CodingSucksILoveIt ... by Shaheed Abdol

 My dearest wife, The world has been so cruel to us. First the world was hateful towards you in your youth, it hated me too in my teens. Next, the world took its sweet time keeping us apart for all those years. When we finally found each other, we were both already well spent from a lifetime of struggle. As if to add insult to injury, we've barely had the shortest decade together and now the world is ending. The world sits on the brink of war, while our beloved homeland sits on the brink of economic collapse and starvation. The sweet fragrance of the flowers of our youth has been replaced with masks as disease ravages our world. No more flowers will bloom when the last bee dies. Through all this, I've found you, and it's been fun. If the world takes me before I can say it: "I don't know what comes next, but I promise to find you in every lifetime. I'm so sorry that you might live this lifetime without me, I'll make it up to you in the next one, pinky swear.

Ok, so it's been a while since my last update. I've been grinding away at this game so hard, and made very little progress as you can see here.   I've been grinding away at this game for a while now and I've learned a lot. The number one thing I've learned so far is that I should have spent a few weeks learning a really good game engine and then just used that.  I've spent so much time just writing boilerplate and infrastructure, that I've yet to build a decent game.  I remember complaining so much about the lack of game engine choices and how hard they are to learn - but, it's even harder writing everything from scratch. And when I say "everything", I mean EVERYTHING!  I've created resource loading classes, scene management, view trees, sound management, audio queues, playlists, rendering pipelines, camera classes, starfields, parallax scrolling, state management.  Everything, painstakingly written from scratch.  For one redeeming moment

So I recently took the plunge and joined the Xbox One Creators Program with Microsoft. It turns out that it's supposed to be incredibly hard to build these little games we see all the time, and for the most part, it is. Not only do we have to deal with the fact that the XBOX One does not use the stripped down PowerPC architecture that the Xbox360's used to run on, we now have to contend with the fact that it's basically running Windows 10. I remember the good old days when win32 and GDI (Graphics Device Interface) were sufficient to get a decent game running on a Windows PC - especially if the game wasn't too resource intensive. Then came Direct(X/3D/2D/11/12) with all its COM (Component Object Model) Glory -> which, perhaps most asinine of all -> is still being used today. Getting into the creators program costs a little bit of money, and that's mostly to keep the chancers out and cover administration fees. After that you really only need to abide by the

Well, if you're new here - congratulations on finding the most useless blog on the planet. If you're not new here, thanks for coming back to another installment of "And he just keeps moaning!", this weeks episode deals with how hard it is to select a Game Engine for your development needs. As I've mentioned in the past, there are many things to consider when developing a game: Storyboarding Specification document Game Engine Resources (art / sound / levels) Time constraints Return on Investment Since I've preached about the Specification Document all throughout my last post , I'll save you a little bit of reading by saying it's nearly the most important part of the entire process - nevermind having a compelling game - without the specification document, nothing gets built. Storyboarding is kind of like the specification document, but it allows you to draw little screens of the game as you imagine it to be, without too much detail.

For those of you who follow my blog, you'll notice that I talk about building games, but I never really release anything useful or fully playable. I'm more interested in studying the individual parts of game development, without really caring about building a game as a whole. Well, for the most part this is perfectly acceptable, as I'm not a game developer by trade, and my bread and butter comes from being a utility developer. I've defined utility developer as someone who codes a variety of things without specializing in any specific discipline. As a self-taught developer, it's been hard for me to pivot into a role where I'm classed as a game developer by trade. This is all good and well, but I still want to talk about game development as a whole - specifically how to get a game off the ground. If you've been following any blog about game development, or any programming course which walks you through the process, you've most likely heard of all the jar

So, for a work-project, the language choice handed down by the Overlords-Of-Jobbing has been TypeScript. You see - where I work, we build websites, and we build the infrastructure to support those websites. We also build platforms to support the website-supporting-infrastructure . . . so we like to iterate quickly and be as agile as possible in our workflow. For the current clientele we're servicing it has been decided that TypeScript on the Babel toolchain would be the most productivity-boosting language we could use, and as a result I've had to learn this new-fangled language with all its idiosyncrasies. Now, TypeScript is awesome, it supports both static and dynamic typing, lambdas, the entirety of JavaScript and all the associated libraries and frameworks which come with JS. TypeScript is awesome. TypeScript: - will mend fences - paint your garage - spay your cat - neuter your dog - rent Clerks II on DVD - run you a nice hot bath after a long day But, the m