Network. Design. Mike Acton's Blog - Lead Quick Start Guide. The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. Congratulations! You’re a lead. Now what? In general, whatever skills you’ve demonstrated that got you to this point aren’t the same things you’ll be doing from here on out (or at least not as much.) What follows is a entry-level description of my expectations for a #gamedev lead. I expect you to read this. Do not skim. Is there anything here that you don’t feel is completely clear? There is no one thing that has more of an impact on the quality of the game, the cost of development, the engagement and happiness of the gamedevs and the future of the studio than leadership. I expect your process to reflect you. I asked some gamedevs recently to list the most common reasons why gamedev sucks: All of these problems are leadership problems. You probably have a lead. GAME DEVELOPMENT IS GETTING VERY CROWDED. Let’s say you download Unity3D, you roll up your sleeves and you get to work.
Six months later, you've got a game! GDC. Animated Bézier Curves. Play with the control points to modify the curves!
These animations illustrate how a parametric Bézier curve is constructed. The parameter t ranges from 0 to 1. In the simplest case, a first-order Bézier curve, the curve is a straight line between the control points. For a second-order or quadratic Bézier curve, first we find two intermediate points that are t along the lines between the three control points. Then we perform the same interpolation step again and find another point that is t along the line between those two intermediate points. Written using the D3 visualisation library. Requires a SVG-capable browser e.g. . © Jason Davies | Privacy Policy. Game Programming Patterns. Ideas about a new programming language for games. Data oriented design and c++ Tanya X Short's Blog - Procedural Generation: By Molecule or Mythology.
The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community.
The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company. Tanya X. Short is the Creative Director of Kitfox Games. Kitfox Games’ first project, Shattered Planet, released to Steam in July. Moon Hunters is currently exceeding its creators’ expectations on Kickstarter. When developing any game, but especially a game that has procedural generation as an explicit feature, we constantly make decisions of what to generate and what to craft. The following article is written to help you choose the best “zoom level” for your procedurally generated game. Remember that I’m a designer, not a programmer. NOTE: Sure, call it random generation instead of procedural. As developers, sometimes our reasons for using proc gen are obvious. Introduction to Software Optimization. As a software/game developer, you usually want more and more... of everything actually!
More pixels, more triangles, more FPS, more objects on the screen, bots, monsters. Unfortunately you don't have endless resources and you end up with some compromises. The optimization process can help in the reduction of performance bottlenecks and it may free some available powers hidden in the code. Optimization shouldn't be based on random guesses: "oh, I think, if I rewrite this code to SIMD, the game will run a bit faster". How do you know that "this code" makes some real performance problems? In order to get some better understanding on what to improve, you need to detect a base line of the system/game.
Of course, the process will not be finished with only one iteration. At the end your game/app should still work (without new bugs, hopefully) and it should run X times faster. TomF's Tech Blog - It's only pretending to be a wiki. I don't know if Perforce is the best version-control system (please stop telling me about Git, people!)
, but it's perfectly decent, and it's the one I've had most experience with. They have a free version for under 20 people (a decent-sized studio!) , which means every indie or bedroom coder has no excuse for not having decent source version-control. BUT - the initial setup to just get version-control on an existing codebase on a single machine is unfriendly as hell.
Using STL Vectors. STL style vectors are a pretty useful construct.
I remember coming to C++ (and the STL) from a background in lower level programming, and finding STL vectors a bit surprising, with the idea of amortized constant time complexity and so on. And then it was actually something of a minor revolution just to be able to set up a contiguous data buffer, without any significant programming effort, and without knowing the maximum required buffer size in advance. Data Structures for Entity Systems – Contiguous memory. This year I’m working on two different projects that need an Entity System (ES).
One of them is a non-game app written natively on iOS + Android. Game Development. Game Audio.