I’ve been interested in Realm for quite a while now, but hadn’t really had a chance to look at it real closely. But it has popped up in different ways a bunch of times over the past couple of weeks, and I have a personal project that I think would be a good fit to try it out in. So that’s what I did this weekend, and I thought it’d be good to jot down my experience with it.   Read more...

Have you ever noticed how the ghosts in Pac-Man don’t all chase him in the same fashion? Does that kind of thing pique your interest? Well, it does mine! So I built a thing that visualizes their AI strategies and that’s what this post is going to be all about.   Read more...

Earlier this month I (partially) participated in Ludum Dare 31. I say partially, because I had a lot of family stuff going on that was going to take up most of my weekend, as I tweeted earlier in the week. But on Friday night after putting the kids to sleep I checked the theme and saw that it was one of the ones I had actively voted against: “Entire game on one screen”. So I was like, “Well, I guess it’s for the better; I didn’t want that theme anyway, so this’ll make it easier for me to ignore the compo/jam.” But then ideas started pouring into my head and some of them seemed like they were pretty good, too! I sat there, unable to sleep as I rolled these ideas through the tumbler over and over until I landed on an idea that not only sounded good, but I had a pretty good handle on how to do it and it might even be able to be completed in the < 24 hours I’d be able to commit to the jam.   Read more...

I’ve been working on a project at work for the past few months that started with a basic idea of what was required of it, and then after a series of proof-of-concept demos we now have a better idea of what this thing needs to do, and more importantly how it needs to do it. This type of organic development process is great, but it can have some side effects for the code base. Primarily there are some code paths that made it into the code base to support some functionality that is no longer required, as well as some implementations allowing for requirements that have either gone away or changed, leaving some strange looking implementation artifacts. Secondarily we did not have time to write tests and setup CI and all those other best practice and stability things. I spent most of my week addressing these two things.   Read more...

Work has been pretty busy this week so my off-time has been spent reading more than coding. And now that I’ve decided that I’ll be making my own “engine” and using C or C++ for a large portion of it, my next task is to decide between C and C++.   Read more...

After just a few days of the game a week challenge I realized that I’m not ready to start that yet. Not if I want to succeed at it anyway, and not if I want to use my own engine as opposed to Unity or something similar.   Read more...

Today I wanted to get it figured out where the line will be drawn as to which logic is written in C/C++ and what gets done in Lua.   Read more...

Getting started on this week’s game on Friday night… The first week was already going to be a little funky because I’d need to get a few pre-requisite things done:   Read more...

By day I’m a mobile developer working for Esri at their Portland R&D Center. By night (and weekend), when not playing with my kids, I really enjoy making games, though. So recently I took a week off from the day job to work on a game idea I’ve been rolling around for quite some time (while the kids are at school). I had a prototype working but I wanted to give it my full attention for a week and see where I could get it in that time. I’ll talk more about the details of the game in other posts, this one is more about the experience of said “Game Dev Week”.   Read more...