Month: June 2011

Original Author: Jaymin Kessler Disclaimer: I am not on the PixelJunk team, so if you liked the game I probably had zero to do with it! Conversely, if there were parts you disliked, I’m probably not the person to talk to 🙂 By now, everyone on the planet should have played PixelJunk Shooter 2, but … Continue reading “PixelJunk Shooter 2 lighting : My one (so far) regret”

Original Author: Paul Laska Links to other parts: Ready, Set, Allocate! (Part 1) Ready, Set, Allocate! (Part 2) Ready, Set, Allocate! (Part 3) Ready, Set, Allocate! (Part 4) Ready, Set, Allocate! (Part 5) In this part I will cover three tests. The first test examines how long it takes to do a set number of … Continue reading “Ready, Set, Allocate! (Part 6)”

Original Author: David Czarnecki TL;DR In the last 2 weeks I’ve ported my leaderboard library, originally written in Ruby, to PHP and Java. It has been an extremely fulfilling endeavor for a number of reasons. 99 PROBLEMS Let’s face it, we’ve all been on epic e-mail threads where someone poses a problem, e-mail armchair development … Continue reading “Re-Education (Through Leaderboards)”

Original Author: Emmeline Pui Ling Dobson Throughout my career I’ve experienced peaks and troughs. In the name of professionalism I always try to find something inspiring to grasp on to, a reason to do my task(s) that links the work to some internal motivation. I love to do work from my heart. When I’m not … Continue reading “Am I Doing Meaningful Game Design Work?”

Original Author: Nicolas Fournel Paradoxically, most audio engines are deaf. They take decisions that will impact the audio output of a game without listening to what they are playing. The same can be said of sound tools: they will randomize, pitch up and down, loop and combine sounds but they don’t really have any knowledge … Continue reading “Your engine is deaf and your tool is dumb. What can you do about it? (Part 1)”

Original Author: Martin Pichlmair This post is part one of a short series of posts about my progress in searching a viable GUI solution for our in-game/live editor. It is live coverage of my research and implementation. I welcome any and all feedback. We’ve integrated live-editing into AntTweakBar. Now that the system has outgrown what … Continue reading “The Quest for the Ginkgo GUI”

Original Author: Ann-Cudworth As some of you may know, I have recently developed an interest in making the games that I design for Second Life and other virtual worlds as accessible to disabled players as possible.  Over the last 10 days, one of them has been shown at SL8B, the laggy, cacophonous, eye candy filled street fair that … Continue reading “Do we live for what our games give to people?”

Original Author: Pete Collier It has been almost 6 months now since I co-founded our games company Hogrocket. I’ve learnt a lot over this period and it feels like the right time to write some of that down and share it. I hope that it’ll be of interest to you. Some of the points may … Continue reading “Running a games company start-up – what I’ve learnt so far”

Original Author: James Podesta When I was young, I used to read all manuals like I read my fantasy novels. Take them into my bedroom for the weekend and read from the first page to the last, in order, skipping nothing. I would devour every piece of information in the order they chose to present … Continue reading “RTFM – TL;DR”

Original Author: Michael Tedder In a post a few months ago here on #AltDevBlogADay, Aras Pranckevičius discussed three approaches to eliminating the virtual function call overhead when using different class implementations on different platforms. One approach that wasn’t introduced in that post was one which utilizes templates.  Although there was some discussion in the comments … Continue reading “Platform Abstraction with C++ Templates”