SVN Owned: Lessons Learned

I’ve been using Subversion even as a single developer for several years now. It’s invaluable to me and millions of other developers. If you’re a developer working on any project that lasts more than a couple hours and you aren’t using version control then you are shooting yourself in the foot. As a developer, we’re comfortable with juggling several things in our heads at the same time, it’s a fundamental skill we use everyday when developing software....

July 18, 2009 · Alex

wxMax > MaxGUI

The title of this article says it all. I’m currently working on the next ‘iteration’ of Gunstyle with a fellow developer and over the past weekend we were in need of a GUI library to help develop our map editor. In the past maxGUI ‘worked’ more or _less…._emphasis on the _less_. The design of maxGUI left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It’s a procedural library that is cobbled together with some weak OO on top that didn’t provide much flexibility (not to mention it wasn’t exactly ‘native’ UI on different platforms)....

July 14, 2009 · Alex

Video Games Live!

I just recently got back from the “Video Games Live!” concert. In short, it was AMAZING. If they are performing in your local area, no, your state I highly recommend you take the effort to make it to one of their shows. It’s an all day event of games, contests, and meeting other gamers that’s capped off with a fun and amazing performance.

July 11, 2009 · Alex

Be A Time Ninja

I’ve settled into my new apartment and job and trying to get a decent schedule for working on my different game projects. For now my iPhone game is my ‘main’ project which I spend Monday through Friday working on in the evenings. Weekends I devote to side projects such as Gunstyle. Trying to make progress is getting increasingly harder as my time has become extremely limited to about 1 maybe 2 hours a night during the week....

July 11, 2009 · Alex

On the other side

Graduation is over :). Real world here I come. Anyway, going to be moving in probably a month or so. In the meantime I’ve got a lot more time to focus on some of my game projects. My main focus is finishing up an iphone game and it’s coming along great! Whenever I play it I end up playing it for a lot longer than needed for testing, so hopefully that’s a good thing :)....

May 6, 2009 · Alex

Physics, iPhone, and non-sense

It has been a while since my last blog post :(. If you’ve been following my twitter account though you’d know it’s still been a busy last couple of months. I’ve been developing things on several fronts lately. For one, I’ve been busy developing some supporting code to hook Opensteer into C4 in a more seamless matter and work with C4’s constructs in mind. It’s a project related to some school work, which has proven to be challenging and fun....

March 19, 2009 · Alex

A Little Twitter Never Hurt Anyone

I’ve decided to give this twitter thing a try. I’m going to try to keep that feed updated as much as possible on my progress throughout the several projects I’m involved with. I’m spread a little thin at the moment so trying to find time to come up with a substantial blog post is becoming increasingly difficult. I’ll try to come up with some blog posts when I hit some milestones for my projects in the future....

January 21, 2009 · Alex

Off To A New Year

Yea, I’m a little late posting about the ‘new year’. My last post pretty much covered what I had to say about 2008. I’m still in flux at the moment getting settled into my new schedule for the semester. Just got off the phone with a colleague discussing potential themes, styles, and design goals for our upcoming XNA game. After spending 3-4 months prototyping the ideas we had in our heads I think we’ve cut the fat and finally have something we can focus on getting done....

January 8, 2009 · Alex

Year In Review

I’m finding it hard to believe its almost 2009 already! I guess it’s that time of the year where I start reflecting on my accomplishments and shortcomings. Back in January I had set the goal of completing a commercial game. Well, that never came to fruition for various reasons. It was mainly a conflict in balancing school responsibilities with game development (which at this point in time couldn’t be considered anything but ‘hobby’)....

December 15, 2008 · Alex

Farseer.BMX Update (v 1.1)

I was made aware of a serious issue with detecting collisions between TGeom’s recently. While it did not affect anyone who was using the engine and letting the TPhysicsSimulator run and manage collisions and dynamics, anyone who wished to use Farseer.BMX’s collision routines separately by calling TGeom.CollideWithGeometry() ran into issues. The code has since been fixed and updated. Please update your Farseer.BMX module so you can continue using it without this annoying bug....

October 14, 2008 · Alex