Month: July 2013

Original Author: Lee Winder Recently myself and Andrew Fray (@tenpn) presented “Git Off My Lawn” at Develop 2013 in Brighton. The talk was designed to discuss how we took a Perforce centric development process and moved over to one centred around Git and a Git based branching work flow. As with most presentations the slides … Continue reading “Git Off My Lawn – Develop 2013”

Original Author: Keith Judge At the Develop Conference in 2011, Sean Murray of Hello Games was the keynote speaker for the Indie Dev Day. One key point he made was that we hear a lot about the successful indie developers, but barely ever hear from those who failed in the pursuit of their dream. This … Continue reading “Confessions of a failed indie developer”

Original Author: Timo Heinapurola Imagine a situation where you have just been employed by a game development company with a large code base. You might setup your computer, adjust your chair, get some coffee and then start synchronizing your source code repositories. This might take a long while so you decide to take a look … Continue reading “What documentation?”

Original Author: Ted Spence If you work with a big company, chances are you’ll have to deal with a ticket tracking system. They’ve become a critical part of IT helpdesk operations, of scrum and agile teams, of collaborating with remote teams, and pretty much everything. But tickets can lead to development paralysis, especially when they’re … Continue reading “The Trouble with Tickets”

Original Author: Mike Wuetherick As mentioned previously, I’ve started fleshing out the backend for the server that I’m looking to build for my ongoing experiments. Let’s recap the key points: The first 2 elements to our server design can be broken nicely into: Static Content (Metadata) Dynamic Content (Player data) Metadata You can consider metadata … Continue reading “Data-driven design with Unity 3d, Part 2 – Server design / API and assumptions”

Original Author: Keith Fuller In visiting with various companies over the past few months I’ve been struck by the common occurrence of certain leadership flaws. I won’t whitewash them…these aren’t “tendencies” or “styles” or any easy-to-swallow aphorism. They threaten the stability of your studio, the happiness of your team, and they’re so common that I … Continue reading “These Leadership Flaws Must Be Stopped Before They Eat Tokyo”

Original Author: Amir Ebrahimi previous article was a deep dive into my own personal experience of burnout and depression and what it took me to regain my own health, vitality, and enthusiasm for the work that we all do. In this final article, I take a look at conditions of the work environment, share some … Continue reading “Life can be better (part 3 of 3)”

Original Author: Paolo Torelli There you are! You, yes you! Been tasked with a new feature or a change, to the code or a script, to be done by yesterday, haven’t you? Yes, yes, I know your pain. You’ll be wading through oddly named files, containing briefly labeled identifiers for elements in an obscure relation, … Continue reading “There’s nothing like a tidy codebase”

Original Author: Robert-Walter Today, I would like to introduce the Xtext framework to you. Xtext is an open source framework which allows you to define your own textual programming languages before you know it. Xtext was not developed specifically with game developers as a target group in mind. It is rather independent in terms of … Continue reading “Creating powerful languages with Xtext”

Original Author: Chris Park Postmortem sounds so grisly, doesn’t it? I was tempted to call this a retrospective, but that sounds a bit foofy. So here we are. This isn’t even a true retrospective, because AI War is still going strong and looks to remain that way for some time. The time period this postmortem … Continue reading “AI War: First Four Years Postmortem (And By Extension Arcen History)”