Travis Vroman

Made some minor updates to the site to make it more easily updated while still quick. With the exception of archives, I’m now making posts in markdown format. The latest news will always be available here. UPDATE: See the top page for the latest. In other news, I finally finished reading Masters of Doom. What a fantastic look into the early days of the game dev industry, as well as the beginnings of id Software. It’s been a very motivating read, and has made me want to go back to lower level programming to gain a better understanding of how and why things work. At some point I’ll likely do a deep dive of this, I hope. I also went to see Iron Maiden this month. What a show! Easily one of the best I’ve ever seen: Going to see Korn […]

Things have been crazy busy as of late. I’ve been working on a major project on the side as well as preparing for great things at work. Speaking of which, I’m going on a business trip to South Africa soon. It’s been almost 3 years since I was last there, so it should be interesting and fun. I’ll be sure to post pictures when I return. YouTube-wise I’m still in the planning stages of the next big project. I’ve got a sizable game design document written so I can maintain organization and direction. The entire thing will be open source using NamorvTech and developed mostly on-screen in the next YouTube series. More coming on that later this month. As a side note, I started growing my hair again. I look quite different than my last appearance on YouTube! It’s for a good […]

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 made some updates to the Discord server, with more channels and whatnot to discuss content, programming and general game development. If you haven’t already, head over and check it out.

I decided to sit down and attempt to work with Unity again. By no means does this mean that NamorvTech will not recieve updates, however. To build a good product, you need to have an understanding of your competition in the field in order to actually compete. Not doing this is short-sighted and, frankly, a recipe for failure. Overall, my reasons for learning Unity are: Understanding the competition, as mentioned earlier Ideas for what could be added to the engine Make notes on what should be done differently in my implementation Unity is a feature-rich engine which has features my engine currently does not. This means that I can use it to release a few smaller games in the meantime that I’ve had on the back burner for a while. Shipping product is important, and it has been a while since […]

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 […]

Sometimes I find it really difficult to stay motivated on projects I’m working on. It is far too easy to just sit down and watch YouTube videos for 10 minutes, which becomes 30, which becomes an hour, then 2, and so on. I did manage to get stuff done around the house I needed to get done, but I didn’t move forward on the project I’m working on. This is even tougher to motivate myself on because I have another project that I really want to work on, but reasonably cannot until I get this one done. I think what I’m going to do at this point is just get one thing done on it – just one – so at least I’ve moved forward with it. I’ve got roughly an hour before I need to get some sleep for the night […]

Today I added a few more items. The new About Page gives some background on me as well as this site. It includes links to version 2 and to the previously-thought-to-be-lost version 1 of this site that I created back in college. It’s not complete but hey, at least I found part of it. I did a light pass on both archives to make sure that most of them work. In other news, while I’m continuing work on the NamorvTech engine, I am also working on another project which I cannot yet announce. I’m hoping to be able to announce something later this summer. Really cool stuff, I think. Given the feedback I’ve recieved on the YouTube channel regarding choice of direction between the current TypeScript and a C++ version of the engine, I am (for now) deciding to stick with the TypeScript engine and use […]

Those of you who have hit this site over the last few years may have noticed several iterations, some of which were far more fancy and complex than this one. Why so simple, you ask? Frankly, those complex iterations required a lot of maintenance on the back end, especially since the last one was a proprietary one. It was nice to use, but ultimately had to be let go due to speed reasons. Simply put, every low-cost hosting solution I’ve ever used has really slow databases, which all of this fanciness requires. This iteration is designed to be fast. That is, no database, no fancy connections to my twitter, and no abundant amounts of calls to various APIs – all of which slow down page load times considerably. I’m going old-school here, and personally I love it. Sometimes simple is best. All the pages […]

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 […]