CodingSucksILoveIt ... by Shaheed Abdol

 I have always been a huge fan of in-person interviews. I used to scoff when some of my friends would tell me that they had gone through AI interviews. I somehow thought it was an inferior process or technology. My eyes have been opened today - I've just completed my first AI-led interview, and it was quite fun. Normally it would take days before a human could be scheduled, and they would always be flustered or disinterested.  By comparison, I had barely submitted my resume when I was ushered into an AI powered interview. The process was quick, calm, efficient and most of all - I felt relaxed throughout. I'm usually very nervous when interviewing for positions, especially when the interviewers were my age or older (I'm hitting 40 soon) - there comes a level of experience and grumpiness that's paired with that age. I like the idea that I could submit a resume for a potential role I like, and immediately cross the first hurdle - getting an interview. When interviewing wit...

I've recently been able to wrestle time away from frantically busy days to pick up Game Development again - it's not the Console game development that's been ongoing for a few years now, no - it's just a simple prototype using PyGame. PyGame is quite a feature rich and mature library, allowing Pythonistas to enter into the world of graphical game development using SDL and OpenGL if they so choose. Using PyGame is incredibly easy, and it takes only a few minutes to get a basic prototype up and running. Performance suffers if one does not read the docs and cache whatever is needed, as memory allocation remains fairly slow on most computers - especially if it's something we end up doing once per frame. I see a need for better instrumentation that could be filled so that we don't have to resort to palour tricks in order to get frame-rate information from the game, as the very act of displaying that information uses up processing power. In my mind, there would be som...

 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....