This ongoing series delves more deeply into each of the “six reasons your game development tools suck” as argued in my very first post. Two of the most important concepts in software engineering are abstraction and modularity. Abstraction allows us to categorize problems and write general code to handle all problems within a group, while modularity [...]
Visual Studio fan or not, its ubiquity in game development means that sooner or later you will have to deal with its shortcomings. It is the de facto standard IDE for the de facto standard game development operating system. One of its weak points is the project file property editor. While it does wrangle compile [...]
Some time ago, I decided to write a small C# “wizard” tool for enemy encounters and other level design patterns. The idea was to create pattern types, that designers could define with a small amount of data (different for each type of pattern) that could be exported into a much more complex xml format that could describe when [...]
A while back, after a talk I gave at our local IGDA chapter meeting, I got an email from a recruiter at a local game development company. He was looking to fill a position for a tools engineer and wanted to know what he needed to look for. I never got back to him (sorry!) [...]
Over the past few years, cloud computing has become the next big thing for enterprise software. The ability to easily scale resources to meet the needs of the end users cheaply is very attractive. Amazon, Sun, Google and now Mictrosoft (among others) are all offering cloud computing solutions. I’ve recently been playing around with the AWS (Amazon [...]
Hey readers, my name is Casey O’Donnell, I’m one of the new Toolsmiths around here. I’m a bit of a strange one, having worked in the industry, studied the industry, and now as a professor at the University of Georgia. My research has begun to focus more and more on tools, tool development, and open [...]
Developing in-house game tools presents a myriad of debugging issues. You can’t always nail down bugs to reproducible steps (if you even have QA resources to concentrate on that). Frequently content creators will complain about rare issues that force them to reboot the tools or use bizarre workarounds then things go wrong. Remote debugging works [...]
One thing I’ve been interested in for a while is what I call “The Dependency Question” as it relates to tools. The question is, when and how do you share code between your game and your tools, specifically tools that are communicating with the game either directly while it’s running or through things like asset [...]
This ongoing series delves more deeply into each of the “six reasons your game development tools suck” as argued in my very first post. Many game companies struggle with delivering tools quickly and cheaply. Money is always an issue wherever you go. After all, the bottom line is what keeps a company afloat and it’s employees [...]
Many of the available source control solutions out there are great if you are a programmer. Both Subversion and Perforce adequately handle the storing of assets, but neither is very friendly to creative types. How often do “bad checkins” happen because some new and obscure file created on the user’s machine didn’t get added? Or maybe [...]