I got an email recently asking for my advice on bug fixing vs. completly rewriting a broken tool. The email described the complexity of the tool in question being caused by the addition of new features on top of an already shakey starting point. This sort of problem always comes down to time and money. The perception among [...]
04.28Tools of 'Love'
Here is an interesting video of the tools Eskil Steenberg has engineered for his game Love: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPIA2g8T6Hw] His integration with Uni-Verse is definitely an interesting take on what life as a content creator could be like without having to deal with load/save/export via files on disk. Verse seems to disconnect where data is stored and [...]
Today, we have out first guest post! Today’s post is from Jay Taoko the founder of inalogic inc, a software company specialized in game development tools for artists and programmers. Before inalogic, Jay was a programmer at Ubisoft where he worked on Splinter Cell Chaos Theory and Rainbow Six Vegas. Before that, he worked for [...]
When I was in college I was a double major — computer science and English. I know, I know, strange combination. Anyway, of the few things that people have said over the years that have really stuck with me, one such pearl of wisdom came from an English professor. He said that a piece of [...]
Thanks to everyone that was able to show up to my talk at GDC. I thought it went very well, and I got a lot of good questions and feedback after the lecture. The focal points of the lecture were: Indirection of file locations using unique IDs instead of string paths to allow files to [...]
03.03Scheduling Tools
Scheduling tools is tricky business. Most tools aren’t even started until they’re needed, unless you’ve got some very forward thinking management (an unlikely scenario at many game companies). The time constraints are impossible since they’re in sync with an equally impossible game production schedule, and budget constraints can be equally constricting. So, how do we [...]