Yes, and it’s not as hard as you think
I am about to engage in something highly experimental in nature. At the start of next month, my team and I will be doing the Low Rez Game Jam on itch.io. It is a two week game jam with an interesting constraint. Your game needs to fit into a 64x64 pixel screen size.
I am also doing something kind of unusual in the game jam world. I have decided not to use any third party game engines and have spent the past week and a half making a custom game engine specifically for this game jam.
In theory, all of…
Imagine driving to work each day in a car packed full of clowns. There’s Bozo in the passenger seat. Curly, Moe, Larry, and Ellison occupy the back row. Open up the trunk, and you will find three more clowns neatly packed inside, like sardines.
Were you to drive such a car, you might eventually make some comments about the daily inconvenience.
You may note that you don’t want to wait for all of the clowns to get into the car before turning the key to start it. …
How do you change a culture? How do you innovate?
Whenever something is innovative it by definition does something different from what is considered the common accepted practice.
One day the popular thing to do is X, and then after some change, that popular practice becomes something else, Y.
Innovation means changing what we do, making a suggestion that we do something new. If the innovator is right, other people will adopt the new way of doing things because it provides more value than the previous way. This is how you change civilization for the better.
What is the Antisocial Fallacy?
Within certain programming circles…
With new technologies, new frameworks, and new management fads coming and going every year, I feel pretty badly for beginners. Here you are, just trying to learn to code, and you’re getting overwhelmed with all of these different learning paths.
Do you learn web development? React Native? Native iOS? Android? Unity? Unreal? PHP? Javascript? What about Swift?
On top of that, you’re being hit on both sides from people promoting various programming ideologies. Is object oriented programming The One True Way? Shall we renounce it and embrace functional programming as the path to enlightenment?
All of these seem like important…
It does not involve simply using the nearest neighbor filter
If you create games on any of Apple’s platforms, there’s a decent chance your game is using Metal as the renderer. This not only applies to games you create with a third party engine like Unity or Unreal. It also applies to Apple’s game tools like Sprite Kit and Scene Kit.
Even if you’re nutty enough to create your own game engine like I have, and you’re shipping to one of Apple’s platforms, you will likely be working with Metal as well.
In this article I will show you how to render perfect pixel art that scales by any arbitrary…
It is more stupid and straightforward than you think
There are roughly 8 billion people on planet Earth. Every single one of them needs to eat, be clothed, and stay sheltered from nature and disease. We require expensive medical care. To do all of these things, we need money.
Money is a form of leverage which allows you to hire people to help you with these most basic of needs and more.
You hire people to ship food from all over the world to a single location so you can eat it and stay alive. You pay your government to keep foreign invaders at bay, so you can have…
A 2D Puzzle Platformer where you edit the level to solve puzzles
If you’ve been reading my articles, you may wonder if all of this advice is backed up by any real world accomplishments. It’s a reasonable question to ask. Indeed it is the only question you should ask of anyone whom you might consider a mentor or source of learning.
I’ve been working on this game since last September, and it is the most ambitious project to date. …
I’ve been making software for nearly twenty years now. It’s amazing to reflect back on my early days and to see myself as someone just learning how to code.
The character of that experience is punctuated with moments of confusion about the structure of the software I was writing. I would often stare at the screen while my mind raced trying to think of how the various code modules I was about to write would fit together. I was, in effect, trying to solve big code organization problems before actually writing a single line of code.
Indeed, my story is…
Even if it takes more time
About a year ago, I received a mildly discouraging comment on one of my YouTube videos.
At the time, I had been working on my indie game and game engine for about a year. I’d made some progress, but it wasn’t totally obvious how far along I had come, so the guy writing the comment seemed justified in his criticism.
Here’s what he said:
“What’s wrong with just using a commercial game engine? I have a feeling you will have great-great-grand children before a game is ever done with this.”
Now, I don’t want to bag on him. I actually…
Contrasting the way I hire artists with the way recruiters find software talent
Believe it or not, I am in the business of hiring people. I have been working on a video game project for the past six months, and it has finally gotten to a place where I can start bringing other people onto the team.
And this is a rather refreshing feeling because it’s nice to work with other people and not be totally alone on this journey. It’s also great to look over the work of these artists. I’m frankly blown away with their skill and talent, and I can only wish that I could possess such talents.
My father…
