Category Archives: Development

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 […]

It’s been a while since I have created and actually published a game. The last one I did was released in 2014, which was just a simple Flappy Bird clone called StupidDuck. Having the itch to release a game of my own again, I decided to set myself up with a challenge – to complete a game in 24 hours. The challenge was to develop an entire game in less than 24 hours total time. To clarify, this means 24 hours of development time, not one calendar day. The game is based around an idea I roughly came up with almost 10 years ago. It involves a farmer named Jethro, who must rescue and protect his cattle during an alien invasion. The game would be a sokoban-style game, which involves the player moving cattle on a tile-based screen to a series of goal tiles. The game […]

I just re-read an old article that I was reminded of when it comes to software architecture and design. It’s called Good Programmers Get Off Their Butts. The basic idea here is that it becomes all to easy to spend copious amounts of time trying to architect the perfect solution. In reality, no such thing exists. Before I continue on, it is important to note that I do not imply that planning is not important, and that planning tools such as UML are useless. As the article says: Coding without planning is just as futile as coding with too much planning. You must plan. Basically, the premise is that, at some point, you need to just start coding. Have a read of the article. It’s an oldie but a goodie:Good Programmers Get Off Their Butts. Speaking of which, I did get some work done on the […]

For those of you who are unaware, I’ve been posting videos for quite a while now on my YouTube channel (here). I started this channel (well, relaunched, honestly) about halfway through last year as a channel for game development. Since then, I’ve posted my thoughts about the industry as a whole, or specific topics therein.  However, I also lauched a TypeScript Game Engine Tutorial series on there, which details the creation of an entire game engine in TypeScript using WebGL. I also, at the time of writing, developed a simple game from start to finish using that engine. Granted, with only 28 videos, things are still pretty simple. However, I do know that TypeScript in games is scalable. Way moreso than I ever thought. You see, in my full-time position, I am the lead developer and maintainer of the game […]