I frequently get emails from people asking me what direction they should take in the future, whether it should be Unity, XNA/MonoGame, or something else. That’s not a question I can answer directly because it depends.
Continue Reading →The first rule of Optimization Club is that you don’t optimize.
Continue Reading →Your game requires a human heart. Your heart.
Continue Reading →Over the weekend, I put out a new end-of-sprint release of my game. One key feature this included was that the game now saves your fleet between sessions. This is a really big deal, because now, for the first time ever, you can start building fleets that you’ll carry with you forever.
Continue Reading →A few weeks back, somebody made a comment about being interested in seeing the class diagrams for some specific, complicated piece of the game. My response was that I’m following Scrum, which de-emphasizes design documents like formal UML, and emphasizes working code instead. That’s not to say that there’s no place for UML in Scrum. Sometimes there is.
Continue Reading →One of the hardest things you’ll face when making your game is deciding what you’re going to do. And what you’re not going to do.
Continue Reading →Nobody told me about the emotional roller coaster. Though I wish they had.
Continue Reading →This is part 2 in a series on unit testing your game. Part 1 can be found here.
Continue Reading →In the somewhat off chance that you don’t know what a modder or a mod is, a modder is a person who makes mods, and a mod is a custom user-made tweak to your game, usually in the form of changes to art assets (often loading their own) and configuration settings. It comes from the world modify.
Continue Reading →Let’s play a game. Take a look at the three images below, from the game Mass Effect. If you’ve played Mass Effect before, pretend you haven’t. I’m going to ask you a few questions and see if you get them right, even without ever playing the game:
Continue Reading →If you’re making a game (or any other project/product) in your spare time, while working full time, you don’t have time to do everything you used to. Something has got to give.
Continue Reading →I intend on putting together some information here about why unit testing is helpful, when to do it, and how to do it (at least, how I’m doing it in my XNA game).
Continue Reading →I’ve been spending the last little bit of my weekend creating a utility class or two that will give me event driven mouse and keyboard events, as opposed to the default polling mechanism in XNA. I thought it would be worth taking a little time to outline what these two models are, what their advantages and disadvantages are, and how to make event driven events in XNA.
Continue Reading →A lot of times you’ll hear people say, “It’s not a sprint; it’s a marathon.” Meaning you’re not trying to go as fast as you can for a short amount of time, you’re trying to maintain a decent speed for a very long time. I suspect that analogy is mostly representative of what I’m doing here.
Continue Reading →