The more you know about a given topic, the more you realize that no one knows anything.
For some reason (why God, why?) my topic of choice is game development. Everyone in that field agrees: don't add networked multiplayer to an existing game, you drunken clown.
Well, I did it anyway bec…
After two and a half years, it's finally, officially announced.
And it got some attention!
Here's PC Gamer: http://www.pcgamer.com/deceiver-is-a-philosophical-shooter-that-lets-you-shoot-drones-through-enemies/
And Rock Paper Shotgun: https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/0…
Each of us have our own giants to face. This is a story about one of my giants. Something I never imagined could make a grown man cry, until it did.
A 3D camera.
No one can face your giants for you. This is a story, not a walkthrough. Expect no useful information. For that I recommend 50…
Alone on a Friday night, in need of some inspiration, you decide to relive some of your past programming conquests.
The old archive hard drive slowly spins up, and the source code of the glory days scrolls by...
Oh no. This is not at all what you expected. Were things really this bad? Why did no one …
Allow me to regale you with an exciting tale: the birth of a janky dialogue and voice system.
I have a JSON file with all the localized strings in my game, like this:{ "danger": "Danger", "level": "Level %d", ...}
A preprocessor takes this and generates a header file with integer constants for each …
The game industry hit Peak Advice Blog a while ago. Every day I [s]read[/s] skim ten articles telling me how to live.
Fear not! I would never give you useful advice. This series is about me writing bad code and you laughing at my pain.
First Contact
Say you have some voxels which occasionally get mo…
Friday 21:15
Fifteen minutes after the theme announcement, my friend Ben Homan walks through my front door. Not really my front door, I'm just a subletter. But this is a first. Normally he ignores our instructions to walk in without knocking. The first time, he texted me from the driveway.
21:30
Jess…
We'll cover some standard tips and tricks here, but we're not really interested in those. We're looking for the One Weird Trick to rule them all. Hopefully each trick we encounter brings us closer to coding Mecca.
In the beginning
The first video game I ever wrote was called Ninja…
Not release day, no. The day we can finally write a postmortem full of pretentious anecdotes, bad jokes, and unsolicited advice.
Well I just finished a ga…
Look for a more in-depth postmortem... soon. It's 6:30am and I haven't slept yet.
For the first time ever, I shelled out for Adobe Premiere rather than hacking something together in Movie Maker and OpenShot. I didn't use any of the fancy features, but it was worth it just to avoid dealing with crashes all the …
- In …
Just so you know, there are sixty of those lights and I had to hook up each one individually. It fell just barely benea…
The story starts with 19 year old me in a dorm room next to the Ohio State stadium. I don't have the repo from this stage of development (SVN at the time), but I remember the process clearly.
[size=2]Photo by Kristen Sutton
XNA 4 comes out in Sept…
Sometimes I had to go out and pull people in, but most of the time, there was a line. My favorite customer by far was this kid:
H…
Then I made this week's map.
Who knew purple and green could look so... not terrible?
Anyway, this puts me ahead of schedule. There are three levels remaining. My goal is to for the game to be playable from start to finish by the end of February. …
...which also included some story-related writing and scripting, and actually started working on NEXT week's level, which looks like this:
I seem to be on a purple streak lately. Actually, pur…
The jam lasted 48 hours. My entry is called…
Although most of Lemma is a strange hybrid of natural and alien-looking architecture, my design calls for a few "industrial / man-made" themed maps. For story reasons, and also because I just want to parkour through a sky…
The move is mostly for my own sanity. Turns out, working alone in your apartment for 9 months isn't the most fun in the world. It's a Herculean effort just to stay motivated. I also lost all semblance of a disciplined sleep schedule.
Produc…
These past two weeks I made two more frost levels. The plan calls for one more frost level, then it's on to the other two biomes.
Clicky for giffy
Both of these levels have interes…
My voxel renderer now has the capability to overlay everything with any texture I want. I'm using it on a new set of interconnected winter levels. This way I don't have to manually come up with a frosty version of each texture.
Without giving away too much, this week I built a n…
With these two ideas in mind, I am focusing the next few months on makin…
New dev blog
First off, my website got a much-needed overhaul. The horrible slowness of Wordpress.com was driving me nuts, so I switched to a custom-built site.
I used Jekyll, which is a static site generator. It spits out a bunch of HTML files which you can upload to…
Behold, new challenge levels! These are timed, bite-sized maps with simple goals that can be completed in under a minute. They're the kind of things you can create in the level editor and share on Steam.…
- Days to create an FPS: 7
- Hours spent: 93
- Levels built: 5
- Lines of code written: 2313
- Hours to spare before deadline: 2
- Functioning brain cells remaining: approximately 4
I'm happy with the result, though. Jack did a great job on the audio as …
The Oculus Rift was a huge hit!
I worked on various improvements right up to the expo. First, some new textures for moving platforms and doo…
[color=rgb(85,85,85)][font=Arial]In this article I present an idea that may help both sides of GamerGate survive the ordeal. Simply this: negative movements are counter-productive. Positive movem…
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[font='Open Sans']Now it's back to work on Lemma:[/font]
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[font='Open Sans']I'll be running a…
Yesterday I gave a talk at Dev Workshop Conf introducing the basic concepts of vertex and fragment shaders. Unfortunately I don't have a video, just this one potato picture:[/font][/color][color=rgb(85,85,85)][font=Arial]
[/font][/color][color=rgb(85,85,85)][font=Ari…
