Balance Programming
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Dream debugging
At the weekend I watched a Tomorrow Corporation Tech Demo, that’s the games company that developed World of Goo and Little Inferno. They show off some tools to help development and debugging. Nice development tools but an amazing debugging tool and I want it. The basics It has the basics you’d expect from an integrated…
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Learning from… jigsaws
Since starting this blog it has made me think about regular activities and wonder if they can teach me any lessons for writing better software. In the last couple of years jigsaws have gone from not on being my radar to a fairly regular thing. I often pick colourful, geometric or architectural one. Although there’s…
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The Power of 10
I originally came across the The Power of 10 by watching the video how NASA writes space-proof code. These are a set of rules to produce code that can be reviewed and statically analysed. As they’ve come from the space industry you can understand why they want to be really sure what their code does.…
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Apples vs oranges
In some of my recent reading I’ve been frustrated at authors making poor comparisons. The typical behaviour is to showcase an example of good coding with their preferred language / methodology against an example of bad coding with the competitor. It’s not, say, the language which is making the difference. It’s whether the code has…
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Time complexity
If you’ve had a university education in software engineering you have probably come across algorithmic time complexity. This classifies algorithms by how long they take to run given an known amount of input, normally written using big O notation. Picking an algorithm with a good time complexity can make an enormous difference to the performance…
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Game Programming Patterns
I wanted to cleanse my palette and decided to read Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom. I’ve read it before so I knew what to expect. It’s a clearly written pattern book with simple example situation taken from the games industry. Don’t expect to get all the patterns here or advanced game programming knowledge. However…
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The taste test
Imagine you’ve just been given a new cookbook. It has a recipe for Oysters Rockefeller that a friend recommended. Really it could be anything but oysters have been in my media for the last week so we’ll go with them. You buy the ingredients, prepare them carefully, cook and serve. It looks great, you take…
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Data-oriented design
I read Data-Oriented Design by Richard Fabian but will mostly cover the methodology (DoD) not the book. Let’s get it out of the way and I’ll try not to belabour it: It’s about all the data Data-oriented design concentrates on the underlying data in any given system. Data tends to be stored in a very…
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Searching for design
This Problem Changes Your Perspective On Game Dev looks at game design as though it’s a search algorithm touching on: Jonas Tyroller talks quickly and makes an argument for discovery rather than one off design. While I’m interested in game design are there lessons to be learned beyond that? Is game dev different? Jonas is…
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Retrospective 1-26
One of my original goals with this blog was to manage 26 posts in 6 months. Here I am in 3 months. Well done me. This one is both a retrospective of that achievement and my thoughts about retrospectives themselves. I think they’re a good idea but… I’m not entirely sure they work. Retrospectives Maybe…