi-threading or not. The good part is that it was pretty much free to set up. After al…
April 10, 2006
So this morning I worked on integrating the rest of my resource manager into my game. All I had to do was change a couple function calls to handle the new async loading and I'd be on my way. Sure enough it only took me about 30 minutes to get the code compiling cleanly. Of course nothing is ever…
April 09, 2006
I've spent most of my weekend work time on adding all of my audio resource types to the resource manager. Following the same patterns that I already had for textures there wasn't anything crazy that I needed to figure out, I just needed to sit down and pound out the code. As anyone who's been pro…
April 06, 2006
While my goal is to go out on my own I think that working for a big company for a while can be good for everyone. Some may view it as selling their soul but the reality is that there is a lot about business or software development that you can learn from a soul-less money hungry corporation. :)
I'v…
I'v…
April 05, 2006
This morning I worked on integrating my resource manager into my game. The good news is that I didn't have any problems with the new code. It all ran flawlessly thanks to getting most of the bugs ironed out with unit tests. The tricky part was getting my game to use it properly. Up until now I'…
April 04, 2006
One of the problems that has been a thorn in my side with any side project that I've started is being distracted by new project ideas. It never fails to happen that about half way through my current project I come up with my next great idea to work on. The next great ideas don't have to be anothe…
April 03, 2006
After writing about wanting to be using TDD I finally gave into the urge to start using it. I've been fighting doing any big new things until I got all the game functionality into my current project but the need to geek out was just to much. After I made the decision to start creating some unit t…
April 01, 2006
Looking back at some of my previous entries it might come across that everything has gone super smoothly this time around on my current project. And while a lot has, thanks to learning from previously failed projects, it hasn't all been smooth sailing.
Being all into agile and iterative development…
Being all into agile and iterative development…
March 30, 2006
When you're working by yourself on a project it's really easy to get into bad habits. These turn into bad results, wasted time and a lack of motivation. In the past I'm slipped into bad habits that would never cut it in a real work place. This time I tried to start off on the right foot from day…
March 28, 2006
Since there's some interest in it I'll describe some of the multi-threading implementation I went with in my current code base. This is not the only way to do things and not necessarily the best way to do things. An ideal implementation would be extensible to handle a growing number of cores and …
March 28, 2006
The fun thing about my current code base is that I started it strictly as an educational excersize. A lot of the stuff I work on in my day job is on "Next-Gen" platforms so I've been dealing in the world of multi-processors. Unfortunately even though I have a technical background with a CS degree…
March 26, 2006
As Evelyn said in her response to my last entry, starting out alone can be a huge risk. Giving up a paying job to foster your own ambitions can be very difficult. I know a lot of people who have left great paying jobs in the industry to start out on their own only to come crawling back a year lat…
March 25, 2006
A huge number of people want to get a job in the games industry. Just getting back from GDC I have a stack of business cards from people who want a job or intership at my day job company. It is after all a great place to work. Good pay, good benefits, good products. All in all I am lucky to hav…
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