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Showing posts from 2018

Finding a Game Engine is Hard

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.

A few thoughts on Game Development

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

Typescript is Hard

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