In February, Mark DeLoura put up a survey on game engines, which we posted and posted his subsequent results. Well, he’s doing it again and I’m sure has refined the survey a bit to answer some of the questions raised by his original survey. This new survey is available here and we’re asking the Toolsmiths [...]
One of the key issues in game tools development is how to improve asset turnaround time; how long is it between when an artist, programmer, writer, level designer, sound designer, or even an executive makes a change before the results can be seen in game or at least in engine. More importantly, how many other [...]
Some of you may have read my recent Gamasutra article, Game Tools Tune-Up: Optimize Your Pipeline Through Usability but I wanted to discuss something that writing that article has really brought to the forefront of my mind. As an industry, we aren’t very reflective on the methodologies we use regarding the development of tools. This blog [...]
Here is an interesting video of the tools Eskil Steenberg has engineered for his game Love: 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 how [...]
Several years ago, I developed an effects tool at High Voltage Software. I was rewriting the effects system we had used on Hunter: The Reckoning and a couple of follow-up titles while creating the tool. The original system had given us some really great results for our first generation Xbox titles and the company wanted to reuse [...]
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 [...]
A few weeks ago, I posted a survey on game middleware from Mark DeLoura . Well, the survey is done, and Mark has been nice enough to share the results and some analysis on Gamasutra. All of the analysis here is very interesting, but I find the concerns over rapid prototyping tools and asset turn-around [...]
Again, here I am late with the Best of Comments post, but, hey, better late than never right? My post about Darius’s ad-hoc level editor by far created the most traffic and comments so far, and a lot of people made some excellent observations about the simple, yet effective tools. First, sjml reports on an [...]
I have a co-worker, Darius, who is creating a game for a small game system called the Meggy Jr. Watching him work on this, I was impressed with the tools that he came up with. He’s not a (really) a programmer, but still somehow can make tools that serve his needs pretty well. I’ll let [...]