Travis Vroman

Edit: As I was writing this article, I hit the website one more time and saw this: GarageGames has been slowly dying off for years now, at least at it’s original core website at http://garagegames.com. It’s been pretty inactive overall since 2017 (before that, really) but has always just been around. Not anymore, unfortunately. I started this conversation on my Twitter page, but felt this deserved a bit more background. For those of you perhaps new to game development and never heard of GarageGames, literally founded in a garage in 2000 by Jeff Tunnell, Tim Gift, Rick Overman and Mark Frohnmayer as a way to help anyone be able to get their hands on a game engine and be able to make games. Until then, most game engines were prohibitively expensive and inaccessible to small or solo developers. GarageGames changed […]

That certainly is the question. Well, it’s one of many when it comes to graphics programming (or really any kind of programming). This question came up in the comments on one of my YouTube videos and I answered it there, but figured I’d go more in depth here. The question, in its original form (TL; DR below): Hi Travis, I hope I can ask you a question about Vulkan wrappers.. Because I can see that you have a lot of them, like a wrapping struct around all (or most) Vulkan objects, but also wrappers around some Vulkan functions as well. So I was wondering: In your experience, what are the tradeoffs/advantages of this approach, in contrast to not having wrappers but using Vulkan directly? Another popular youtuber (Arseny Kapoulkine) was arguing against creating such wrappers saying “I wish people would […]

Hello everyone! It’s been a bit since I’ve posted here. I’ve been really busy as of late, namely with the development of Kohi and it’s newly-launched website, https://kohiengine.com. For those of you who aren’t aware, Kohi is the name of the game engine I am developing as part of my ongoing YouTube Game Engine Series, where we build an entire engine from the ground-up using C and Vulkan. Check it out and, if you haven’t already, hit the subscribe button and mark kohiengine.com as a favorite to get the latest on updates on the project.

That’s a lot to cover in one post. Basically, I want to talk some about these things together as they relate to my Kohi Game Engine Series on YouTube. In case you’re not aware of it, it’s a series I am hosting where I am building a game engine from the ground up completely in C, using Vulkan as a rendering backend (at least initially). I’ve answered some of what is discussed here on video, but I’ll break this down a bit more in detail here. Disclaimer: Please note that everything contained here is my opinion. If you disagree, that’s fine. I’m not saying you have to agree with me. It’s not a “my way or the highway” situation here. I’m also not going to say I’m an expert on any of this. This is merely an overview of my […]

I’ve been writing code for a long time. In fact, I started when I was 7 with QBASIC on MS-DOS 6.22. That’s nearly 28 years. So, I’ve by extension been typing for a long time, but never the “right” way. I never learned touch-typing. Yep. A programmer who doesn’t touch-type. Madness! Now, for the most part I stopped having to actually look at the keyboard years ago. I use a typing style that’s 5 or 6 fingers and average about 50 words per minute. Not abysmal, but not great either. But it is about the fastest I will be able to get with that “technique”. Accuracy is also absolute rubbish. Therefore, I decided it’s time to change all that by learning to type the proper way. I’ve been at it for 2 days now and am sitting at an abysmal […]

Yep, you read that right. Just 3 videos in and I’ve decided to reboot the series. Quality. Put simply, I was not happy with how the series was going. I felt that I skipped some important things, and that the videos weren’t split up/planned out well enough. So, the series is getting a reboot. The new C series, aptly named Introduction to C, will instead begin with a deep-dive on how computers represent data before jumping into other details like data types and how the compiler works on a high level. I’ll also be recording the bulk of the series on Linux, since the workflow there is far simpler than that in Visual Studio. Rest assured, though, Windows users, there will be a video for you too. I’ll be touching on everything from language basics to some of the things […]

I have decided to do a thing. A big thing. I’m going to make a game completely from scratch. Start to finish. Not only the game logic, but the engine which runs it, as well as the art. Possibly even the music. It’s something I’ve wanted to do for years, and I think I am finally ready to do it. It is going to take a long time, and will be extremely frustrating, but it is time. I do not yet have a full vision for what the end product will be yet, but I do have a lot of inspiration and a general direction. I’m planning on doing several things: Keep a running log of the entire process from start to finish. Some of it may be here, some will likely be in the form of video down the […]

For a long time, I’ve been teetering on the fence on learning Vulkan because of its steep learning curve. Well, earlier this month I finally decided to take the plunge. This is the first in a series of articles discussing my process of learning Vulkan and my progress along the way. NOTE: I’ll be posting links to a lot of resources at the bottom of this article. A Brief History I’ve been programming against OpenGL and its variants since around 2011 or so. In the last couple of years I’ve done a lot of programming against WebGL and more recently I’ve begun experimenting with WebGL2. I also did some DirectX 9, 10 and 11 programming several years ago, but never really went anywhere with it. So, I started this with a familiarity with graphics programming concepts – at least on […]

I wanted to post a quick but super-helpful resource that was pointed out to me for Japanese immersion. It’s a live, constantly-running, freely-available news stream. It is available to watch here or on YouTube directly: Enjoy!

First, a recap of 2019 (and 2018, kinda) 2019 has been a difficult year for me in general. I’ve been very busy with life and work. 2018 was much the same unfortunately. Sometimes there are more important things in life than hobbies, such as a close family member becoming sick and shortly after losing them, or another having a very close call. It serves as a reminder that, no matter how much you want to do something, life sometimes unavoidably gets in the way. And that’s okay. The key, however, is to bounce back from whatever trials you may encounter. This post is the start of that bounce-back for me (technically, the bounce-back has started, but now I am recording it). In 2018, I launched my game development YouTube channel over at http://youtube.com/travisvroman. A *lot* of time went into that. […]