Development

Today I had to install nodejs on a new dev machine for a separate project. I did the reasonable thing and went to nodejs.org and installed from there. Little did I know what insanity I was in for. After it finished spewing garbage all over my dev machine for several minutes, I went back and tried to remove as much of the cruft as I could and went with nvm-windows. It installed in half a second, and installed a version of node even quicker, and no ridiculious other dependencies....

When it comes to gui coding I don’t typically find it the most glamorous things to do. Particularly when dealing with games. You are left with writing a lot of boiler plate GUI code that is tightly integrated with your rendering pipeline. And even when I do find gui libraries for games they tend to try to emulate the OS in look and feel. When you want something lightweight and very interactive/animated you typically have to write it and integrate it yourself....

I try to avoid music with lyrics while working as it ends up being distracting for me when trying to work through some problem or bug. For the last several years I’ve been listening to chillout/lounge/ambient music. A couple of the sites I tune in to in case you wish to expand your listening playlist: Digitally Imported – Chillout Channel SomaFM – Groove Salad

I’ve had this issue in past 2D games all the time. The ability to interpolate 2D rotations for basic animations for anyone that doesn’t understand quaternions becomes a rather laborious task. I’ve done messy if-then statements to try to catch all the cases where rotation hits the ‘360 to 0’ boundary and it’s always ugly and seemed like there had to be a more mathematically correct way to interpolate a circular value....

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....

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....

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 :)....